Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: A Global History [1st ed.] 9783030482398, 9783030482404

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PALGRAVE CRITICAL STUDIES OF ANTISEMITISM AND RACISM

Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism A Global History Edited by Abigail Green · Simon Levis Sullam

Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism Series Editor David Feldman Birkbeck College – University of London London, UK

Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism considers antisemitism from the ancient world to the present day. The series explores topical and theoretical questions and brings historical and multidisciplinary perspectives to bear on contemporary concerns and phenomena. Grounded in history, the series also reaches across disciplinary boundaries to promote a contextualised and comparative understanding of antisemitism. A contextualised understanding will seek to uncover the content, meanings, functions and dynamics of antisemitism as it occurred in the past and recurs in the present. A comparative approach will consider antisemitism over time and place. Importantly, it will also explore the connections between antisemitism and other exclusionary visions of society. The series will explore the relationship between antisemitism and other racisms as well as between antisemitism and forms of discrimination and prejudice articulated in terms of gender and sexuality. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15437

Abigail Green  •  Simon Levis Sullam Editors

Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism A Global History

Editors Abigail Green Brasenose College University of Oxford Oxford, UK

Simon Levis Sullam Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici Ca’ Foscari University of Venice Venice, Italy

Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism ISBN 978-3-030-48239-8    ISBN 978-3-030-48240-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Peter Pulzer

Acknowledgements

The chapters of this volume originated from an Oxford Seminar in Advanced Jewish Studies and its concluding conference, held at the University of Oxford in the academic year 2016–2017. We are grateful to the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies for hosting the Seminar, and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) for providing additional support (AH/N006631/1). Warm thanks are due to Martin Goodman, former president of the OCHJS, to Martine Smith-Huvers and Sue Forteath, and to the other participants in the seminar: Peter Bergamin (also for his editorial assistance), Pierre Birnbaum, David Feldman, Jaclyn Granick, Ruth Harris, Kei Hiruta, Lindsay King, Nathan Kurz, Andreas Pfuetzner, Peter Pulzer, Michael Silber. We are especially grateful to David Rechter for his invaluable contribution from beginning to end. We would also like to thank Derek Penslar and David Sorkin for their support, and Sam Moyn for writing the afterword. Finally, we are grateful to David Feldman and Emily Russell for embracing the volume at Palgrave with enthusiasm. Abigail Green Simon Levis Sullam

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Contents

1 Introduction: Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: Towards a Twenty-First-Century History  1 Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam

Part I The Limits of Liberalism  21 2 Liberalism and Antisemitism: A Reassessment from the Peripheries 23 Lisa Moses Leff 3 Osman Bey’s The Conquest of the World by Jews (1873): A Liberal Antisemitism? 47 Simon Levis Sullam 4 Jews and Other Others 69 Ari Joskowicz

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Part II Living Liberalism  95 5 The Material of Race: Caribbean Jews, Clothing, and Manhood in the Age of Emancipation and Liberal Revolution 97 Laura Arnold Leibman 6 Liberalism, Antisemitism and Everyday Life in Vienna: The Tragic Case of Heinrich Jaques (1831–94)131 Jonathan Kwan 7 Giving and Dying in Liberal Italy: Jewish Men and Women in Italian Culture Wars153 Luisa Levi D’Ancona Modena Part III Rethinking East-West 183 8 Unsettling the “Jewish Question” from the Margins of Europe: Spanish Liberalism and Sepharad185 Michal Rose Friedman 9 A Model Millet? Ottoman Jewish Citizenship at the End of Empire209 Julia Phillips Cohen 10 From East to West: As the Liberal Melting Pot of Jewish Politics233 M. M. Silver Part IV Liberalism, Empire, Zionism 261 11 Who Introduced Liberalism into the Damascus Affair (1840)? Center, Periphery and Networks in the Jewish Response to the Blood Libel263 Yaron Tsur

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12 A Jewish “Liberal” in Istanbul: Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Young Turks and the Zionist Press Network, 1908–1911289 Ozan Ozavci 13 Jews, Imperial Liberalism, and the Predicament of “Small Nations”: Lewis B. Namier’s Gentry Nationalism315 Arie M. Dubnov Part V Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Liberalism 339 14 1848 and Beyond: Jews in the National and International Politics of Secularism and Revolution341 Abigail Green 15 “A Certain Type of Liberalism”: Minority Rights in Jewish Liberal Discourse, 1848–1948365 James Loeffler 16 The Jewishness of Cold War Liberalism387 Malachi Haim Hacohen 17 Afterword411 Samuel Moyn Index419

Notes on Contributors

Julia Phillips Cohen  is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Vanderbilt University. She has authored two award-winning books, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (Oxford, 2014), and Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700–1950 (Stanford, 2014). Arie M. Dubnov  teaches at the George Washington University. His publications include Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (2012), Zionism: A View from the Outside (2010), and Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-century Territorial Separatism (2019, co-edited with Laura Robson). Michal Rose Friedman  (Ph.D. Columbia University, 2012) is the Jack Buncher Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on the intersection of modern Iberian and Jewish history. She is the author of articles in journals such as The Jewish Quarterly Review, Jewish Social Studies, and the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Abigail Green  is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Brasenose College. She is the author of Fatherlands: State-building and nationhood in 19th century Germany (2001), and Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (2010). She is now leading a collaborative project on Jewish Country houses. Malachi  Haim  Hacohen  is Professor of History, Political Science and Religion at Duke University. Author of Karl Popper. The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge, 2000) xiii

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

and Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History Between Nation and Empire (Cambridge, 2019), as well as essays on the Central European Jewish intelligentsia. Ari Joskowicz  is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and director of the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is currently writing a book on the relation between Jews and Roma during the Holocaust and in memory and archival politics since 1945. Jonathan  Kwan is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Nottingham. Publications include Liberalism and the Habsburg Monarchy, 1861–1895 (Basingstoke, 2013) and articles on the 1867 Compromise, Bohemia, Transylvania and Viennese Jews. At present he is researching the life of Napoleon II and editing a book on the Austro-Hungarian Compromise. Lisa  Moses  Leff  is Professor of History at American University whose research focuses on Jews in France. Her books include The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust and Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth Century France. Laura Arnold Leibman  is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon (USA). She is the author of the award-winning Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (London, 2012) and of The Art of the Jewish Family (New York, 2020). Luisa Levi D’Ancona Modena  (Ph.D., Cambridge University 2004) is an Italian historian, living in Jerusalem where she is currently a Research Fellow at the European Forum, Hebrew University. She has taught, published and researched in Italy, Israel and England, most recently as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Oxford. Her areas of interest are: Jews in Liberal Italy, Jewish philanthropy, women and civil society, Jewish secularism and ego-writing. Simon  Levis Sullam  is Associate Professor of Modern History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Among his books: Toleration within Judaism (with Martin Goodman and others, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013); Giuseppe Mazzini and the Origins of Fascism (Palgrave, 2015), The Italian Executioners. The Genocide of the Jews of Italy, 1943–1945 (Princeton University Press, 2018).

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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James  Loeffler is Jay Berkowitz Professor of Jewish History at the University of Virginia. His books include Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (2018), The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century (2019), and The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (2010). Samuel Moyn  is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and a Professor of History at Yale University. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010). Ozan Ozavci  is Assistant Professor of History at Utrecht University. His research specialisms are in the transimperial histories of security, violence and ideologies in the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is currently finalising his second monograph titled Dangerous Gifts: Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798–1864 (Oxford UP, forthcoming). M.  M.  Silver  is Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Max Stern College of Emek Yezreel. He is the author of books and articles in Hebrew and English on American Jewish History, Zionism, Jewish Literature. He received his Ph.D. in Modern Jewish History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and lives in Galilee. Yaron Tsur  Emeritus Professor in the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, specialises in the Jews in Muslim Lands and the ethnic problem in Israel. Among his books: A Torn Community: The Jews of Morocco and Nationalism, 1943–1954 (Tel-Aviv, 2001); Notables and Other Jews in the Ottoman Middle-East 1750–1830 (Jerusalem, 2016; English translation forthcoming).

List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5

Fig. 5.6

Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8

Macaroni Ensemble: Suit, Italy, probably Venice, c. 1770, Los Angeles County Museum of Art 103 c.1825–1830 Men’s wool suit, Los Angeles County Museum of Art 104 Detail from Horace Emile-Jean Vernet, Incroyable et Merveilleuse (1814). Style and pose of legs modelled on Apollo Belvedere. (Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum)106 Pierre Jacques Benoit, Jewish Shopkeeper in Paramaribo (ca. 1831), Voyage a Surinam . . . cent dessins pris sur nature par l’auteur (Bruxelles, 1839), plate xvi, fig. 32. (Courtesy of John Carter Brown Library, Brown University) 107 Pierre Jacques Benoit, “House Servants Going to Church, Paramaribo, Suriname, ca. 1831.” Voyage a Surinam. (Bruxelles, 1839), fig. 24. (Courtesy the John Carter Brown Library)112 Detail of Pierre Jacques Benoit, Voyage a Surinam (Bruxelles, 1839), fig. 38. (Courtesy John Carter Brown Library [Left]). Detail of Pierre Jacques Benoit, Voyage a Surinam (Bruxelles, 1839), fig. 32. (Courtesy John Carter Brown Library. [Right]) 113 Anonymous, “Judah Eleazar Lyons.” Ca. 1820–1830. Watercolor on Ivory Miniature. (American Jewish Historical Society)113 John Ramage, “Jacob de Leon.” 1789. Watercolor on Ivory Miniature. (American Jewish Historical Society) 114

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.9 Fig. 5.10 Fig. 5.11 Fig. 5.12

Isaac Mendes Belisario, Sketches of Character, 1837. (Yale University)116 John Montefiore vest, 1840s. (Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum) 118 Anonymous, “Portrait of Isaac Lopez Brandon” (Early Nineteenth Century). Watercolor on Ivory, Miniature. (Courtesy of American Jewish Historical Society) 119 Pierre Jacques Benoit, Voyage a Surinam (Bruxelles, 1839), fig. 28. (Courtesy the John Carter Brown Library) 123

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: Towards a Twenty-First-Century History Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam

Globalizing the Dialectics of Inclusion Some have identified the figure of the Jew navigating the perils and contradictions of modernity with the character of Odysseus in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.  Adorno’s Dialectics of Enlightenment.1 Writing as the Holocaust was reaching its abyss on the old continent, these two émigré philosophers of Jewish or partly Jewish descent described what they saw as the dialectical process inherent to the Enlightenment: a process that produced not just progress and human advancement, but also  – as an originary contradiction – the instrumental use of reason, violence, hatred 1  Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment; Rabinbach, “Why Were the Jews Sacrificed?,” 49–64; Porter, “Odysseus and the Wandering Jew,” 200–13.

A. Green (*) Brasenose College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Levis Sullam Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_1

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and antisemitism then reaching its pinnacle in mass extermination. Forty years later, Amos Funkenstein described both Jewish assimilation and self-­ assertion as “truly dialectical processes.” His influential article attacked the concept of assimilation as an ideological construct deployed in Jewish historiography to demonize the experience of social, cultural and political integration.2 Taken together, these two very different attempts to bring a Hegelian and Marxist “dialectic” into conversation with the “Jewish question,” underscore the complex relationship between inclusion and exclusion in modern Jewish history.3 It is a leitmotif developed in more recent work on antisemitism, which highlights the complexity of its relationship with progressive ideologies like liberalism and socialism.4 Explaining how the devastation that was the Holocaust could have emerged from the heart of modern European civilization remains a central problem in Jewish history. And yet, for the historical profession writ-large the frame of reference has shifted. This book represents both a response to this development and an attempt to move beyond it. We seek to reimagine a field shaped by European experiences and paradigms in the light of a relatively recent historiographical moment that has “provincialized Europe” and begun to explore issues of race, discrimination and hybrid identities in colonial and postcolonial settings, without taking much account of either Jews or the Holocaust.5 In so doing, we aim to integrate some of the established preoccupations of Jewish historiography, which have traditionally been studied in national, local and primarily European contexts, with the new perspectives opened up by transnational history and the global and imperial turn. The time is ripe for such a project. The relationship between Jews, liberalism and antisemitism is a staple of modern Jewish history. Peter Pulzer first attempted to sketch the contours of this field in a properly historical manner when he argued in 1964 that “[t]he dominant ideology of this period, as we have seen, was Liberalism: a study of the theoretical content  Funkenstein, “Dialectics of Jewish Assimilation,” 1–14.  For a thoughtful discussion of inclusion/exclusion see van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, especially 6–8. 4  Exemplary: Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews; Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, 119–38; Lang, Converting a Nation; Brustein and Roberts, The Socialism of Fools?; Hoffman, Bergmann, and Walser Smith, eds. Exclusionary Violence, 23–65. 5  See the agenda-setting Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. For context, Chatterjee, ‘Brief History’. Relevant for the Jewish world int his context are Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora. 2 3

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of anti-Semitism will show us that it represented, in the first place, a reaction against this ideology.”6 Werner E. Mosse took a similar line, arguing that the place of Jews in modern German history was shaped above all by the conflict between liberalism and nationalism as fundamentally opposing forces.7 As products of the “German-Jewish symbiosis” who fled their respective hometowns when the Nazis came to power, Pulzer and Mosse believed that liberalism (with which they identified) and nationalism (which had persecuted them) were fundamentally incompatible. This view reflected an understanding that nationalism was itself an ideology, not just a flexible political language that could sit within different ideological currents. Most powerfully articulated in Hannah Arendt’s famous study of “totalitarianism”, it was both a response to the Holocaust and a product of the Cold War moment. Thirty years after Pulzer’s pioneering study, two landmark volumes redefined modern Jewish history for a generation.8 The contributions to Assimilation and Community and Paths of Emancipation represent the collective achievement of a new wave of revisionist historians. These volumes have stood the test of time, but they do not speak to the historical sensibilities of the twenty-first century. Our task is to reconnect the concerns of that historiographical generation – and the pioneers that preceded it – with those of our globalized and fragmented world. Together with Lisa Moses Leff, we take inspiration from the new, critical historiography of liberalism that emphasizes especially its symbiotic relationship with European imperialism.9 If, as Carole Pateman, Uday Mehta, Jennifer Pitts and Domenico Losurdo have argued, the liberal political tradition was founded not only on universalizing, democratic ideals, but also on a series of important exclusions, subjugations and deferrals related to gender, race and class, then thinking about Jews reminds us that religion (Christianity) was part of this exclusionary matrix.10 Antisemitism, in this perspective, was not simply a “reactionary” phenomenon; nor were liberalism and nationalism necessarily as antithetical as they seemed in the immediate aftermath of  Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 29.  Werner E. Mosse, “The Conflict of Liberalism and Nationalism,” 125. Shulamit Volkov later nuanced this approach, see most recently Germans, Jews and Antisemites. 8  Frankel and Zipperstein, eds., Assimilation and Community; Birnbaum and Katznelson, eds., Paths of Emancipation. 9  Exemplary Mehta, Liberalism and Empire; Sartori, Liberalism in Empire; Bell, Reordering the World. 10  Pateman, Sexual Contract; Losurdo, Liberalism; Pitts, Turn to Empire. 6 7

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the Holocaust. Rather, as Pieter Judson argued with respect to the Habsburg Empire, liberalism itself was one of the sources of antisemitic ideology and politics.11 That insight informs the opening section of this volume, which we have called “The Limits of Liberalism.” Understanding antisemitism not just in terms of right-wing nationalism or socialist anti-capitalism but rather as one of liberalism’s formative exclusions helps us to bring discussions of antisemitism into conversation with the new, globally oriented history of liberalism. Yet it is clear from this volume that we cannot understand the complexity of liberalism as a political tradition unless we appreciate the extent to which it was also constructed from the margins, both in Europe and beyond. For Jews – like women, colonial subjects and others originally excluded from full membership of the liberal polity – were not just objects of the liberal political imagination.12 As liberal actors in their own right, who fought to overcome prejudice, oppression and discrimination, they too found ways to influence what liberalism became. Second, we draw attention to the way in which global, imperial and transnational history reshapes our understanding of the Jewish past. Modern Jewish history was invented as a field by maskilic Jews who were products of the Jewish Enlightenment, conceived of themselves as Europeans and thereby helped to shape what that meant. More recently, however, historians of the Jewish experience have highlighted the role of Jews as agents of European colonialism and cultural imperialism, and the existence of transnational networks of Jewish solidarity that cut across political and cultural divides in the Jewish world even as they reified differences within it.13 Thinking globally allows us to move beyond the idea that Jews were a quintessentially “European” people and to understand Jewish history also as that of a global minority. Indeed, it is no longer possible to write the history of Jews, liberalism and antisemitism without looking across the Atlantic or taking account of colonialism. Consequently, this volume illuminates a diasporic geography which, we argue, better reflects the nature of Jewish history than the distinction between Europe and non-Europe,  Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries.  For instance Cheyette and Valman ed., Image of the Jew. 13  Exemplary: Katz, Leff, and Mandel, eds., Colonialism and the Jews; Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews; Bar-Chen, Weder Asiaten noch Orientalen; Green, “Old Networks, New Connections”; Granick, International Jewish Humanitarianism. 11 12

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that only really acquired relevance for Jews with the Great Divergence. Rather than privileging European Jewish history (originally construed as Germanocentric), or adopting a structure that reflects the conventional oppositions between East and West, “Sepharad” and “Ashkenaz,” metropole and colony, we have divided the volume into sections that speak to complementary methodologies. This helps us to “provincialise Europe” in a Jewish key and to move beyond the framework imposed on both Jews, and Jewish history, by orientalism.14 Third, living in the twenty-first century has forced Jewish historians to engage more actively with the experience of other minorities and to think about the Holocaust in relation to other genocides. The challenges posed by racism, islamophobia and mass migration have given the study of Jews, liberalism and antisemitism a different relevance.15 They force us to think comparatively about racial and religious prejudice, and more dynamically about the interactions between Jews and other religious and ethnic groups – a point also made by the 2018 forum on new approaches to antisemitism in the American Historical Review.16 As Ari Joskowicz argues in the present volume, this insight has unsettling implications for the categories we use to analyse inequality in modern societies. Jews, in short, were not simply victims of liberalism’s exclusions; they also benefitted from them – and this may have been most apparent not in the colonial metropole but rather in the periphery. Fourth, the place of the Holocaust in the historiography of liberalism has shifted. On the one hand, Mark Levene’s monumental comparative study of genocide builds upon Adorno and Horkheimer’s pioneering insight that seeds of the modern history of antisemitism and racism were apparent from the very inception of the liberal project in the age of enlightenment and revolution. On the other hand, although the Holocaust came to symbolize the complete failure of liberalism, liberal Jewish politics survived the darkest hour of the twentieth century – as Malachi Haim Hacohen reminds us here. Meanwhile, the Holocaust itself became a critical touchstone in the new, more global politics of human rights. And yet for Jewish liberals the lessons of the Holocaust were not straightforward. Rather, as James Loeffler argues in this volume, the fate of the Jews of Europe served

 See Kalmar and Penslar, eds., Orientalism and the Jews.   Bunzl, “Between Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” 499–508; Katz, Burdens of Brotherhood; Gidley and Renton, eds., Antisemitism and Islamophobia. 16  See Judaken, Introduction to “Rethinking Anti-Semitism.” 14 15

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to illuminate the fundamental tension between individual and group rights at the heart of the liberal project. Fifth, comfortable assumptions about the ideological affinity between Jews and liberalism can no longer be taken for granted.17 The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 created a new framework in which Jews were no longer the perpetual minority, but rather a majority which, for the first time, faced difficult choices about democracy, national identity and civil rights. For this reason, we emphasize the importance of 1948 as a key chronological marker, while rejecting Zionist teleology. Increasingly, Israel’s past, present and future raise challenging questions for liberal-­ minded Jewish historians, prompting a flurry of work exploring the ideological and political connections between Zionism and the European colonial enterprise.18 Like so many of the issues raised in this book, these questions appear differently when viewed from the metropolitan perspective of the British intellectuals who are the focus of Arie M. Dubnov’s chapter, than they did to those for whom nationalist liberalism was a means of resisting colonization and westernization, like the Young Turks who figure in Ozan Ozavci’s contribution as potential supporters of Vladimir Jabotinsky. Throughout, our authors bring together the more “internalist” approach to modern Jewish history that characterized Assimilation and Community and Paths of Emancipation – both of which failed to engage with antisemitism – with the “externalist” approach taken by scholars of antisemitism, who tend to study anti-Jewish hostility in isolation from Jewish experience.19 Giving weight simultaneously to dynamically related processes of inclusion and exclusion allows us to break down the boundaries between these approaches – just as situating European developments in their global context helps us view familiar phenomena through a different lens.

 Novak, Jewish Social Contract.  See for example Katz et al., Colonialism and the Jews, Part 3. 19   Neither volume includes a chapter on antisemitism. Frankel’s introduction to Assimilation and Community only mentions antisemitism in passing; Birnbaum and Katznelson only discuss antisemitism in two paragraphs on the final page of their introduction. 17 18

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Recontextualizing Liberalism and the Jews Liberalism is so central to the politics of our contemporary world that we often struggle to understand its historical origins, geographical variation and chronological specificity. In this volume, we take a more properly historical approach and understand liberalism both as an international political tradition born in a particular moment, and as a set of interrelated political cultures, reflecting the evolution of liberal ideas and political practices in a variety of contexts over more than a century. The Constitution of Cadiz marked, in some accounts, the beginning of this new political tradition. Yet Helena Rosenblatt and Jörn Leonhard – both of whom proffer “world histories” of world [world liberalism]  – understand liberalism as a more specifically French phenomenon in origin, rooted in the political and cultural faultlines of Restoration Europe and closely associated with the revolution of 1830.20 Writing from a North American perspective, Rosenblatt traces liberalism’s transformations in the wake of successive waves of European revolution, with the emergence of a more interventionist liberal tradition in post-unification Germany and its appropriation by the New Liberals of Edwardian Britain. She shows how liberalism fused with more inclusive (but sometimes illiberal) democratic politics; how it adopted facets of socialism; how it came to be entwined with the civilizing project of European – and specifically British – imperialism; and how, during the Cold War era, it was refashioned into an American ideology focused on individual freedoms. Like Duncan Bell in a different context, Rosenblatt rejects a canonical or stipulative definition of liberalism; she emphasizes instead the moralizing agenda at the heart of the liberal project.21 Our authors too explore liberalism not just as a set of ideas (like religious toleration) or institutions (like representative government), but also as a sensibility, temperament, culture and “way of life.”22 More generally, we approach liberalism not as a clearly defined doctrine but rather as a spectrum bordered at one extreme by conservatism, and at the other by socialism.23 As Raymond Williams noted, any keyword such as liberalism can only be understood in relation to a bundle of neighbouring ones, in  Rosenblatt, Liberalism; Leonhard, Liberalismus. See also Kahan, Liberalism.  Bell, “What is Liberalism?” 22  See also Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism. 23  Following also Wallerstein, Centrist Liberalism. 20 21

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this case not just socialism and conservatism, but also secularism, religion, progress, modernity, nation, class and gender.24 Opening in Spain in 1812 with Michal Rose Friedman’s essay, and closing with Malachi Haim Hacohen’s account of Cold War liberalism, the chronological architecture of our volume sits neatly within the framework outlined by Rosenblatt. This chronology also makes sense when thinking about modern antisemitism, which has survived the Holocaust in both its right and left wing variants. For, as Michele Battini has recently argued, both strands trace their origins to the anticapitalist literature that arose in the context of the intransigent Catholic reaction against the revolutionary nexus of political rights, the emerging free market and secularization.25 At the same time, our volume poses challenges for the history of liberalism as usually practiced, which has tended to be both Anglocentric and Eurocentric.26 Rather than replicating the “‘first in Europe, then elsewhere’ structure of global historical time” that underpins historicism, we have chosen where possible to decentre the picture.27 That is reflected in the range of contexts we address and the structure of individual sections: “The Limits of Liberalism” opens with Lisa Moses Leff’s reassessment of liberalism and antisemitism in Romania and Algeria; “Living Liberalism” takes as its starting point Laura Arnold Leibman’s account of the ways in which Caribbean Jewish men used clothing to express their civic virtue, race, and proximity to power; we set about “Rethinking East-West” from the seemingly peripheral vantage point of Spain; and our exploration of “Liberalism, Empire, Zionism” opens with Yaron Tsur’s retelling of the Damascus Affair from the perspective of a local protagonist. It is immediately apparent that developments in these unfamiliar contexts were not necessarily less significant than those in the European “center.” Romania produced one of the earliest manifestations of modern political antisemitism. Algeria served as a platform for Edouard Drumont’s election to the French parliament. The Sephardim of the Caribbean helped redefine Jewish manhood in an age of revolution and empire Spain was a pioneer of European liberalism. Syria – not Europe – was the first centre  Williams, Keywords.  Battini, Socialism of Fools. 26  Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism; Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism. Freeden, “European Liberalisms,” 9–30 attempts a broader approach. Bayly and Biagini eds., Giuseppe Mazzini, and Bayly, Recovering Liberties, attempt a more properly global understanding of the liberal tradition. 27  Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 7. 24 25

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of the Damascus Affair. In short, all this suggests that we cannot understand the contradictions of liberalism if we relate to it simply as a Western political tradition. Yet any attempt to engage with liberalism as a form of politics and set of ideas beyond the West must be alive to the “problem of translation.”28 As Ozan Ozavci argues in his contribution to this volume, the “other liberalisms” that emerged outside the West (or at its periphery) developed a more defensive, communitarian, nationalist and emotional interpretation of the liberal tradition, one “that saw political, economic and religious protection from encroachments of overseas empires as a prerequisite of individual and communal emancipation, but not vice versa.”29 He and Loeffler show that expanding our understanding of liberalism to include non-western contexts and collectivist variants makes it easier to identify specifically Jewish forms of liberal politics. Indeed, both argue that Zionism itself can be viewed in this light, rather than simply as a manifestation of European settler-colonialism.30

Crossroads of Liberalism and the Jewish Experience Historians of the Jewish experience have tended to bracket liberalism and emancipation together.31 Such accounts conventionally open in the late eighteenth century, a period characterized by the Haskalah, the Toleranzpatent, and the French Revolution. Recently, however, David Sorkin has argued that Jewish emancipation was a “recurring and interminable” process drawn out over four and a half centuries: it did not begin “with the Enlightenment’s advocacy of a common humanity, nor with the French Revolution’s promulgation of citizenship”, and it did not end with the achievement of emancipation across western and central Europe by 1870, or in eastern Europe in 1917.32 Like Sorkin, we decouple emancipation and liberalism but direct our attention instead towards the latter. This allows us to think more about individual subjectivity  – including gender  – and less about institutional change and social processes. While individual chapters do evaluate  Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 17.  Ozan Ozavci, “A Jewish ‘Liberal’ in Istanbul,” infra. 30  See Colonialism and the Jews, Part 3; also Robinson, Citizen Strangers. 31  See for instance Birnbaum and Katznelson, “Emancipation and the Liberal Offer.” 32  Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation, 5. 28 29

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different paths of integration in specific national and imperial contexts, we go beyond the minority/majority scheme often used when considering the place of Jews in modern states and societies by recognizing that the experiences of Jewish men and women need to be set alongside those of other religious and ethnic minorities who accessed and made competitive claims towards a fragmented liberal public sphere.33 Shifting the focus from emancipation to liberalism necessarily imposes a different chronology, one rooted simultaneously in European developments and global rhythms. Modern Jewish history has been structured by a periodization that begins with the Enlightenment and ends with the Holocaust, although Sorkin’s longue-durée approach challenges this framework. We propose a more subtle recalibration. Opening with the post-revolutionary crisis of the early nineteenth century, we identify 1848, 1919, and 1948 as key chronological markers that redefined the place of Jews within an increasingly hegemonic liberal political order, both nationally and internationally.34 For if 1848 marked the moment when Jews began to enter the political mainstream, then 1919 created a new geopolitical framework both within Europe (minority rights) and beyond it (the Mandate), while 1948 saw both the birth of the State of Israel and the adoption by the UN of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights  – developments which, as James Loeffler has argued, were fundamentally interconnected.35 Redirecting our attention away from more narrowly European dates like 1917 and 1945, this chronology serves to underline the ways in which a global history framework can change the terms of debate. We do not have to see 1948 as either the consummation or the culmination of modern Jewish history in order to appreciate its importance as a world-historical moment that marked the onset of decolonisation within the British Empire: one that mattered not just for Israel/Palestine but for India/Pakistan with its parallel history of partition as well. Throughout this period, Jews and the “Jewish question” lay at the heart of many of the issues that most preoccupied liberals: from capitalism and its impact on traditional societies, through religious toleration, civil 33  See Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere. On the emergence of a specifically Jewish public sphere see Sorkin, Transformation of German Jewry; Berkovitz, Rites and Passages; Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture. 34  Wallerstein, Centrist Liberalism. 35  Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans.

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rights, the emergence of a secular state and the nature of the liberal public sphere, to problems of national identity and racial hierarchy in an age of empire, internationalism and globalization.36 In Germany and Austria, as Peter Pulzer has argued, the Jewish question served as a critical dividing line between more progressive leftist and more nationalist right-wing elements within the liberal movement. Like socialism, but differently from it, liberalism was one of the sources for antisemitic ideology and politics, as Marcel Stoetzler reminded us, and as both Leff and Simon Levis Sullam suggest here.37 Yet repeatedly, Jews – always a tiny, vulnerable minority – emerged as key figures in constituting liberal politics and the apparatus of the liberal state: both in moments of liberal ascendancy (“liberal era” Germany and Austria, Giolitti’s Italy, Progressive Era America) and during international episodes of crisis and upheaval (1848, the interwar years). Thinking about liberalism and the Jews consequently requires us to engage in two sets of issues: first, the problematic contemporaries described as “the Jewish question,” how it influenced liberalism and was shaped by it; second, the less familiar story of the role played by liberals who happened to be Jewish in constituting liberal politics and liberal political culture.38 In this context, we should remember that Jewish liberals were – like their non-Jewish counterparts – mostly men. The double exclusion experienced by Jewish women both within the liberal public sphere and within Jewish communal institutions conditioned their engagement with liberalism in fundamentally different ways. While liberalism, Jewishness and antisemitism were undoubtedly ‘situational’, men and women responded to the particular dynamics of these different contexts in ways that reflected the gendered options available to them.39 The classic analyses of modern Jewish politics tend to neglect liberalism in favour of socialism and Zionism, reflecting a preoccupation with “the Jews” as a nation in the making.40 Liberalism figures here as the politics of

36  See for instance Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews; Karp, The Politics of Jewish Commerce; Penslar, Shylock’s Children. 37  Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire; Stoetzler, The State, the Nation and the Jews. 38  For context see Case, The Age of Questions. 39  See Okamura, “Situational Ethnicity,” 452–65, as interpreted in the German-Jewish case by van Rahden, Jews and other Germans, 8–9. 40  Most obviously Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics, and Frankel, Prophecy and Politics.

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“integrationism”: a project associated above all with western Europe.41 Jewish liberals, in this context, are interesting only as defenders of Jewish rights or as proponents of a liberal form of Jewish spirituality – a subject we do not really discuss in a volume that deals primarily with liberalism as a political tradition, broadly understood.42 Volume 8 of the new Cambridge History of Modern Judaism makes this point very clearly.43 Part II, “Emancipation, Challenges and Consequences” includes chapters on the state, assimilation, liberal Judaisms, the new Jewish politics, Zionism and the left, but overlooks the critical role of Jewish men and women in constituting liberal political culture. The significance of this phenomenon has likewise received surprisingly little attention from historians of liberalism, notwithstanding an emerging body of work on Jews and human rights.44 Edmund Fawcett’s Liberalism. The Life of an Idea is a case in point since the author takes an explicitly prosopographical approach.45 Fawcett devotes time and space to thinking about the social and religious hinterland of liberal figures like Alexis de Tocqueville, Edwin Chadwick and Woodrow Wilson, but the Jewishness of Louis Brandeis receives only passing attention, while that of Walter Lippmann, René Cassin, Louis Hartz and Karl Popper does not merit a mention. The same applies to Michael Freeden’s Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction, which tellingly includes a brief discussion about the ­emancipation of women and the working class, but says nothing about Jews, Jewish emancipation or antisemitism.46 Even the key role of Jews in German liberalism is overlooked by the standard overviews of the subject: neither James Sheehan nor Dieter Langewiesche devote more than a couple of lines to it.47

41  Hyman, “Was there a ‘Jewish Politics’ in Western and Central Europe?” Recent work on Russia has qualified this assessment: Nathans, Beyond the Pale, and Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment. On the USA see Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion. 42  We recognise, however, the central importance of new interpretations of religion, and religiously inflected secularism, for both Jewish and non-Jewish liberals. See Joskowicz and Katz, eds., Secularism in Question, Asad, Formations of the Secular. 43  Hart and Michels, eds., The Modern World, 1815–2000. 44  See Kurz, Jewish Internationalism; Samuel Moyn, “René Cassin,”; Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans. 45  Fawcett, Liberalism. 46  Michael Freeden, Liberalism. 47  Sheehan, German Liberalism; Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany.

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Jews were, of course, as divided in their political attitudes as everyone else.48 Yet recognizing this truth should not obscure their importance in constructing liberal politics. Liberalism was the conduit that first allowed Jewish access to citizenship and mainstream society; it was also one of the main routes to Jewish power and influence. Many who embraced this route preferred to leave their Jewishness behind them, but this was not something they could easily do. As Arendt argued long ago, the unique place Jews occupied in the European political imagination reified Jewishness in a way that made it possible to live a self-consciously Jewish life without frequent or even any explicit engagement with Jewish communal or religious worlds.49 Particularly in Europe, a desire to avoid “essentializing” Jewishness has made it hard to discuss Jewish difference.50 That should not prevent us from understanding that the Jewishness of even secular and highly assimilated Jewish liberals still mattered in a social and political context where Jewishness was stigmatized and Jews regarded as “other”.

Jews and/beyond the Nation, Jews in/beyond Europe The relationship between Jews, liberalism, and antisemitism has usually been considered in the context of national historiographies, and the dynamics engendered by the birth of modern nationalism and the rise of the nation state.51 Like Assimilation and Community and Paths of Emancipation, this literature retains a Eurocentric focus although modern Jewish history has recently taken a more global and imperial turn. By ­contrast, the essays in our volume explore how liberalism, citizenship, nationality, religion, race gender, and the Jewish question functioned differently in the Jewish heartlands of western, central and eastern Europe, in the Mediterranean periphery of Spain and the Ottoman Empire, and in the North American Atlantic world where race carried different connotations. Nationalism, as Levis Sullam reminds us in his account of Osman Bey, whose Conquest of the World by the Jews was a principal source for the 48  See for instance Häusler, “Demokratie und Emanzipation 1848,” 92–111; Häusler, “Konfesssionelle Probleme in der Wiener Revolution von 1848,” 64–77. Hamburger, Juden Im Öffentlichen Leben Deutschlands. 49  Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, chapter 3. 50  See the introductory reflections in Hacohen, Jacob & Esau. 51  Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism; Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction; Almog, Nationalism & Antisemitism.

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Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was not always as central to the production of antisemitic ideas as we might think. Empire, however, should certainly be understood as a significant parameter, whether the empires in question were nationalizing territorial empires like the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, or imperial nation states like France and Britain. What this meant was highly context dependent. The essays in Part II, “Living Liberalism,” provide different approaches to rethinking the paths of emancipation pursued in the Anglosphere where the Jewish claim to whiteness assumed central importance; in German-speaking central Europe with its more clearly ethno-linguistic nationalism; and in the Catholic south where the culture wars fought between the Vatican and liberal nationalism were particularly entrenched. Leibman shows that in the Caribbean, where Jewish and Afro-Caribbean emancipation movements were entangled, liberalism was written upon the body itself. Here, as elsewhere, liberalism was gendered male. Yet, as Jonathan Kwan reminds us, the rise of European Jewish men like Heinrich Jaques to positions of prominence proved a false dawn, at least in Vienna. By contrast, the case of Italy points to the proliferating options open to Jewish men and women in a context where civil society was still in the making and Catholicism infused the whole social order. Here, it is worth comparing the influence exerted by Sara Nathan on Italian politics and society with the challenges Emma Lazarus faced as a precocious woman intellectual struggling for self-realization in Gilded Age America, as outlined by M. M. Silver. This variegated picture is reinforced by the contributions to Part III “Rethinking East-West,” which consists of three national/imperial case studies. Undercutting the East-West binary so central to liberal and Jewish political geographies, Friedman shows us how in Spain – a country that figures in the liberal political imagination as Europe’s interior “Orient” – late nineteenth-century ideas of race provided a platform from which liberals could reintegrate Jews into the nation. Cohen, meanwhile, notes the structural similarities between the situation of Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the United States, both of whom cultivated myths of welcome and insisted upon their exceptionality, in part perhaps because neither filled the role of the paradigmatic other. Finally, Silver shows how Jewish support for key planks of the American liberal agenda emerged as responses to the Russian Jewish experience, thereby connecting the emergence of American Jewish liberalism to the global production of Jewish political ideologies in an age of empire. Indeed, all three chapters in this section emphasize the

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transnational circulation of ideas and individuals, a process that undercut national exceptionalism. This sets the stage for Part IV, “Liberalism, Empire, Zionism,” in which the book takes a more explicitly imperial turn – with a particular eye to the Middle East. These issues are addressed from the local perspective of internationally networked Jewish notables in Syria and Egypt; the more nationally inflected orientation of the Ottoman capital; and the metropolitan perspective of the Polish-born British historian Lewis B.  Namier. Like Cohen, Yaron Tsur underlines the cultural distinctiveness of the Ottoman Empire, a world so radically other that only fifty years before the Damascus Affair it had been possible for Jews in Basra to accuse local Christians of ritual murder, not vice versa. His conclusion is nuanced by Ozavci and Dubnov, who highlight the capacity of two rather different empires to serve as incubators for Zionism. Part V, “Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Liberalism” concludes the volume with chapters that trace the role of Jews in the making of liberalism from the revolutions of 1830 to the Cold War. All three chapters take a transnational approach. Tellingly, while Abigail Green and James Loeffler trace fundamentally divergent strands of Jewish liberal politics, both identify the revolutions of 1848 as the critical point of departure. Their contributions help us to see the century from 1848 to 1948 as a distinct period in Jewish history, one structured by the relationship between liberal politics, marginality and nationality both in and beyond Europe. In this context, Malachi Haim Hacohen’s account of the Jewishness of Cold War liberals can be read as a kind of coda. Collectively, the essays in this volume seek to navigate a path between sensitivity to locale and awareness of the big picture. This enables us to see how different chronologies and starting points ensured that quite similar – although always idiosyncratic processes – could take place in very different contexts at different moments. Dialectical readings of history are one way of expressing the complexity of Jewish history, but many of the contributions in this volume question the binaries – between majority and minority, metropole and colony, public and private, assimilation and self-assertion, inclusion and exclusion – upon which such readings rest. Race, for instance, was a shifting category that could operate for Jews in both inclusive and exclusive ways. This helps us to de-essentialize, historicize and contextualize antisemitism, which historiography still too often encapsulates within

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an a-historical and teleological “Sonderweg.”52 And yet the transnational movement of people and ideas – and the global production of ideologies that resulted – did generate a certain convergence over time. Understanding Jewish history as that of a global minority, and thinking globally about the relationship between liberalism and antisemitism consequently helps us to see that developments in the “periphery” and the “center” were intertwined from the very beginning of the period in which both modern Jewish history and modern liberal politics were born.

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Globalization and Faith Communities Since 1750, eds. Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene, 53–81. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Habermas, Jurgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962), Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hacohen, Malachi Haim. 2019. Jacob & Esau. Jewish European History Between Nation and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hadley, Elaine. 2010. Living Liberalism. Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hart, Mitchell B. and Tony Michels, eds. 2017. The Cambridge History of Judaism Volume 8. The Modern World, 1815–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hertzberg, Arthur. 1990. The French Enlightenment and the Jews. The Origins of Modern Antisemitism. New York: Columbia University Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W.  Adorno. 1987. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum. Horowitz, Brian J. 2009. Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late Tsarist Russia. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Hyman, Paula. 1992. Was There a ‘Jewish Politics’ in Western and Central Europe? In The Quest for Utopia: Jewish Political Ideas and Institutions Through the Ages, ed. Zvi Gitelman, 105–117. New York: M. E. Sharpe. Joskowicz, Ari, and Ethan B. Katz, eds. 2015. Secularism in Question. Jews and Judaism in Modern Times. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Judaken, Jonathan. 2018. Introduction to “Rethinking Anti-Semitism”, AHR Roundtable. American Historical Review 123 (4): 1122–1138. Judson, Pieter M. 1996. Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kahan, Alan S. 2003. Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe. The Political Culture of Limited Suffrage. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kalmar, Ivan Davidson, and Derek Penslar, eds. 2004. Orientalism and the Jews. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. Karp, Jonathan. 2008. The Politics of Jewish Commerce. Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Katz, Jacob. 1980. From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Katz, Ethan B. 2015. The Burdens of Brotherhood. Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Katz, Ethan B., Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel, eds. 2017. Colonialism and the Jews. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kurz, Nathan. 2020. Jewish Internationalism and Human Rights after the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Langewiesche, Dieter. 2000. Liberalism in Germany, transl. Christiane Banerji. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Leonhard, Jörn. 2001. Liberalismus. Zur Historischen Semantik Eines Europäischen Deutungsmusters. Munich: R. Oldenbourg. Levene, Mark. 2005. Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State. London/New York: Tauris, 2 vol. Loeffler, James. 2018. Rooted Cosmopolitans. Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. Losurdo, Domenico. 2011. Liberalism. A Counter-History. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso. Mehta, Uday Singh. 1999. Liberalism and Empire. A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mendelsohn, Ezra. 1993. On Modern Jewish Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mosse, Werner E. 1970. The Conflict of Liberalism and Nationalism and Its Effect on German Jewry. Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 15: 125–139. Moyn, Sam. 2016. René Cassin (1887–1976). In Makers of Jewish Modernity: Thinkers, Artists, Leaders and the World They Made, eds. Jacques Picard, Jacques Revel, Michael Steinberg, and Idith Zertal, 278–291. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nathans, Benjamin. 2002. Beyond the Pale. The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nirenberg, David. 2014. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. New  York: WW. Norton & C. Novak, David. 2005. The Jewish Social Contract: an Essay in Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Okamura, Jonathan Y. 1981. Situational Ethnicity. Ethnic and Racial Studies 4 (4): 452–465. Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. London: Polity Press. Penslar, Derek. 2001. Shylock’s Children. Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pitts, Jennifer. 2005. A Turn to Empire. The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Porter, James I. Winter 2010. Odysseus and the Wandering Jew: the Dialectic of Jewish Enlightenment in Adorno and Horkheimer. Cultural Critique 74: 200–213. Pulzer, Peter. 1988. The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria. London: Halban. Rabinbach, Anson. 2000. Why Were the Jews Sacrificed?: The Place of Anti-­ Semitism in Dialectic of Enlightenment. New German Critique 81 (Autumn): 49–64.

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PART I

The Limits of Liberalism

CHAPTER 2

Liberalism and Antisemitism: A Reassessment from the Peripheries Lisa Moses Leff

Recent work on liberalism suggests that it’s time to rethink our historiographical common sense about the emergence of political antisemitism in late-nineteenth-century Europe.1 Since Peter Pulzer published his classic study at the height of the Cold War, few scholars have questioned his contention that that in essence, the antisemitic movement constituted a “Rejection of Liberalism.”2 Indeed, practically every study since has portrayed “illiberalism” as the key to understanding the politics of such ideologically diverse antisemites as the Christian Social Party founder Adolph Stöcker in Germany, the pan-Germanist Georg Ritter van  By antisemitism I refer not to anti-Jewish prejudice in general, but rather to the latenineteenth-century political mass movement aimed at limiting Jews’ newly won political rights, social integration, and economic activities. 2  Pulzer, The Rise of Political Antisemitism, chap. 2. Before Pulzer, Paul Massing described the German antisemitic movement as a clerico-conservative alliance against the German Liberal party in Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Antisemitism in Imperial Germany (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949). 1

L. M. Leff (*) American University, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_2

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Schönerer in Austria, and the self-styled “national socialist” Maurice Barrès in France.3 Scholars have accounted for this diversity by pointing to the fact that for antisemites, liberalism was defined broadly enough to be identified with any of the features of the modern world that they despised.4 Certainly, this has been a useful framework for understanding an otherwise confounding movement whose ideology pulled from both the conservative right and the socialist left, as well as from much older Protestant and Catholic religious traditions.5 Indeed, the German and Austrian antisemitic parties founded in the late 1870s presented themselves as the opposition to the Liberal parties that had held power since the 1860s. In France, antisemitism came on the scene a decade later than in Germany and Austria. Since there was no liberal party in France and liberalism strictly speaking was weak ideologically there, these antisemites attacked the republicans, particularly the moderate “Opportunists” who had dominated politics since the 1876 election, and stood for the same things as German and Austrian Liberals: legal universalism, representative democracy, free-market economic development, and empire. In all three contexts, the antisemitic parties developed a novel ideology that not only opposed the parties in power, but more broadly rejected the core features of liberal life. They sought to undo what liberals had done, and focused their critique on religious toleration, equality before the law, political corruption, and the socio-economic tumult produced by decades of free-market capitalism. Beneath liberalism’s supposed universalism, these antisemites claimed, lay a hidden agenda of advancing “Jewish” power. While traditional scholarship does much to help us understand the antisemitic parties, their rhetoric, and some of their appeal, it fails to fully account for the complexity of antisemitism’s relationship to liberalism. What are we to make of the fact that these supposedly “illiberal” antisemites mobilized the language of popular sovereignty, embraced democratic tactics, adopted a scientific worldview, and promoted economic modernization and cross-class unity? Indeed, the very same body of scholarship that stressed the illiberalism of the European antisemites also provides 3  Birnbaum. “La France aux français”; Katz, “The Preparatory Stage of the Modern Antisemitic Movement (1873–1879),” in Almog, ed., Antisemitism through the Ages, 279–90; Levy, The Downfall of the Antisemitic Political Parties; Parkes, Antisemitism; Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français; Whiteside, The Socialism of Fools. 4  Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, xix. 5  Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left. For another take on the diversity of antisemitic views, see Engel, “Away from a History of Antisemitism,” 30–53.

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plentiful evidence that these movements rejected some features of liberal modernity while embracing others.6 Making sense of this relationship requires moving beyond the notion that antisemitic politicians used the rhetoric of Jew-hatred opportunistically, to rally support for other aspects of their platforms. In fact, as Richard S. Levy’s research shows, when their movements declined in popularity, antisemites stressed their social and economic agendas and minimized their anti-Judaism in their efforts to win back voters.7 Indeed, given the diversity of the various antisemitic groups’ positions on religious, social, economic, and political issues, hatred of the Jews must be understood as the defining feature of the movement. Its “illiberalism” is far less clear. Part of our difficulty in understanding the antisemites’ relation to liberalism is that historians of the antisemitic political movements and theorists of liberalism have rarely engaged in a common conversation. This is surprising, given how deeply our understanding of liberalism has shifted in response to work done by historians of imperialism, slavery, racism, and sexism who have grappled with similar contradictions. Scholars such as Carole Pateman, Domenico Losurdo, Uday Singh Mehta, and Jennifer Pitts have revealed that the liberal political tradition was founded not only on universalizing, democratic ideals, but also on a series of important exclusions, subjugations, and deferrals.8 Pateman, for example, shows how beneath the seemingly “universal” language of social contract theory lay a limitation—sometimes explicit—of rights to men only. Losurdo shows how liberalism supported rather than undermined the institution of ­slavery in the United States. And Mehta and Pitts show that liberals came to embrace imperialism despite its seeming incompatibility with their faith in equal rights and free trade. Here, racial thinking was central, allowing liberals to imagine that while all humans were free and equal, some races still needed tutelage before they could achieve full rights. Taken together, these scholars and others like them have transformed our understanding of liberalism, pushing us towards much more expansive definitions that leave

6  See, for example, Sternhell, Maurice Barrès, also Pulzer, Rise; Birnbaum, La France aux français; Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair; Wilson, Ideology and Experience. and Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology. 7  Levy, Downfall; for an excellent statement of the problem, see Lavinia Anderson, Practicing Democracy, 432. 8  Mehta, Liberalism and Empire; Pitts, A Turn to Empire; Pateman, The Sexual Contract, and Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History.

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room for such seemingly paradoxical phenomena as liberal imperialism, liberal racism, and liberal sexism.9 Yet these developments within the scholarship on liberalism have had little impact on how we understand the history of the antisemitic movements of the late nineteenth century. Indeed, even as they engage the problems posed by imperialism, slavery, and sexism, political theorists of liberalism still ignore antisemitism. Social theorists of “modernity” like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and later, Zygmunt Bauman have shown more interest, pushing generations of scholars to contend with the ways in which “modernity” or “Enlightenment” led not only to greater civility but also to the Holocaust. Their insights further suggest we need to rethink the perplexing relationship between late nineteenth-century political antisemitism and the liberal public sphere in which it emerged.10 To apply these insights to the antisemitic movements of the late nineteenth century is not a straightforward task. Unlike liberal imperialists, slave-owners and male chauvinists, members of the Austrian, French, and German antisemitic parties did not think of themselves as liberals, even as they adopted many of liberalism’s most salient features. Undeniably, antisemitism’s best-known spokesmen came on the scene as opponents of the liberal parties in power or broke from the liberal movement from within its very ranks, often over precisely this issue. As such, understanding the complexity of the movement’s relationship to liberalism requires a definition that moves beyond even Duncan Bell’s maximalist “the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal.”11 Instead, we must expand our view of liberalism beyond the realm of ideas and labels and consider also the practices of liberal democracy. Writing about Austria, Pieter Judson provides a useful approach for understanding how ethnic nationalism and antisemitism developed in a liberal milieu.12 Rather than focusing on ideology and political platforms, Judson studies political culture, including social practices and systems of meaning. Such an approach allows us to understand the aspects of the  Bell, Reordering the World; Gunn and Vernon, eds., The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity.  Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment; Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust. On antisemitism and the Enlightenment, see, e.g., Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews. One exception to this is Katz, who includes a short chapter called “The Liberal Ambiguity,” which focuses on the antisemitism of French thinkers Jules Michelet and Ernest Renan in From Prejudice to Destruction, 129–138. 11  Bell, “What is Liberalism?” In Reordering the World, 64. 12  Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries. 9

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nationalist and antisemitic movements that defy simple categorization as “illiberal.” Yet even Judson’s excellent work leaves important questions unanswered. As one reviewer wrote, “Are we to understand nationalism as an offshoot of liberalism or as a separate ideology in competition with a liberalism clever enough to coopt its opponent until late in the century?”13 We still have work to do if we are to understand how and why nineteenth-­ century political antisemites and liberals shared some basic practices and commitments, despite their stark differences. To gain new perspective, this essay focuses on Algeria and Romania, two sites rarely examined in general histories of political antisemitism. Such a shift to the peripheries of Europe does not by any means take us away from the center of the action in the history of antisemitism. Like other nineteenth-century political movements, antisemitism developed in multiple countries across Europe and its peripheries at around the same time, and antisemites across these countries were interconnected through the press, international meetings, and migration. As we now know, vectors of political influence in the nineteenth century did not simply move from West to East, as scholars wedded to modernization theory once imagined. When it came to antisemitic ideas and practices, Algeria and Romania led the way. In these places, political antisemitism emerged slightly earlier and with much broader support than in Germany, Austria, and France. And since Algerian and Romanian antisemites were highly successful in achieving their political aims, their successes were publicized widely, inspiring antisemites elsewhere to adopt similar rhetoric, goals, and political strategies. But it is not just their influence on the better known antisemitic movements in Austria, Germany, and France that makes the Algerian and Romanian movements worth examining. These cases also serve as important correctives to traditional accounts about the political context for the emergence of antisemitism. In these sites, antisemitism emerged as part of the transition to liberal democracy, and its proponents saw themselves as furthering rather than reacting against that transition. As such, they cannot be seen as “illiberal.” Focusing our investigation on these two

13  James P. Krokar, Review of Judson, Pieter M., Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914. HAPSBURG: H-Net Reviews. April, 1999. Accessed online at https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev. php?id=2973

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contexts allows us to broaden our perspective and understand far better the complexity of the relationship between antisemitism and liberalism.

Antisemitism in Romania For the historian of liberalism’s progress in nineteenth-century Europe, Romania presents something of a paradox in many ways, not least of which is the sustained denial of rights to Jews by a state dedicated to most other liberal ideals.14 A longtime Ottoman province ruled by local Christian boyars (nobles), the Danubian Principalities had come under increasing Russian influence in the early nineteenth century. Romania began on its path to independence following Russia’s loss in the Crimean War. The architects of the new state were the left-leaning men of Romania’s 1848, including the Brătianu brothers, Alexandru Cuza, Ion Ghica, the Golescu family, Ion Eliade Rădulescu, and Constantin Rosetti. Except for the Moldavian Cuza, these men were all Wallachian boyars who had forged strong ties to Western European liberals, particularly in France, where they had spent significant time as students (and later, after 1848, exiles) and moved in the orbit of French republicans like Jules Michelet, Edgar Quinet, and Adolphe Crémieux. As such, their nationalist aspirations were articulated in the same romantic terms as the era’s other liberal movements across Europe. They were democratic nationalists yearning for selfrule, equality, and the establishment of civil liberties, including religious freedom.15 The liberal state they eventually created was peculiar when it came to the question of Jewish rights. Initially, it appeared that Romania would follow the French model its architects so admired. In 1848, Wallachia and, to a lesser degree, Moldavia were on the path to a liberal state in which Jews would have the same equal rights as in France. But this was not to be the case. The Paris Treaty of 1856, which set the terms for Romanian independence, gave all non-Christians civil, but not political, rights. The movement to deny Jews full rights grew into a movement around which diverse social groups, including both the boyar nobility and the emerging bourgeoisie, rallied. In the early 1860s, legislative measures restricted

 On other aspects of this paradox, see Jianu, Circle of Friends, 358.  Jianu, Circle of Friends, 3–12.

14 15

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Jewish tavern-keeping, cabarets, tenant faming, and tobacco sales, and limited their immigration from Russia into Moldavia.16 When Moldavia and Wallachia united in a common constitutional monarchy in 1866, the new government formally denied political rights to Jews. A series of new Rural Laws forbade Jews from residing in the countryside and new vagrancy laws targeted Jewish immigrants specifically. The achievement of formal independence in 1877 did not improve matters. On the contrary, when the former ’48ers rose to power, they reaffirmed the exclusion of Jews from the political community, much to the surprise of their Western allies. Concerned representatives of Western liberal democracies made equality for Jews a condition of recognizing Romania’s independence in the 1878 Berlin Treaty. Nevertheless, Romanian Jews continued to be denied political rights and were frequently subject to violent attacks. Indeed, seen from a Western European perspective, the Romanian case is strange. The more Romanian liberals achieved their dream of creating a modern democracy, the more the antisemitic movement grew. And in this two-party system, it was the more left-leaning National Liberal Party that was more apt to use antisemitic rhetoric, although the conservatives were generally willing to support the policies they proposed. Romanian Jews achieved rights only in 1919, in the aftermath of the Great War.17 Presented with the conundrum of how modern Romania could simultaneously embrace both liberalism and antisemitism, many scholars have tended to fall back on tired stereotypes. Their explanatory accounts have traded on the trope of so-called Eastern barbarism—either from native Romanians or from Russian meddlers—preventing a proper transition to modern democracy. A few have blamed the Jews themselves: either the Romanian Jews for their backwardness and misbehavior or the Western European Jews for their diplomatic interference.18 The other possibility is that we need to question our assumption that liberalism is necessarily, by its very nature, at odds with antisemitism. An early sign that Jewish equality would not form part of Romanian liberalism came in the aftermath of unification in 1866 as the National 16  Cohen, “The Jewish Question during the Period of the Romanian National Renaissance,” in Fischer-Galati, Florescu, and Ursal, eds. Romania between East and West, 205, and Iancu, Jews in Romania 1866–1919, 9. 17  Iancu, Jews in Romania and Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 183–8. 18  See for example Cohen, “The Jewish Question.”

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Assembly was writing its new constitution. To the satisfaction of crowds in Ç the street, the National Liberal Finance Minister Ion Br a tianu renounced his earlier stance in favor of Jewish emancipation in a brutal speech decrying Jews as a threat to the national body, a “disease,” against which the state must take immediate action by refusing them civil rights and curbing the immigration of this “foreign proletariat.”19 Behind these ugly words lay an astute political calculation. As Abigail Green has argued, the Wallachian Brătianu embraced the language of antisemitism and xenophobia to forge political common ground with the Moldavians in Parliament, without whose support it would have been impossible for his ministry to govern.20 The language resonated with Moldavian deputies unhappy with the influx of Jewish immigrants into their region. Since the beginning of the century, the Jewish population had increased enormously there, particularly in urban centers. In 1803, Jews had formed just 6% of the urban population of Moldavia; in 1846, they formed 38%, and immigrants continued to pour into cities like Iaşi.21 Such conditions form an important backdrop for understanding why Romanian liberals—otherwise steeped in French republican ideals—made antisemitism a foundational part of their new political culture. At the very moment of the promulgation of the new state’s constitution, parliamentary unity was forged across regional and class lines by defining Jews as outside the bounds of the nation. Economic considerations were also part of the calculus for Romanians in their attitude toward the Jewish question. Earlier than their liberal counterparts in the West, the Romanians rejected laissez-faire. Instead, they sought to use the state to build the national economy, which they saw as lagging in development. For this reason, they were more likely to adopt policies then deemed at odds with liberalism in other settings, such as the institution of tariffs and other protectionist economic measures.22 Scholars have long noted this seeming contradiction in Romanian liberalism, but have failed to see how it shaped the young state’s antisemitism.23 Yet the

19  Iancu (Jews in Romania, 40) contends that these anti-Jewish protests were in fact orchestrated by Brătianu. 20  Green, Moses Montefiore, 344. 21  Andreas Pfuetzner, “The Romanian-Jewish Question.” 22  Brown, “The Adaptation of a Western Political Theory,” in Fischer-Galati, Florescu, and Ursal, eds. Romania between East and West, 270. 23  Jianu, A Circle of Friends, 358.

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connection is clear: Romanian liberals framed their antisemitic measures as a means to cultivate, for the first time, a native middle class.24 Romanian antisemitism—already firmly established in the late 1860s— worsened in the 1870s after Western European Jews organized a diplomatic campaign in favor of Jewish emancipation. Under the leadership of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Western European and American Jews lobbied Romanian leaders to offer Jews full rights, starting in the 1860s. When these efforts proved unsuccessful, they turned to their own governments that, in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, negotiated treaties formal recognizing the new state. During those negotiations, Jewish leaders from Britain, France, Germany, the United States, and Italy coordinated their efforts and successfully pressed the Great Powers to make Jewish equality a condition of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin.25 But Jewish leaders’ rejoicing soon turned to disappointment when the Romanians willfully ignored this condition of the treaty. Rather than securing emancipation, they inadvertently fueled antisemitism on the ground and transformed it into something essential to their national identity. If previously, Romanian liberals’ antisemitism had been a populist xenophobia aimed against poor immigrants, now it had all the power of conspiracy theory. Against the external threat of Jewish international power, one major newspaper wrote in 1879: Who can force us to take to our bosom a half-million charlatans to suck our blood, become owners of our property and then treat us as slaves in our own country? That will never happen. The Romanians will not give in no matter what pressure is brought to bear upon them by foreign powers supporting the Alliance Israélite Universelle. The Jews are a sword with its point in the ribs of Romania, while the hilt is held by the Alliance Israélite Universelle.26

Romanians—both liberals and conservatives—agreed that to accept the terms the Great Powers had set regarding Jewish rights in the Berlin Treaty was tantamount to “suicide.”27 As such, in the changed political environment that followed the Berlin Congress, denying Jews political rights became an ever more meaningful political aim. No longer did  Iancu, Jews in Romania, 70–1; Pfuetzner, “The Romanian-Jewish Question.”  Iancu, Jews in Romania, 89–94. 26  From the liberal newspaper Romania Libera of 11 June 1879, as cited in Iancu, Jews in Romania, 104. 27  July 29, 1879 article from the Telegraful, as cited in Iancu, Jews in Romania, 104. 24 25

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antisemites merely make economic or political arguments, as they had in the 1860s; now, they argued that excluding Jews was necessary as an act of national self-defense against a powerful foreign conspiracy.28 This new antisemitic claim fit well with existing ones, though the face of the foreign threat had shifted. In both cases, Romanian nationalists’ antisemitism was articulated in the language of resistance to oppression by foreign forces, whether powerful Western Jews influencing Great Power diplomacy, or bedraggled immigrants fleeing neighboring Russia. It has been difficult for scholars wed to a strictly ideological definition of liberalism to see the founders of modern Romania as liberal, given their economic protectionism and their religious discrimination. But to call Romanians illiberal is to fundamentally misunderstand them. As Victoria Brown has argued, Romanians turned to economic protectionism in the name of national “liberty.” As such, they were no more “compromised” in their liberalism than the many Western liberals, who, by the end of the nineteenth century, likewise turned away from free trade to foster their national economies’ growth.29 Indeed, Romanian liberals saw their policies as an improvement on Western European models of liberalism, designed to create a more virtuous state that nonetheless actualized the principles of freedom, equality, and national self-determination that they dearly embraced. As Diana Mishkova has shown, Romanians developed a systematic critique of Western democracy as having been corrupted by spoils politics, and their protectionist policies, immigration restrictions, and exclusion of Jews were all part of their efforts to bring a truer form of liberalism to Romania.30 Most scholars now agree that the founders of modern Romania must be seen as liberals in spite of the contradictions they embodied. Not unlike twentieth-century post-colonial nationalists in Asia and Africa, these liberals on Europe’s periphery were simultaneously inspired by Western forms and transformed them to suit local circumstances.31 Understanding their peripheral situation helps us to understand how deeply intertwined 28  For more on the history of the campaign and its aftermath, see Duhaut, “The Europeanisation of French Jews.” 29  Brown, “Adaptation,” 270. On Western European liberals’ turn away from free trade, see Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV. 30  Mishkova, “Forms without Substance,” in Daskalov and Mishkova, eds. Entangled Histories of the Balkans. Vol. 2, 16–37. 31  For a useful comparison, see Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, and The Nation and Its Fragments.

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liberalism and antisemitism were in Romania. Here, antisemitism allowed nationalists to embrace a Western model of liberalism while boldly asserting their independence.

The Algerian Antijuifs Like their counterparts in Romania, the Algerian antijuifs (as they called themselves, emphasizing their opposition to Jews, not Arabs) were liberal proponents of democracy. Indeed, Algerian antisemitism was articulated in the name of French republican ideals, using familiar republican images. By the height of their power, the antijuifs had adopted the “Marseillaise antijuive” as a rallying song, and one of their key leaders, the journalist Max Régis, twice elected Mayor of Algiers, promised to “water our liberty tree with Jewish blood.”32 Throughout this powerful (if woefully understudied) movement’s history, its leaders called for stripping Algerian Jews of their citizenship rights using violent terms that rooted their movement in the French Revolutionary tradition of republicanism, the French variant of liberalism in the Third Republic. Examining the history of antisemitism at this periphery of European political culture thus provides a valuable new perspective from which to consider the question of antisemitism’s relationship to liberalism. As in Romania, antisemitism in Algeria emerged as the first institutions of democracy began to function. In Romania, this was in Parliament with the writing of a Constitution; in Algeria, it was in the first democratic elections. A settler colony conquered by the French in 1830, elections in Algeria began only after 1871, when the republicans came to power in the metropole and integrated the colony fully into the French state administration. The region was divided into départements, just as metropolitan France was. Each had its own elected representatives to the French Chamber of Deputies and Senate, as well as officials elected to serve at the municipal level. The three Algerian départements of Oran, Algiers, and Constantine were home to a diverse population, and not all had voting rights. In the 1870s, there were about 350,000 European settlers, half of whom were French, the other half principally from Italy, Spain, and Malta. Settlers from France had the full rights of French citizenship, including the vote. 32  On the Marseillaise antijuive, see Zack, “Who Fought the Algerian War?,” 55–97; for this quotation from Régis, see Roberts, Citizenship and Antisemitism, 104.

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Other European settlers only gained those rights when they were naturalized in 1889; in the 1890s, these citizens were known as néos. There were also about three million indigenous Muslims, including both Arabs and Berbers, who, unless they were among the very few to be naturalized French as individuals, could not vote. They were also subject to a special, discriminatory legal code called the Code de l’Indigénat, instituted in 1881. Algeria was also home to over 50,000 indigenous Jews who were naturalized French en masse in 1870. As in metropolitan France, Jews in Third Republic Algeria had the same civil and political rights as all other Frenchmen, including the vote. But political demography was quite different in the colony. Whereas in the metropole, Jews represented less than 0.1% of the population, in Algeria, the proportion was much larger. Overall, they represented almost 20% of the voting population until 1889 (and after the 1889 naturalization of European settlers, 10% overall). Since they were primarily concentrated in urban areas on the coast, in some places they represented over 50% of voters.33 Moreover, Algeria saw a massive immigration in the late nineteenth century, and Jews, primarily from neighboring Morocco, were overrepresented among the immigrants. The situation was most noteworthy in Oran, where the Jewish population went from 6294 to 11,837 in the fifteen years from 1891 to 1906.34 From a cultural perspective, Algerian Jews resembled the disenfranchised Algerian Muslims more than they resembled the European settlers. This made their political status suspect in the eyes of the republicans who would join the antijuif movement in the 1880s and 1890s. In essence, antijuifs believed Jews were uncivilized natives whose votes unfairly distorted the democratic process. In this sense, Algerian antijudaïsme cannot be understood separately from the structural racism built into the settler colonial legal regime. Indeed, as Emmanuel Sivan put it, “It’s a strange irony of history that the birth of modern antisemitism as a mass movement in the most civilized country of the West is inextricably linked to the hatred of the Jew as an Arab.”35 It was among the European settlers, not the disenfranchised Arabs, that the antijuif movement emerged. The movement began in the early 1880s with the first municipal elections. Jews voted in these elections from the  Ageron, Modern Algeria, 47–63.  Dermenjian, La Crise antijuive oranaise (1895–1905), 21. 35  Sivan, “Stéréotypes antijuifs dans la mentalité pied-noir,” in Les Relations entre juifs et musulmans en Afrique du Nord, XIXe-XXe siècles, 169. 33 34

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time they were emancipated, and they often voted as a bloc. Usually, they supported the Opportunist or centrist republicans and against the Radicals or left-wing republicans. This was increasingly the case as time went on and Radicals adopted anti-Jewish rhetoric in their campaigns, making it difficult for any Jew to imagine voting for them.36 For example, in 1882, campaign posters for the Radicals in Oran read “All means are good and must be employed in the destruction of the Jews by the Europeans.”37 A wave of anti-Jewish violence accompanied such rhetoric across a number of towns in the period from 1881 to 1884.38 In the Third Republic, access to power on the municipal level meant access to jobs and other rewards. In the colonial context, the rewards could be greater than in metropolitan France. Government salaries were disproportionately high, and programs designed to encourage European settlement (generally involving expropriating the disenfranchised Arab majority) provided many opportunities for lucrative government contracts.39 Historian Sophie Roberts explains that elections, particularly for municipal government, were central in the history of colonial antisemitism. This was because these bodies were endowed with the power to distribute government contracts, rewards, social welfare initiatives, and well-salaried jobs. This created a patronage system that pitted competing social groups against one another in their quest for access to resources.40 Thus established, Algerian antijudaïsme took off after 1889 with the enfranchisement of the néos. Its peak came in the late 1890s in Oran and Alger, where the antijuifs displayed a zeal for their cause that exceeded anything seen in the metropole, even at the height of Dreyfus affair. In Oran, the troubles started in 1895, led by the Brussels-born republican journalist Paul Bidiane of the Petit Africain newspaper. Though not Jewish, Bidiane was a former secretary of the Oran Consistory (synagogue) who accused Consistory President Simon Kanoui of swelling the electoral lists in Oran with the names of illegitimate Jewish voters from Morocco. When Kanoui and the Opportunist republicans he had supported won the election despite these challenges, antisemitism took off,  Szajkowski, “Socialists and Radicals,” 257–80.  Cited in Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 231. 38  See Zack, “Algeria,” in Levy, ed., Antisemitism, 10. 39  David Prochaska shows how this worked in the municipality of Bône but it is equally true of other towns. See Making Algeria French. On salaries, see Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 231. 40  Roberts, Citizenship and Antisemitism, 32–39. 36 37

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particularly in the pages of the Petit Africain. By the time of the 1897 elections, the antisemitic mobilization was known locally as anti-­ Kanouïsme, and the mobilization of “Frenchmen” against “Jews” resulted in numerous riots across the region. The fact that Vice-Mayor Peffau, who served as Oran’s police chief, was also the former Vice-President of the Ligue antijuive made the situation particularly dangerous, so the zouaves (Algerian soldiers) were called in to keep the peace, but they too tended to stand by in the attacks. The antijuifs won that election with the platform of stripping citizenship from the Jews emancipated in 1870. Although that goal was never attained, Jewish access to municipal services was limited, their livelihoods threatened and their sense of security shaken. In 1898, as the Dreyfus affair raged across metropolitan France, the antijuif campaign in Oran reached its height as well, but with a violence that never broke out on the mainland. Only the arrival of a new Governor General restored calm. Eventually, by 1905, the movement lost steam.41 In Algiers, the situation was no less extreme. The Ligue antijuive d’Alger was formed in the early 1870s but mobilized in the 1890s under the leadership of Max Régis, who was elected mayor of the city in 1898. As in Oran, the Algiers antijuifs pursued their campaign through legal means (electoral campaigning, petitioning, and boycotts against Jewish voters and Jewish shops) as well as extra-legal means (violence against property and people). January 1898 was the height of the movement. During Algiers’s crise antijuive, the notorious Parisian antisemitic journalist Edouard Drumont was elected to represent the Algiers département in the Chamber of Deputies; the twenty-five-year-old Régis was elected Mayor; and thousands marched through the city, destroying Jewish property, attacking Jewish people, and, as in Oran, creating a sense of lawlessness and crisis. This was intentional: Régis himself declared, “The hour of the Revolution had sounded.”42 As in Oran, only new authorities sent from the metropole eventually resolved the crisis, though not before Régis called for the separation of Algeria from the metropole.43 Fin-de-siècle Algerian antisemitism was striking in three ways. First, it was highly influential. In Algeria itself, antijuifs captured control of the  Dermenjian, Crise antijuive oranaise.  Zack, “French and Algerian Identity Formation,” 122–3. 43  Both Lizabeth Zack (in “Who Fought the Algerian War?”) and Sophie Roberts (in Citizenship and Antisemitism) warn against reading Régis’s separatism as anti-republican; if anything, he and his followers were resisting French central authority by declaring their right to self-determination in decidedly republican terms. 41 42

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most important city governments and enacted programs that far exceeded anything in continental Europe at the time, limiting Jewish access to public services and threatening Jewish security. Its influence extended to the mainland as well. Antijuif newspapers were read in France and contributed to the radicalization of the antisemitic movement there, and perhaps even more importantly, Algerian voters provided Drumont a seat in the French Chamber of Deputies at the height of the Dreyfus affair. Second, Algerian antisemitism reshaped social relations in the colony, particularly in the cities. The Third Republic’s extension of the vote to all adult Frenchmen and its empowering of municipal government brought about new alliances that cut across traditional divisions of region and class. In Algeria, the most visible of these was antijudaïsme. The movement became a vector through which the newly naturalized néos found common ground with French colons, who put aside the differences that had separated them and coalesced into a unified social group working to limit Jewish political power and access to municipal resources.44 The antijuifs joined in a common “French Algerian” identity through the practices associated with republican citizenship: they read the same newspapers, discussed politics, and worked together in electoral campaigns.45 They also socialized together in such sites as antijuif cafés and antijuif banquets. In the metropole, cafés and banquets had long been sites of republican sociability, and would have been understood as such by the many settlers who had come to Algeria as former ’48ers or former Communards exiled to the colony at one point or another for their activism.46 It was no coincidence that the antijuifs socialized like republicans; indeed, republicanism was the third and most striking aspect of the Algerian antijuif movement. Produced through the very practice of republican citizenship, the antijuifs understood themselves to embody the very spirit of the French Revolution, a struggle against oppression in the name of liberty and equality, and these ideas pervaded their rhetoric. In 1898, the antijuif municipal government of Oran celebrated Bastille day by withholding aid to the Jewish poor and by using its fireworks display to spell out “Down with the Jews!”47 In Algiers, and to a lesser extent in 44   See Zack, “French and Algerian Identity Formation” and “Who Fought the Algerian War?” 45  Roberts, Citizenship and Antisemitism, 80–110. 46  Dermenjian, Crise antijuive oranaise, 136–7. 47  Godley, “Almost Finished Frenchmen,” 235–6.

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Oran, the antijuifs sang both their “Marseillaise antijuive” and a “Carmagnole antijuive,” two songs well known for their revolutionary origins. In the Petit Africain, Paul Bidiane represented Jews as a hydra, just as French revolutionaries had represented aristocrats and other enemies, and urged his readers to vote by writing of a “taking of the Jewish Bastille.” Threaded throughout this decidedly republican rhetoric, rooted in the French Revolution, was the unmistakably racial and even proto-­ eugenicist language we know well from other modern antisemites, including calls for the “disinfection” of Algerian commerce.48 Scholars have been puzzled by the republicanism of these settler antisemites. After all, wasn’t republicanism generally associated with secularism and religious equality? Certainly, this was the case in metropolitan France in the 1890s, where Dreyfusards defended Jews in the name of the republic, and anti-Dreyfusards attacked the republic as a Jewish conspiracy. But in Algeria, republican antijuifs did not understand state neutrality or equality before the law to mean equal rights for Jews or equal access to municipal services. Indeed, in Oran, one dedicated antijuif embodied the contradiction quite explicitly, saying “I am anti-clerical, therefore I hate the Jews!”49 In many ways this republican vision was in line with the liberalism of the Romanian lawmakers who believed that their goals could only be achieved by limiting Jewish mobility, commerce, and rights. In Algeria, as in Romania, ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism were not opposites; they were two sides of the same coin. To a lesser degree, Algerian antisemites can be seen in the same light as the French republicans who, in the 1880s and 90s, extended the French colonial empire in Africa in the name of liberal French Revolutionary ideals. Alice Conklin has shown that in French West Africa, French republican imperialists refused rights to locals by arguing that they were not yet civilized enough for them, and that colonization itself was an effort to further civilization. Nat Godley has used Conklin’s theory to explain the contradictions of Algerian antijuidaïsme as well, arguing that it was justified by its proponents as a deferral of rights until Jewish Algerians were civilized.50 While such justification can certainly be found among the primary sources, 48  Dermenjian, Crise antijuive oranaise, 134–5 and Roberts, Citizenship and Antisemitism, 68. 49  Dermenjian, Crise antijuive oranaise, 90. 50  Godley, “Almost-Finished Frenchmen,” 231. For comparison to West Africa, see Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, and Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State.

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much more pervasive among the antijuifs was a rhetoric of popular selfdefense against a foreign conspiracy. This made antijudaïsme more like the anti-aristocratic movement of the Revolutionary era: an organized popular movement designed to liberate the people by vanquishing and banishing a longtime oppressor, seen increasingly as irredeemable. Like the Romanian antisemites, an overarching commitment to many of liberalism’s ideals was not at odds with such conspiracy thinking and the violence it unleashed. On the contrary, it lent it vigor and shaped its rhetoric.

Conclusion Romanian and Algerian antisemitism cannot be understood as strictly reactionary. Certainly, these political movements rejected Jewish emancipation, an element of liberalism that, by the 1860s and 70s, many saw as fundamental. But a closer look has revealed that they were far from rejecting all that liberalism stood for. Their desire was for equality and freedom, not to return to old political or social hierarchies. Their prejudices may have been informed by Christian teachings, but antisemites did not believe in Divine Right or a Christian state. Their coalitions reached across regions and class boundaries, and they embraced economic modernization. Certainly, they were nationalists in an exclusivist and sometimes aggressive sense, but their ethnic nationalism was not as far from civic nationalism as we tend to assume. Our understanding of antisemitism’s relationship to liberalism is enriched by recent scholarship on liberal sexism, liberal racism, and liberal imperialism. This scholarship shows that there was never a pure form of liberalism that was not built upon certain concrete exclusions, hierarchies, and exceptions, be they by sex, wealth, degree of education, or other markers of social status. Some of these exclusions were based in biology and assumed to be permanent; others were more grounded in culture, which could be acquired or learned. Even the liberals’ very commitment to universalism should be understood as a sort of exclusion, for it demands the erasure of difference in the public sphere.51 When we accept exclusivism to be as constitutive of liberalism as its commitment to universal liberty and equality, it becomes easier to understand how liberal nationalism could so easily give way to the more 51  This point is made beautifully by Judson, “Rethinking the Liberal Legacy,” in Beller, ed., Rethinking Vienna 1900, 65–9.

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obviously exclusivist sorts of nationalism that characterized the mass movements of the fin-de-siècle, including antisemitism. This is not to say that the movements are identical, or even without serious tension; but they are not opposites either. As Pieter Judson has written, “If liberals became illiberal, the seeds of their illiberal behavior could be found in liberalism itself.”52 Judson confines his discussion to Austria, but the point could also be made about France and Germany; and of course, as we have seen, an even stronger point about the consonance between liberalism and antisemitism can be made for Romania and Algeria. If we take the cases at the periphery to be as important as those at the center, it’s clear that antisemitic ideology was less the opposite of liberalism than it was a particular mutation or variant of it. Moving from ideology to practice helps us to understand why and how this mutation took place. In both Romania and in Algeria, antisemitism emerged with the birth of liberal democracy and in the practices of citizenship among a diverse electorate. In Romania, this was in the parliamentary maneuvering necessary for merging two states with different cultures and different demographics. In Algeria, this was in the new municipal elections among a diverse, but still limited electorate of European-born settlers who found common ground in their opposition to extending equality to natives. In both cases, antisemitism served an important function. Its ideological exclusivism created common ground among people who, previously, would never have thought of themselves as sharing an identity. In this sense, antisemitism was not just modern; it was modernizing. Both Algeria and Romania were democracies each in their own way peripheral to the center of European power, and in each place, antisemitism was also anti-imperialist. Antisemites felt that Jewish emancipation had been imposed by far-away powers who understood little of local social and economic conditions and saw themselves as a democratic resistance movement. In this sense, both Romanian and Algerian antisemites sought to purify liberal democracy from forces of corruption, both internal and external. Indeed, as Diana Mishkova has shown, the Romanians saw in the West a model of how liberalism could become corrupted. They sought to use state power to stave off the cultural decadence they perceived to be taking root elsewhere.53 Their antisemitism must be understood as part of this political critique.  Judson, “Rethinking,” p. 67.  Mishkova, “Forms without Substance,” in Daskalov and Mishkova, eds. Entangled Histories of the Balkans. Vol. 2, 1–98. 52 53

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Like their Romanian and Algerian counterparts, Austrian, French, and German antisemites would also deploy a rhetoric of purifying the state from corrupt liberals, though the “corrupt” liberals that concerned them were the established parties in power, not diplomats or far-away imperial policy-setters. The Algerian case alerts us to a development within “liberal” states that is essential for understanding antisemitism: the emergence of what Peter Jones calls the “milch-cow state,” in which state bodies, wielding larger and larger treasuries, increasingly controlled access to lucrative government contracts, jobs, and social welfare programs.54 This created not only competition between social groups (as in Algeria), but also opportunities and incentives for corruption among liberal politicians. Indeed, historians of antisemitism have long noted that controversies over liberal corruption in financing large-scale public works were important factors in launching antisemitic movements. One need only think of the Gründerschwindel in 1870s Germany, the 1882 Vienna city rail corruption scandal, and the 1892 Panama Canal scandal in France.55 Much like in Algeria, Austrian, French, and German antisemitism developed as reform movements that blamed Jews for the vulnerability of liberal states to corruption. The similarity of Romanian and Algerian antisemitism on the one hand and Austrian, French, and German antisemitism on the other alerts us to an important dynamic in the history of this global political movement. Many of antisemitism’s central ideas, and certainly its base of support, moved from periphery to center rather than the other way around. The fact that a conspiracy theory about global domination is so central to antisemitic ideology makes it especially powerful in democracies on the periphery, where full self-determination is limited by the political or economic influence of foreign powers. Under certain political and economic circumstances, these theories have flourished at the European center as well. Political antisemitism was fundamentally a modern and democratic movement. Some of the most important antisemitic movements grew out of liberal milieus and were expressions of their adherents’ commitments to liberalism as it was lived in their particular political culture. Most everywhere, antisemites played an integral role in shaping democratic political  Jones, Politics and Rural Society.  Pulzer notes the importance of such factors in the rise of antisemitism in Germany and Austria in Rise of Political Antisemitism. On Panama, see Mollier, Le Scandale de Panama. 54 55

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culture as journalists, elected politicians, shapers of constitutions, and active citizens. Their movements represented an awakening to citizenship and new alliances across barriers of class and region. Even in the sites where antisemites labeled themselves anti-liberal like Austria, France, and Germany, we must understand their self-identification as part of their critique of power and their desire to participate within it, not a wholesale rejection of its basic tenets.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. 2007. The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ageron, Charles-Robert. 1991. Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present. Trans. Michael Brett. Trenton: Africa World Publishers. Anderson, Margaret Lavinia. 2000. Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bell, Duncan. 2016. Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Birnbaum, Pierre. 1993. “La France aux Français”: Histoire des haines nationalistes. Paris: Seuil. Brown, Victoria F. 1982. The Adaptation of a Western Political Theory in a Peripheral State: The Case of Romanian Nationalism. In Romania between East and West: Historical Essays in Memory of Constantin C. Giurescu, ed. Stephen Fischer-Galati, Radu R. Florescu, and George R. Ursal. Boulder: East European Monographs. Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohen, Lloyd A. 1982. The Jewish Question during the Period of the Romanian National Renaissance and the Unification of the Two Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, 1848–1866. In Romania between East and West: Historical Essays in Memory of Constantin C. Giurescu, ed. Stephen Fischer-Galati, Radu R. Florescu, and George R. Ursal. Boulder: East European Monographs. Conklin, Alice. 1997. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Dermenjian, Geneviève. 1986. La Crise antijuive oranaise (1895–1905): L’Antisémitisme dans l’Algérie coloniale. Paris: L’Harmattan. Duhaut, Noëmie. 2017. The Europeanisation of French Jews: French Jewish Perception of Jews in Southeast Europe, 1840 to 1880. PhD Thesis, History Department, University College. Engel, David. 2009. Away from a History of Antisemitism: An Essay in the Semantics of Historical Description. In Rethinking European History, ed. Jeremy Cohen and Moshe Rosman. Oxford: Littman. Godley, Nathan. 2006. ‘Almost Finished Frenchmen’: The Jews of Algeria and the Question of French National Identity (1830–1902). PhD Dissertation, University of Iowa. Green, Abigail. 2010. Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gunn, Simon, and James Vernon, eds. 2011. The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hertzberg, Arthur. 1968. The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism. New York: Columbia University Press. Iancu, Carol. 1996. Jews in Romania 1866–1919: From Exclusion to Emancipation. Trans. Carvel de Bussy. Boulder: East European Monographs. Jianu, Angela. 2011. A Circle of Friends: Romanian Revolutionaries and Political Exile, 1840–1859. Leiden: Brill. Jones, P.M. 1985. Politics and Rural Society: The Southern Massif Central, C. 1750–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Judson, Pieter M. 1996. Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2001. Rethinking the Liberal Legacy. In Rethinking Vienna 1900, ed. Steven Beller. New York: Berghahn Books. Katz, Jacob. 1988. The Preparatory Stage of the Modern Antisemitic Movement (1873–1879). In Antisemitism through the Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Leff, Lisa Moses. 2006. Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Levy, Richard S. 1975. The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press. Losurdo, Domenico. 2011. Liberalism: A Counter-History. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso. Massing, Paul. 1949. Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany. New York: Harper & Brothers.

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Mehta, Uday Singh. 1999. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Social Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mishkova, Diana. 2014. Forms without Substance: Debates on the Transfer of Western Models to the Balkans. In Entangled Histories of the Balkans, ed. Roumen Daskalov and Diana Mishkova. 2 vols. Vol. 2: Transfers of Political Ideologies and Institutions. Leiden: Brill. Mollier, Jean-Yves. 1991. Le Scandale de Panama. Paris: Fayard. Mosse, George. 1981. The Crisis of German Ideology: The Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. New York: Schocken. Parkes, James. 1963. Antisemitism. London: Valentine Mitchell. Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pfuetzner, Andreas. 2017. The Romanian-Jewish Question: The Early Phase (1856–1873). Paper Presented at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, 2 March. Pitts, Jennifer. 2005. A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Prochaska, David. 1990. Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pulzer, Peter G.J. 1964. The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Roberts, Sophie Beth. 2018. Citizenship and Antisemitism in French Colonial Algeria, 1870–1962. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sivan, Emmanuel. 1980. Stéréotypes antijuifs dans la mentalité pied-noir. In Les Relations entre juifs et musulmans en Afrique du Nord, XIXe-XXe siècles. Actes du colloque international de l’Institut d’histoire des pays d’outre-mer, Abbaye de Sénaque, octobre 1978. Paris: Editions du CNRS. Stern, Fritz. 1974. The Politics of Cultural Despair. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sternhell, Zeev. 1972. Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français. Paris: Armand Colin. ———. 1986. Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France. Trans. David Maisel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Szajkowski, Zosa. 1948. Socialists and Radicals in the Development of Antisemitism in Algeria (1884–1900). Jewish Social Studies 10 (3): 257–280. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2011. The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press. Whiteside, Andrew G. 1975. The Socialism of Fools: Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wilder, Gary. 2005. The French Imperial Nation-State; Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Wilson, Stephen. 1982. Ideology and Experience: Anti-Semitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair. London: Farleigh Dickinson University Press. Zack, Lizabeth. 2002a. French and Algerian Identity Formation in 1890s Algiers. French Colonial History 2: 122–123. ———. 2002b. Who Fought the Algerian War? Political Identity and Conflict in French-Ruled Algeria. International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 16 (1): 55–97. ———. 2005. Algeria. In Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, 2 vols., vol. I, ed. Richard S. Levy. Santa Barbara: ABC Clio.

CHAPTER 3

Osman Bey’s The Conquest of the World by Jews (1873): A Liberal Antisemitism? Simon Levis Sullam

Antisemitic Pamphleteer and Militant Liberal In the last years of the nineteenth century, as the Dreyfus affair and its echoes were still raging in Europe, and he was  visiting Karl Lueger’s Vienna, Osman Bey (1836–1905 ca.) could rightly claim he had been a “prophet” of antisemitism about twenty-five years earlier, while the Luegers, the Stoeckers and the Drumonts were  still far from engaging with “the Jewish question.”1 In relative isolation, without provoking much immediate attention, he had published in Basel in 1873, in French and in German, the pamphlet La conquête du monde par les Juifs (The Conquest of the World by the Jews). Soon this 60-page booklet was translated, and printed in several languages: it was published in Russian, in 1  Osman-bey, Dreyfus, martyr Juif, Osman Bey, martyr des Juifs, 32 and 39. See: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0006/bsb00066658/images/ (accessed November 2020).

S. Levis Sullam (*) Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_3

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Odessa, already in 1874, and then in Lvov in 1876; it appeared in English in St. Louis (USA), in 1878; and again in French, in Bucarest, in 1879. The volume was then printed in Polish, in Warsaw, in 1880; and in that same year La conquête appeared in Italy, with a second edition in 1883. In 1875 and in 1880 it was republished in German, with the 1875 Wiesbaden edition claiming to be the seventh.2 A new edition of La conquête finally appeared in Paris in 1887, by now with an inscription to Edouard Drumont, the recent author of the hugely successful La France juive who was quickly gaining notoriety as the rising star of French antisemitism.3 Using powerful strokes in painting the historical picture and offering a broad outlook on the contemporary international situation, in La conquête Osman Bey depicted the Jews as an aggressive and conquering “race” already in antiquity, which had been constantly led by “material interest,” and now appeared in most European countries at the head of politics, diplomacy, journalism, and especially finance. After evoking a meeting of Jewish leaders in Cracow in 1840, the pamphlet denounced the supposed growing space of the recently founded Alliance Israélite Universelle in the background of European events, it lamented the rising role of the Rothschild in the world economy, and the part played in recent politics by the Crémieux, the Disraelis, and other Jewish politicians in Europe and the United States. Thus Osman Bey was also a pioneer in setting the scenes, characters, and the general plot for the future, notorious success of the foundational text of modern antisemitism, the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The well-known forgery, first published in Russian in 1906 and translated into several European languages in the immediate aftermath of the First world war, would use La conquête among its models and sources of inspiration.4 Osman Bey was a pen name for Frederick Millingen, an Englishman born in Constantinople in 1836 from an English father, doctor Julius 2  Osman Bey, La conquête du monde par les Juifs, quoted hereafter as La conquête, and Id., Die Eroberung der Welt durch die Juden. I have also used the English translation: The Conquest of the World by the Jews (see: https://archive.org/details/ConquestOfTheWorldByTheJews/ CWJ1, accessed November 2020). For the various editions see: De Michelis, The NonExistent Manuscript, 400. For the Bucarest edition see Bulletin de l’Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale, 11, III, 1900, 149 (found through www.gallica.bnf.fr) 3  This edition (Paris: Dentu, 1887) is briefly reviewed, with quotes from Bey’s inscription to Drumont, by L’Univers, 13 Avril 1887 (found through www.gallica.bnf.fr) 4  De Michelis, The Non-Existent Manuscript, 154–6; Cohn, Warrant for Genocide; Taguieff, Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion.

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Millingen (who had served at the deathbed of lord Byron in mid-1820s Greece), and from a French and Greek mother, Marie Dejean.5 The parents split up soon after his birth, and in his childhood Frederick was converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism, while he was raised and educated for some years in Rome in the 1840s. As a young man, Millingen returned to Constantinople and joined the Ottoman army for approximately ten years, serving, above all, in Anatolia. This came after a new conversion, this time to Islam: Frederick thus followed his mother’s religious choice, since Marie had converted once she remarried to a high officer of the Ottoman empire. After leaving the army, Millingen, now known as Osman Bey, became a man of letters and lived for some time in Paris and London, where he began publishing as an ethnologist: his book Wild Life Among the Koords appeared in the English capital in 1870. This volume would be followed by several others, including Les Imams et les derviches, published in Paris in 1881. Around 1870, just a couple of years before he drafted his antisemitic pamphlet La conquête du monde par les Juifs, Osman Bey had published three articles in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of London, under his real name, Millingen.6 They have gone unnoticed by previous scholars, but, as we will see, they are actually related in important ways to La conquête. In 1875, having not been especially successful with his publications and almost broken, Millingen moved to Russia after an encounter in Switzerland with Czar Alexander II.  There  he converted for the third time, this time to Russian Orthodoxy. He then enrolled in the Russian army and, in the context of the Russian-Turkish war of 1877–78, he took part in the battle of Kars. In the early 1880s Millingen was again in western Europe, often in Italy, but also in the Balkans, and again in Paris: he struggled constantly with the difficulties of both his material situation and complicated familial issues. He also continued to write as a political pamphleteer, and the Jewish question now began increasingly to play a role in his writings. Millingen actually appeared to have become somewhat 5  Most of this biographical information is based on De  Michelis, ‘Un professionista dell’antisemitismo ottocentesco: Osman Bey’, 51–62; Id., The Non-Existent Manuscript, 154–6. I have integrated this with details found in Millingen, La Turquie sous le regne d’Abdul Aziz, and in Osman Bey, Les Anglais en Orient. See also Schick, Introduction to Melek Hanim, Thirty Years in the Harem, v-xl (this is the supposed autobiography of Osman Bey’s mother, originally published in London: Chapman and Hall, 1872). 6  Millingen, “On the Koords,” 175–81; Id., “On the Negro Slaves in Turkey,” lxxxv–xcvi; “The Circassian Slaves and the Sultan’s Harem,” cix–cxx.

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obsessed by an antisemitic paranoia: in 1886, in Geneva, he published a conspirationist booklet by the title Révélations sur l’assassinat d’Alexandre II.7 In the pamphlet, he sought to highlight the decisive role of a Jewish Nihilist conspiracy—which Millingen posited was centered around the Alliance Israélite Universelle—in the recent killing of the czar. The following year, La conquête was republished in Paris, and bore an inscription to the rising star of antisemitism Edouard Drumont. At the turn of the century, Millingen finally recounted his long fight against the Jews and his related adventures around Europe in the short pamphlet Dreyfus, martyr Juif; Osman-bey, martyr des Juifs. This appeared in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in 1900, just a few years before the author’s death in Nice, France. Perhaps strikingly, before he became notorious as an antisemite, Osman Bey had been, in the second half of the 1860s, a liberal: actually, a militant liberal. In 1867, in London, he wrote for the newspaper Le Mukhbir, which supported the fight of the movement Young Ottomans for freedom of thought and constitutional rights in the Ottoman Empire.8 Around that time Frederick Millingen also published, possibly from Paris, in the American newspaper New York Herald, which in the 1850s had employed no less a figure then Karl Marx as a European correspondent.9 In 1865, while living in the United States (to where he had returned, even if unsuccessfully, to fight in the Civil war on the side of the Union army), he wrote his first book La Turquie sous le règne d’Abdul-Aziz, which was published in Paris in 1868.10 This was a liberal critique, based on autobiographical episodes, of the contemporary Ottoman government and institutions, and praised freedom of press, the separation of powers and religious toleration. According to a contemporary review, the author of La Turquie was “performing a duty of humanity and progress, by the exposure of a government which he considers a cause of misery to its subjects and unworthy of protection by more enlightened nations.”11 Finally, in his reminiscences

7  This was first serialized in 1883 in the Roman newspaper La Gazzetta d’Italia in 1883 (it was originally meant to appear also in book form with the well-known Italian publisher Sommaruga), see De Michelis, The Non-Existent Manuscript, 400. 8  Osman Bey, Les Anglais en Orient, 362. See Johnson, A Revolutionary Young Ottoman. 9  Ibid., 404. 10  Ibid., 343. 11  See ‘La Turquie’, The Spectator, 15 August 1868, 967 (I have identified this through www.gallica.bnf.fr).

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of this period, Osman Bey also claimed to have fought as a volunteer for the liberal cause in the war for Crete, in April 1869.12 Was therefore Osman Bey’s antisemitism the result of the many conversions which punctuated his life: more specifically, in this instance, a political conversion from liberalism to illiberalism? On the contrary, as we will see, Millingen’s career—or better yet, his views—as a liberal and as an anti-Semite actually did not necessarily stand in opposition to each other. In fact, at least in their intellectual origins, these views and ideas were partly intertwined.

Founding Modern Conspirationism: La conquête du monde par les Juifs In 1873, in the opening pages of La conquête, Osman Bey took a historical and philosophical approach to the Jewish question, defining the Jews as a greedy and rapacious “race,” which always aspired to conquer neighbouring peoples and the societies in which they lived. Throughout history the Jews appeared to have been led by what Osman Bey called the “principle of material interest”: this was an aspiration to gain, enrichment, wealth. Osman Bey actually saw their aspiration to conquest and what he called the Jews’ “material interest” as the true reason for the their survival and as their driving force throughout history. He thus criticized and overcame the Christian theological theory—which he called a “Christian prejudice”13—about the Jewish responsibility for the killing of Christ, which had condemned Jews to wander for eternity. An outstanding aspect of Osman Bey’s approach to the Jewish question seems, indeed, that it was secular, explicitly removing the Christian roots so relevant to antisemitic ideology still common in this period. Osman Bey’s multiple conversions do not seem to have had a direct influence on his shift away from a religious justification for his outlook.14 Indeed—by contrast—they seem only to have increased his skepticism toward the religious element. After his childhood conversion to Catholicism, his subsequent embrace of Islam  Osman Bey, Les Anglais en Orient, 366.  Osman Bey, La conquête, 23–4. 14  Still, it is true that Osman Bey’s critique of “Christian prejudice” might also have originated from a Muslim, i.e., non Christian perspective. However in his writings on Islam he does not seem to embrace Islamic theology and faith, but mostly to be exercising an anthropological observation of Islam from a scholarly, non-religious perspective. 12 13

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and especially of Christian orthodoxy seem likely to have been instrumental in  the decision to enlist in the Turkish and in the Russian armies. Osman Bey brought therefore a secular, even materialist, approach to the Jewish question, at a time in which not only Christian—Catholic and Protestant—antisemitism was making a return, but antisemitic activists and ideologues in France and Germany displayed the re-emergence or persistence of religious prejudices, intertwined with their new secular anti-­ Jewish arguments and accusations. As mentioned, Osman Bey took a historical—and, as we will see, ethnological—approach, marked by a materialist sensitivity, to the factors that allowed the presence of the Jews within European societies, and in explaining the consequences of this presence. It was, Osman Bey wrote, “the great religious and political revolutions, that have shaken all Christendom,” which “enabled [the Jews] to take a decided forward step in their work of conquest, and to obtain the hegemony in finances, in the State, and in society.” To explain this Jewish penetration into the contemporary world, Osman Bey also pointed to “the dissemination of cosmopolitan ideas, the growth of greater equality in the morals and usages of the European nations, the multiplication of all the means of intercommunication and the increase in international relations.”15 Were it not for the conquering role of the Jews and their supposed hegemony, this story could read as a rather balanced historical representation of the rise of liberal democracies in Europe, spurred on originally by religious revolutions, beginning with the Reformation. These were followed by the political revolutions of 1789 and 1848 and, finally, by the rise of societies connected by cosmopolitan ideas and the multiplication of communications, and shaped by equality in customs and habits. This was, in fact, the general context and process of what we now call Jewish emancipation and integration within European societies and their liberal public spheres. In Osman Bey’s pages this historical sketch was followed by a treatment of the Jewish presence in various nations at the heads of diplomacy, journalism, banking and finance. Here Osman Bey denounced the leading role of the Rothschild family and a phantomatic international activity of the recently born Alliance Israélite  Universelle, which had been founded in 1860 (Osman Bey called it here ‘Société israélite universelle’ and dated it back to ca. 1840). It is especially in these pages where we begin to find an imaginary representation and monocausal explanation for the functioning  Osman Bey, La conquête, 38.

15

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of European liberal societies, beginning from such episodes as a supposed meeting of Jewish leaders in Cracow in 1840. This was a possible inventive reference to official meetings of Jewish institutions in France and Britain, in order to coordinate reactions to the Damascus affair (the case of blood libel which had mobilized the Jewish public opinion in Europe, and which had actually been one of the episodes that laid the basis for the future birth of the Alliance, twenty years later).16 However a more recent Jewish mobilization which was likely to have caught Millingen’s attention was the international effort, led among others by Adolphe Crémieux and Moses Montefiore and supported by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, in defence of the Jews of Romania, and which began precisely in the early 1870s.17 But the situation which might have triggered the drafting of La conquête, with its fantastical enunciation of the Jewish role therein, was the so called “panic of 1872”: the crash in May 1872 of the Viennese stock exchange and the ensuing crisis, which triggered a period of financial and economic “great depression” that involved most of Europe, including Britain and the Ottoman empire. At the beginning of this crisis many had implicated Jewish capitalists and finance.18 Be as it may, Osman Bey’s passing reference to the Cracow meeting would have a lasting influence as one of the seeds which blossomed, in turn, into the fantasy of the Jewish meetings later infamously evoked in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” In his pamphlet, Osman Bey looked at European events in the 1860s and identified a supposed, growing Jewish domination. He referred repeatedly to Britain and Disraeli as head of the opposition in parliament; to France, with Adolphe Crémieux again leading its government in 1870–71 (as it had already been the case back in 1848). He looked at Prussia, with the liberal leader Eduard Lasker (1829–84) in its parliament, and its 1848 Prime minister Adolf Heinrich von Arnim (1803–1868), whom the same Disraeli had portrayed in his novel Coningsby as “a Prussian Jew.” La conquête also referred to the United States, where August Belmont (1813–90), a financier who represented the interests of  Frankel, The Damascus Affair.  See most recently Wilke, “Competitive Advocacy,” 131–55. 18  Goo, “Depression and Capital Formation,” 511–34; Pamuk, “The Ottoman Empire in the ‘Great Depression’ of 1873–1896,” 107–18 The historiography on antisemitism has long drawn attention to this episode, although in relation to the publication of Wilhelm Marr’s Victory of Judaism, which actually appeared only in 1878 (it never mentions Osman Bey’s pamphlet), see Katz, “The Preparatory Stages of the Modern Antisemitic Movement (1873–1879),” in Almog, ed., Antisemitism through the Ages, 279–90. 16 17

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the Rothschild in America, headed the Democratic Party in the 1860s. Actual Jews, Jews by origin, or supposed Jews, these public figures often displayed the troublesome features of being, in turn, revolutionary or authoritarian, imperialist or republican, even communist. In Osman Bey’s view, they emerged in these various guises, which changed according to the changing political contexts, and were triggered by Jewish interests, which they exclusively served. These supposedly ambiguous characters, the secret plots they led, now defined the suspicious and protean nature of the Jewish presence in Europe and beyond, in ways which would influentially characterize the following antisemitic conspirationism. In the pages of Osman Bey anti-Jewish conspirationism was thus being definitively removed from its ancient Christian roots;19 it was being secularized,20 and it would later be transmitted to a new age.21 From the beginning of the following century, this era was marked, in ever-lasting ways, by the forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and its bloody legacy, which La conquête du monde par les Juifs would contribute to inspire.

The Cultural and Intellectual Sources of Osman Bey’s La Conquête But where did Osman Bey’s antisemitism come from? If we look for the sources of La conquête du monde par le Juifs, it does not seem to have any immediate predecessors within canonical antisemitic literature of the time. This holds true unless we suppose that, for the role attributed to the Rothschilds and to Jewish “rapacity” in the realm of finance, Osman Bey had read or certainly knew about one of the founding texts of the phenomenon of so-called economic antisemitism, which developed especially in France: Alphonse Toussenel’s Les Juifs rois de l’époque (1845).22 We do find some terminological affinities between the two texts: for example in  On which see, for example, Rubin, Gentile Tales.  For aspects of this transformation see Ascheim, “‘The Jew Within’: the Myth of ‘Judaization’ in Germany”, in Reinharz and Schatzberg, eds., The Jewish Response to German Culture, 212–41. 21  In the nineteenth century, the most infamous conspirationist episode before the Dreyfus affair which started in 1896, was the Damascus affair, indeed an ispiring moment for Osman Bey (on which see Frankel, The Damascus Affair). 22  Toussenel, Les Juifs rois de l’époque. See Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism in NineteenthCentury France; Battini, Socialism of Fools, chapter 1. 19 20

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the common denunciation of the Jewish “domination universelle”; in the attack on the Jews’—in Osman Bey’s words—“puissance financiére” (but there is no mention of Toussenel’s “foedalité financiére”; and the depiction of society’s consequent subjugation to “Mercure”, the god of commerce). Finally, we find the condemnation by both Toussenel and Osman Bey of the “puissance juive.”23 However, an assumption of Osman Bey’s direct dependence on Toussenel is not strictly necessary, as reference to the Rothschild as a symbol of capitalism, and the vocabulary connected to the denunciation of the Jewish presence which characterized economic antisemitism, had been widespread since the mid-nineteenth century in the polemic surrounding capitalist and financial economy. Invoking the role of the Jewish family of magnates was actually a component of a sort of “Rothschild effect,”24 which featured frequently in antisemitic attacks both in France and on the British scene.25 In point of fact, one of the novelties of the text, Osman Bey’s racial approach to the Jewish question—in the pamphlet he characterized the Jews as a “people” and a “race”—figured in a similar manner, in the years immediately preceding the drafting of La conquête, also in his anthropological articles devoted to the Kurds. This was a time when Frederick Millingen perhaps was trying to start a new career in Britain, or at least fashioned himself, as a scholar and social scientist avant-la-lettre. The articles in question appear to have been offshoots of Millingen’s volume Wildlife among the Koords, published in London in 1870 and inscribed to Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, President of the Royal Geographical Society. Millingen’s articles featured in the proceedings of the Anthropological Society of London. This was an institution founded in 1863 and dissolved already in 1870, which combined through the work of little known scholars  influenced by the evolutionist theories of Robert Knox, the author of The Races of Man (2nd edition 1862),26 an aggressive racial approach with political and social issues of the day.27 This was 23  Cfr., respectively, Toussenel, Les Juifs rois de l’époque, 90, and La conquête, 14; Toussenel, Les Juifs rois de l’époque, 103 and La conquête, 43; Toussenel, Les Juifs rois de l’époque, 191, and La conquête, 43. 24  Savy, Les Juifs des Romantiques, 69–80, which explores the French literary origins of the Rothschild myth in Chateaubriand, Vigny, Stendhal and others. See also: Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, chap. 5 ‘Rothschildian Greed: This New Variety of Despotism’, 128–54. 25  Davis, “Disraeli, the Rothschilds, and Anti-Semitism,” 9–19. 26  Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science, esp. 41–5. 27  Rainger, “Race, Politics, and Science,” 51–70.

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probably a milieu where Osman Bey found himself especially at ease. The volume on the Kurds was the result of Millingen’s sojourn and observations during his service in the Ottoman army in “Asiatic Turkey” (mostly Armenia), and of subsequent research he had conducted in London at the British Library.28 In one of the chapters, Jews were treated—together with “Armenians, Nestorians, Yezids”—as a “persuasion” and a “race,” and their similarities with Muslims were especially noticed. Millingen underlined in particular the “affinity existing between the law of Moses and that of Mohammed,” especially in relation to matrimonial habits, including polygamy.29 In La conquête, three years later, this was reinforced by describing the origin of the Jews, in the times of Abraham, as an “Arab tribe”: Abraham himself, originally “Ibrahim Allehisalam,” was introduced as an “Arab patriarch” living in Arabia, who founded the Ka’bah in Mecca.30 This theory by Millingen possibly still derived from his Islamic allegiance, or at least it was a reference to the story of Abraham as told in the Quran.31 In the same year, 1870, Millingen published an article which was a sort of resume of his book. Here the Kurds were emphatically represented as a race (an “Aryan race”) and some of their characteristics appeared to be similar to those attributed to the Jews in La conquête: both Kurds and Jews were rapacious, in constant strife with the enemy, and regularly carried out surprise attacks and looting. In a following article, Millingen dwelled upon the “invasions” and “conquests” of “Mussulmanism,” and he interpreted the role of Islam in the slave market and trade in light of the law of “supply and demand.” Finally, in a third essay, Millingen studied the “Negro slaves in Turkey” and the “negro race,” which he saw as both “wild and ferocious” and as a threat to the “purity of the Arabian blood,” in equal measure. Here, too, the market was ruled by the “causes of supply and demand,” men were “inflamed by the rage of profit,” and “profit” and “pecuniary advantages” characterized the “influence of the market.” More 28  Osman Bey was sent to Kurdistan during his military service in 1862, see Millingen, La Turquie sous le règne d’Abdul Aziz, 23. For his research at the British Library in 1869, see Osman Bey, Les Anglais en Orient, 372. 29  Millingen, Wild Life Among the Koords, 268–9. 30  Osman Bey, La conquête, 4. 31  Later Osman Bey will insist, with crude antisemitic tones, on the contrast between “Judaism” and “Islamism”, see Osman Bey, Il genio dell’islamismo. Some passing stereotypical references to Jews, also as opposed to Muslims, are in a previous “anthropological” work: Osman Bey, Les Imams et les derviches, 115–17; 227–8; 250–2.

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generally, “Mussulmanism” was “based on the principle of perpetual war, Djehad [sic].”32 One of the central factors or agents of Millingen’s theories was thus the “conquering race,” which featured so prominently in La conquête—starting from the pamphlet’s title—and was incarnated there by the Jews. This notion could have originated from French liberal historiography of the Restoration period: in particular Augustin Thierry’s Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands (1825) and Lettres sur l’histoire de France (1827). We do not know if Frederick Millingen/Osman Bey, had read Thierry directly, but we do know that he knew and had probably read other major nineteenth-century French historians (incidentally, Thierry’s volumes were reprinted in Paris also in 1866–67, at the time when Osman Bey was in the French capital).33 Certainly “race” and “conquest” play a central role in Thierry’s work and in some of his successors and followers, in ways which are similar to what we find in La conquête.34 More likely, however, the mediators of Thierry’s ideas had been for Osman Bey the novels of Walter Scott or, perhaps even more so, those by Benjamin Disraeli, especially his 1840s novels, Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred, in which the racial question—and the Jewish question—and the idea of “conquest” emerge. Disraeli, after all, features as one of the negative heroes of La conquête, and in Trancred the future English prime minister also expressed through his protagonist the theory espoused by Osman Bey in the opening of his pamphlet that the Jews were “an Arabian tribe.”35 Later, in 1886, Edouard Drumont would famously open his La France juive with a statement regarding Jews inspired by another influential French historian, who had used a similar notion of “conquest,” Hippolyte Taine. “Taine wrote the Jacobin conquest. I want to write the Jewish conquest,” Drumont

 For the details of these articles see above, footnote 6.  In Bey, Révélations sur l’assassinat de Alexandre II, 47, the author cites the historians of the French revolution Lamartine, Michelet, Thiers. 34  See Seliger, “Race-Thinking During the Restoration,” 273–82; Id., “The Idea of Conquest and Race,” 544–67. 35  A recent reassessement of the historiography on Disraeli political novels and the racial theories that run through them is found in Cesarani, Disraeli, part II (see p. 108 for the quote from Tancred; and compare La conquête, 4: “Les Juifs n’étaient jadis qu’une tribu Arabe”). For Disraeli’s relationship with, and admiration for, the work of Thierry, and for the racial theories he found in his own contemporary English context, including the activity of the Anthropological Society of London, see Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 174–233. 32 33

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announced.36 The notion of racial and national conquest emerged even more clearly in Osman Bey’s pamphlet from a few years later, Luttes sur les Rhin et sur le Danube entre Latins, Germains et Slaves.37 Indeed, Osman Bey’s ideas about race seem to fit well with thinking about race in mid-­ Nineteenth-­century Britain, including the display of French influences: especially Walter Scott’s and Benjamin Disraeli’s novels, which had also been affected by Thierry’s work. Perhaps Osman Bey was mostly a reader and admirer of Scott and Disraeli, and their racial ideas, which were also antisemitic in the case of Scott, and highly ambivalent toward Jews in that of Disraeli.38 Another unexpected parallel with Osman Bey’s thoughts about “conquest”—also in relation to “interest”—can be found in one of the founding text of European liberalism: Benjamin Constant’s essay De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation dans leur rapports avec la civilisation européenne (1814), a chapter of which bears the title: “D’une race militaire n’agissant que par intêret.”39 This phrase, by one of the founders of liberalism,40 recalls Osman Bey’s Jewish “race,” one which acted on the basis of the “principle of interest.” Incidentally, Constant’s essay also twice contains the expression “la conquête du monde,”  since De  l’esprit is  a fierce anti-­ Napoleonic critique.41 As it would later be the case with the anarchist Maurice Joly’s anti-Napoleon-III treatise Dialogue aux Enfer entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (1864), which became a defining source for the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a progressive or—in the case of Constant—liberal critique of the contemporary government and dictatorial power was turned into an antisemitic conspirationist pamphlet.42 36  Drumont, La France juive. Essai d’histoire contemporaine, V.  On Drumont see Kauffmann, Edouard Drumont. 37  Paris: Dentu, 1879. 38  Horsman, “Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism,” 387–410, which also refers to the influence and role of Thierry, 393–5. 39  Constant, De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation dans leurs rapports avec la civilisation européenne, 14–18; for ‘la conquête du monde’, 28 (a reference to ‘conquêrir le monde’ is on 198). 40  For the place of Constant’s essay in the classic liberal critiques--and endorsements--of empire, see Pitts, A Turn to Empire, 173–9. 41  For the complex nature of this text see, however, Holmes, “Liberal Uses of Bourbon Legitimism,” 229–48. 42  Both La conquête and the later “Protocols,” therefore, had anti-Napoleonic critiques as one of their indirect models (respectively anti-Napoleon Bonaparte, and anti-Louis Napoleon III), although  the “Protocols” were  much closer  formally to their textual source, i.e.

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We have come, then, to Osman Bey’s theory of the “principle of material interest”: a driving force in his interpretation of the role of Jews in history and current events. This theory could derive from Osman Bey’s interest in political economy. Here we find similarities with the role that “interest” plays among the French eighteenth-century materialists like D’Holbach and Helvétius; but, more in particular, we must recall (once again) Adam Smith’s theory of “self-interest”: as mentioned, Osman Bey also seems to refer, directly or indirectly, to Smith’s theories elsewhere. In this context it is interesting to notice how Smith’s theory of the “invisible hand” has been considered a metaphor which has inspired modern conspiratorial thinking, an outstanding characteristic of La conquête: “The invisible hand”, a modern critic has noticed, "is also a metaphor that can be read conspiratorially … [It] means the intrusion of a supernatural power into worldly matters. In a world shaped by secular tendencies, this occurrence is transformed in the conjecture that there must be a worldly but hidden force intervening in everyday life.”43 However, we should also keep in mind that the expression “invisible hand” appears only twice in the work of Adam Smith, despite being largely associated with his name. In fact a remote origin of the phrase in Millingen’s imagination may possibly attribute it to a more ancient author who had used that expression: the French historian Charles Rollin (1661–1741),44 whom Osman Bey recalled, in an autobiographical text, he had read in his childhood.45 Be it as it may, in his 1886 Révélations sur l’assassinat, through a further, decided conspirationist twist now marked by his paranoid outlook, Osman Bey would refer twice to the Jews as the “main invisible” (invisible hand) behind the killing of czar Alexander II.46 Finally, the specific formula “material interest”—the guiding force leading the Jewish race, according to the opening pages of La conquête—is to be found in the pages of the Utilitarians, from Jeremy Bentham to, especially, John Stuart Mill. Some of Mill’s writings from 1838–40 refer

to Maurice Joly’s attack on Napoleon III. For the latter see Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 80; 82–3; and Ginzburg, “Representing the Enemy,” 151–64. 43  Tanner, “The Conspiracy of the Invisible Hand,” 51–64. 44  Harrison, “Adam Smith and the History of the Invisible Hand,” 42. For Rollin’s influence, despite its American focus, see Gribbin, “Rollin’s Histories and American Republicanism,” 611–22. 45  Millingen, Sin and Its Victims, 251. 46  Osman Bey, Révélations sur l’assassinat, 47 and 58.

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explicitly to “material interest,”47 and utilitarianism, with its materialist approach, was mainstream and widely popular in British political culture of the second half of the nineteenth century.48 Indeed, Osman Bey seems to display in La conquête a radical or extremely emphatic utilitarian interpretation of the Jewish presence especially in modern societies. This leads him to a monocausal explanation— typical of conspirationism—of world events centered on “interest,” and specifically on Jewish interest. Furthermore the utilitarian factor represented by “material interest” produces an “antagonism” of social forces, which seems to anticipate the forces and conflicts identified by the then rising social-Darwinist interpretations.49 Osman Bey could also be seen as anticipating here the relation between a critique of the utilitarian tendencies of modern capitalist society and antisemitism, which would characterize some of the beginnings of classic sociology a few decades later.50 As with the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” whose sources lay mostly as mentioned in Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers, the intellectual building blocks or sources of inspiration for Osman Bey’s La conquête thus lay mostly outside the tradition of antisemitism. They have in fact to do with the liberal historiography on the origins of nations—or more likely with novels inspired by that historiography—and especially with socio-economic, and specifically utilitarian, readings of the workings of capitalist and liberal societies, which in themselves bore no reference to the Jewish question. The remote (and not-so-remote) ideological roots of the pamphlet’s theories can thus be identified in liberal historiography, utilitarianism, and contemporary social sciences. One of the founding texts of modern 47  See essays by John Stuart Mill, ‘Jeremy Bentham’ (1838) and ‘Coleridge’ (1840), which I have read at: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/mill-the-collected-works-of-john-stuartmill-volume-x-essays-on-ethics-religion-and-society  (accessed November 2020). Raymond Williams defined these essays ‘among the most remarkable documents of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century’, in his Culture and Society, 53. 48  See, still, Albee, A History of English Utilitarianism. For the context: Collini, Winch, Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics. 49  These combined the theories of the utilitarian Herbert Spencer with those of Charles Darwin. Darwin’s Descent of Man was published two years before La conquête in 1871; while Spencer’s Principles of Biology, in which Spencer first used the formula ‘survival of the fittest’, had appeared in 1864. See Hawkins, Social Darwinism. 50  Stoetzler, “Sociology’s Case for a Well-Tempered Modernity,” 66–89. Stoetzler insists that this is based on a caricature version of utilitarianism (ibid., 17 and 71).

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conspirationist antisemitism seems therefore intertwined with liberal theories and ideas, reinterpreted in a specific historical context by a creative— and paranoid—imagination.51

Osman Bey and the Jews: A Liberal Antisemitism? So what was Osman Bey doing with La conquête, in light of these sources? He was offering a reading and interpretation, informed by liberal theories and ideas, of the role of Jews within liberal societies. This interpretation was secular: that is, it superseded theological explanations or implications of the Jewish historical and contemporary presence and role, which had been typical of previous anti-Judaism and were still part of especially modern Catholic antisemitism. La conquête represented in fact, in many ways, a new phase in the history of antisemitism—one specifically influenced by liberalism—also because Osman Bey constructed his critique of, and attack on, the Jews and their supposed influence and power, not on theological arguments, but on political and economic theories, and on information derived from the circulation of the news. These he had not received, as in the centuries-old anti-Jewish tradition, from a higher authority like the Church; but he had freely selected them from the liberal public sphere. This allowed the national and international circulation of economic ideas, political and social critiques, and contemporary information, which was also spread by increasing international relations and the diffusion of communications through various media. Through Osman Bey’s example, one may thus suggest that modern antisemitism also derived from the consolidation and effervescence of the new liberal public sphere, in the context of the nineteenth-century developments of what has been called “print capitalism.”52 Furthermore, because of his cosmopolitan upbringing and life experiences, Osman Bey offered a transnational—and, actually, supranational— view of the Jews’ role, which went beyond any particular national or nationalist vision, which is usually associated with the rise of modern political antisemitism from around this time, especially in France and in the German-speaking world. By contrast, although in Wilhelm Marr’s 51   On paranoia and conspiracy theory: Graumann and Moscovici, eds., Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy. 52  Anderson, Imagined Communities; Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, 289–339.

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notorious Victory of Judaism over Germanism, published a few years later (1879), the German journalist, who is considered to have coined the term “antisemitism” itself, equally described the Jewish question as a “political-­ social” one, his main concern was the “Judaization” of Germany, the national fatherland. Jews were characterized by Marr as a “race” and as a “tribe,”53 and the author insisted that he was not motivated by “religious-” or “race-hate,” but rather by the concern for his own “Volk”:54 Marr thus proposed a sort of racialized nationalism. Osman Bey and Marr similarly displayed a mostly non-religious perspective: in the case of Marr this was developed during his youth from the reading of Feuerbach and Otto Bauer.55 Both authors also openly criticized the Christian anti-Jewish hostility of the past centuries. In their two influential works there was a common denunciation of the Jewish “conquest” of the West, and also Marr insisted on the growing Jewish ‘world power’ (which he saw as parallel to that of “Ultramontanism,” i.e., Roman Catholicism) and on Jewish dominance in neighboring nations by real or supposed Jews (Marr also pointed to his contemporaries Crémieux and Gambetta in France; to Disraeli in England; and to the “Association Israélite”). But contrary to Osman Bey’s global vision and paranoid denunciation, Marr’s was mostly a defense of the fatherland, of the German people, and he showed a special preoccupation with the Jewish control of the press, particularly relevant to him as a—not especially fortunate—journalist.56 Osman Bey’s liberal antisemitism may also be compared with the stream of antisemitism labelled as “liberal,” which emerged in Germany a few years after the publication of La conquête. This flurry of texts—known as the “anti-Jewish debate” of the 1880s—was famously initiated by the conservative historian Heinirch von Treitschke, with his article ‘Our Prospects’ published in the Preussische Jahrbücher, which he edited. Treitschke notoriously criticized Jewish materialism and the transformation of (especially Eastern European) Jews into the “rulers of our stock markets,” and he 53  These and the previous terms appear in Marr, The Victory of Judaism over Germanism, 32: see http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Marr-Text-English.pdf  (accessed November 2020). But see the original edition, Id., Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum, 45, which refers to Verjudung (Judaization) and Volkstamm (tribe). 54  Cf. Marr’s English translation, 33, and the original edition, 48. 55  Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr, 17. 56  Whether Marr had direct knowledge of Osman Bey’s La conquête is possible from the Wiesbaden edition or also thanks to his frequent travels to, relations with, and sojourns in Switzerland, where both La conquête and Victory over Judaism were originally published. But this knowledge cannot be clearly established from a comparison between the two texts.

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accused Jews of non-productive usury. The historian proposed at the same time a progressive view of society in accordance with his liberal vision, “motivated by ideas of social cohesion and homogeneity and about socio-­ economic ethics and patterns of behavior” adequate to the development of modern capitalism, which he saw as a “community of producers.”57 As with Osman Bey, in the case of Treitschke and other German contemporaries—for example the popular novelist Gustav Freytag—their liberal antisemitism was secular and also based on racial and racist conceptions.58 Still, Frederick Millingen, aka Osman Bey, laid most of the emphasis of La conquête on a monocausal explanation of the functioning of liberal societies, imagining and denouncing a fundamental role of the Jews at the head or in the background of European nations, led by what he labelled “material interest.” Through his pages and based on the sources of his vision Osman Bey emerges as a liberal, who proposed a radical utilitarian and materialist representation of liberalism, dominated by the driving force of Jewish “interest.” This resulted in a conspiracy theory, the remote origins of which lay in a popular reading and use of Adam Smith’s (or perhaps Charles Rollin’s) “invisible hand.” A study of Osman Bey’s influential pamphlet La conquête and of its origins, shows therefore that antisemitism did not necessarily go against liberalism and liberal ideas, but that there could be an antisemitism within liberalism—a liberal antisemitism—which was secular, supranational (and not necessarily nationalist), and materialist in its explanations. This interpretation of antisemitism became one of the streams feeding into the conspirationist vision produced and reproduced a few decades later in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. In 1891 France, in a supplement to La Semaine Religieuse, a periodical of the Cambrai diocese, under the title Les Juifs, an article denounced once again the growing presence and influence of Jews in French society on the occasion of the centenary of their emancipation.59 The Jews’ financial power and wealth were immense, as well as their presence in the 57  I quote the analysis of Stoetzler and Achinger, “German modernity, Barbarous Slavs, and Profit-seeking Jews,” 755 (744, for Trietschke’s quote, mentioned above, on Jews as “rulers of stockmarkets”). 58  Ibid., 754–5. See more broadly, Stoetzler, The State, the Nation, the Jews, part 1 “The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute.” 59  ‘Les Juifs’, Le Dmanche, 3, 41, 10 October 1891, supplement to La Semaine Religieuse of the diochesis of Cambray, 641–643 (I have identified this source, and the following volume by de Ligneau, through www.gallica.bnf.fr)

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administration of the French State; and the Jewish control of the press was constantly expanding. The article quoted especially two “speeches” by so-­ called “rabbis,” which described the plans of a Jewish conquest: one from a meeting in Cracow in 1840, taken precisely from Osman Bey’s La conquête du monde par les Juifs; the second from a Report of historical events of the last ten years by a certain John Readctiff (recte: Readclif or Retcliffe).60 In this article from La Semaine religieuse we find one of the first instances in which Osman Bey’s and John Retcliffe’s texts were associated, producing what is virtually a French incunabulum of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” by weaving together two of its major sources. In the same year, the article from La Semaine Religieuse was quoted in the volume Juifs et Antisémites en Europe by Jean de Ligneau (the pseudonym of François Bournand, a close associate of Edouard Drumont), a sort of documentary collection on Jews in contemporary European antisemitic literature.61 Through this volume, the rabbis’ speeches probably began the journey which would lead them to contribute to the subtext of the “Protocols.” The “Protocols” themselves—one of the founding texts of the most virulent twentieth-century antisemitism—though belonging to and emanating from different cultural and political contexts (the contours of which continue to be explored, including their Russian background), found therefore some of their sources in the evolution of certain streams of liberal ideas, and specifically in a radical—and delirious—utilitarian and materialist interpretation of the functioning of liberal societies proposed thirty years earlier in Osman Bey’s La conquête du monde par les Juifs.62

60  Readctiff (sic), Compte rendu des événements politico-historiques survenus dans les dix dernières années, n.d. (1881). Sir John Retcliffe was the pen name for Herman Goedsche, the author of the novel Biarritz (1868), which contained the imaginary speech of a rabbi, later spread also as the above mentioned “compte rendu” and one of the sources of the “Protocols”: see Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 38–45, also for the afterlife and influence of the rabbi’s speech; and De Michelis, The Non-Existent Manuscript, ad indicem. 61  Jean de Ligneau (pseud. of François Bournand), Juifs et Antisémites en Europe (Paris: Tolra, s.d. [1891]). Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 42, cites the inclusion of Retcliffe’s speech (but no reference to Osman Bey) in Bournand’s earlier Les Juifs et nos contemporains, which I was unable to consult. 62  La conquête itself was also ominously resurrected in the context of fascist antisemitism, with new Italian editions following the 1938 racial laws and during the Second world war, at the end of Mussolini’s republic of Salò: Osman Bey, Gli ebrei alla conquista del mondo.

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Bibliography Albee, Ernest. 1902. A History of English Utilitarianism. London: Swann Sonnenschein. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London/New York: Verso. Ascheim, Steven A. 1985. ‘’The Jew Within’: the Myth of ‘Judaization’ in Germany. In The Jewish Response to German Culture. From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg, 212–241. Hanover/London: University Press of New England. Battini, Michele. 2016. Socialism of Fools. Socialism and Modern Anti-Semitism. Trans. Noor Mazhar and Isabella Vergnano. New  York: Columbia University Press. Bournand, François. 1899. Les Juifs et nos contemporains. L’antisémitisme et la question juive. Paris: Pierret, n.d. Cesarani, David. 2016. Disraeli: The Novel Politician. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Cohn, Norman. 1996. Warrant for Genocide. The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. London: Serif. Collini, Stefan, Donald Winch, and John Burrow. 1983. That Noble Science of Politics. A Study in Nineteenth-century Intellectual History. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Constant, Benjamin. 1814. De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation dans leurs rapports avec la civilisation européenne. Paris: Le Normant – H. Nicolle. Davis, R.W. 1996. Disraeli, the Rothschilds, and Anti-Semitism. Jewish History 10 (2, Fall): 9–19. de Ligneau, Jean (pseud. of François Bournand). 1891. Juifs et Antisémites en Europe. Paris: Tolra, n.d. De Michelis, Cesare G. 1997. Un professionista dell’antisemitismo ottocentesco: Osman Bey. La rassegna mensile di Israel 63 (2): 51–62. ———. 2004. The Non-Existent Manuscript. A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion. Trans. Richard Newhouse. Lincoln/London: The University of Nebraska Press. Eley, Geoff. 1992. Nations, Publics and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century. In Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, 289–339. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Frankel, Jonathan. 1997. The Damascus Affair. “Ritual Murder”, Politics and the Jews in 1840. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Ginzburg, Carlo. 2012. Representing the Enemy: On the French Pre-History of the Protocols. In Carlo Ginzburg. Threads and Traces. True, False, Fictive, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi, 151–164. Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press.

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Goo, Park Young. 1997. Depression and Capital Formation: The United Kingdom and Germany, 1873–96. Journal of European Economic History 26 (3): 511–534. Graumann, Carl F., and Serge Moscovici, eds. 1987. Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy. New York: Springer Verlag. Gribbin, William. October 1972. Rollin’s Histories and American Republicanism. The William and Mary Quarterly 29 (4): 611–622. Harrison, Peter. January 2011. Adam Smith and the History of the Invisible Hand. Journal of the History of Ideas 72 (1): 29–39. Hawkins, Michael. 1997. Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945. Nature as Model and Nature as Threat. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Holmes, Stephen. 1982. Liberal Uses of Bourbon Legitimism. Journal of the History of Ideas 43 (2): 229–248. Horsman, Reginald. 1976. Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain before 1850. Journal of the History of Ideas 37(3, July–September): 387–410. Johnson, Aaron S. 2012. A Revolutionary Young Ottoman: Ali Suavi (1839–1878). PhD Thesis, McGill University, Montreal. Kalman, Julie. 2010. Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Katz, Jacob. 1988. The Preparatory Stages of the Modern Antisemitic Movement (1873–1879). In Antisemitism through the Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog, 279–290. Oxford/New York: Pergamon Press. Kauffmann, Grégoire. 2008. Edouard Drumont. Paris: Perrin. “La Turquie”, The Spectator, 15 August 1868: 967. “Les Juifs”, Le Dimanche, supplement to La Semaine Religieuse of the diochesis of Cambrai, 3, 41, 10 October 1891: 641–643. Marr, Wilhelm. 1879. Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum. Vom nichtconfessionellen Standpunkt aus Betrachtet. Bern: Rudolph Costenoble. ———. 2009. The Victory of Judaism over Germanism, Considered from a Non-­ Religious Perspective. Trans. Gerhard Rohringe. See http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Marr-Text-English.pdf Mill, John Stuart. 1838. Jeremy Bentham. See: http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/ mill-the-collected-works-of-john-stuart-mill-volume-x-essays-on-ethics-religion-and-society ———. 1840. Coleridge. See: http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/ mill-the-collected-works-of-john-stuart-mill-volume-x-essays-on-ethics-religion-and-society Millingen, Frederick. 1868. La Turquie sous le règne d’Abdul Aziz. Paris: Lacroix, Verboechoven et Cie. ———. 1870a. Wild Life Among the Koords. London: Hurst and Blackett. ———. 1870b. On the Koords. The Journal of the Ethnological Society of London 2 (2): 175–181.

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———. 1870c–71. On the Negro Slaves in Turkey. The Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 8: lxxxv–xcvi. ———. 1871. Sin and Its Victims. A Tragedy in the East. Vienna: Charles Gerold’s Son. ———. 1870d–1871. The Circassian Slaves and the Sultan’s Harem. The Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 8: cix–cxx. Osman Bey (pseud. of Frederick Millingen). 1873a. La conquête du monde par les Juifs. Essai d’histoire et d’actualité. Basel: Christian Krüsi, n.d. ———. 1873b. Die Eroberung der Welt durch die Juden. Verusch nach Geschichte und Gegenwart. Basel: Christian Krüsi, n.d. ———. 1877. Les Anglais en Orient, 1830–1876. Vraie version du livre Trente ans au harem. Paris: Ernest Leroux. ———. 1878. The Conquest of the World by the Jews. An Historical and Ethnical Essay. Trans. F. W. Mathias. St. Louis: The St. Louis Book and News Company. ———. 1881. Les Imams et les derviches. Pratiques, superstitions et moeurs des Turcs. Paris: Dentu. ———. 1886. Révélations sur l’assassinat de Alexandre II. Geneva: Librarie H. Staplemohr. ———. 1890. Il genio dell’islamismo. Roma/Torino/Napoli: Roux. ———. 1900. Dreyfus, martyr Juif, Osman-bey, martyr des Juifs. Neuchâtel: Impremerie Rossier et Grisel, n.d. ———. Gli ebrei alla conquista del mondo. Bologna: Cappelli, 1939 and Venezia: Edizioni Popolari, 1945. Pamuk, Şevket. March 1984. The Ottoman Empire in the ‘Great Depression’ of 1873–1896. The Journal of Economic History 44 (1): 107–118. Pitts, Jennifer. 2005. A Turn to Empire. The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press. Ragussis, Michael. 1995. Figures of Conversion. ‘The Jewish Question’ & English National Identity. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Rainger, Ronald. Autumn 1978. Race, Politics, and Science: The Anthropological Society of London in the 1860s. Victorian Studies 22 (1): 51–70. Readctiff, John. 1881. Compte rendu des événements politico-historiques survenus dans les dix dernières années, n.p., n.d. Rubin, Miri. 1999. Gentile Tales. On the Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Savy, Nicole. 2010. Les Juifs des Romantiques. Le discours de la littérature sur les Juifs de Chateaubriand à Hugo. Paris: Belin. Schick, Irvin Cemil. 2005. Introduction to Melek Hanim, Thirty Years in the Harem. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. Seliger, Martin. 1958. Race-Thinking During the Restoration. Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (2): 273–282.

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———. 1960. The Idea of Conquest and Race-Thinking during the Restoration. The Review of Politics 22 (4): 544–567. Stepan, Nancy. 1983. The Idea of Race in Science. Great Britain, 1800–1960. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books. Stoetzler, Marcel. 2008. The State, the Nation, the Jews. Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck’s Germany. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 2014. Sociology’s Case for a Well-Tempered Modernity: Individualism, Capitalism, and the Antisemitic Challenge. In Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology, ed. Marcel Stoetzler, 66–89. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press. Stoetzler, Marcel, and Christine Achinger. 2013. German Modernity, Barbarous Slavs and Profit-seeking Jews: the Cultural Racism of Nationalist Liberals. Nations and Nationalism 19 (4): 739–760. Taguieff, Pierre-André. 2004. Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion. Faux et usages d’un faux. Paris: Berg International-Fayard. Tanner, Jakob. 2008. The Conspiracy of the Invisible Hand: Anonymous Market Mechanisms and Dark Powers. New German Critique 103 (Winter): 51–64. Toussenel, Alphonse. 1845. Les Juifs rois de l’époque. Histoire de la foedalité financière. Paris: Librarie de l’Ecole Societaire. Wilke, Carsten L. 2016. Competitive Advocacy: The Romanian Committee of Berlin and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1872–1878. Jahrbuch des Simon-­ Dubnow-­Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook XV: 131–155. Williams, Raymond. 1960. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. New  York: Anchor Books. Zimmermann, Moshe. 1986. Wilhelm Marr. The Patriarch of Antisemitism. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Jews and Other Others Ari Joskowicz

Studies of Jewish liberalism tend to follow a few recognizable paths. The first might be called the “unreconstructed” approach, which charts the emergence of enlightenment rationality and celebrates its achievements even while acknowledging that it was at times undermined by “the forces of emotion.” A related though distinct approach is elegiac: it portrays liberalism as a widely held ideological commitment that, tragically, proved unable to stop the rise of antisemitism and genocide.1 “Excavational” approaches treat Jewish liberalism as a less insidious form of liberal politics than that of the mainstream, which—according to this view—was more often tainted by integral nationalism than its Jewish counterpart. Less common is a critical approach that scrutinizes Jewish liberalism with an eye to all of its internal contradictions.2 In this respect, the history of Jewish liberalism is different from, say, the history of Jewish Orientalism: in the latter case, both those scholars who see Jews as exempt from the association between Oriental Studies and  See, for example, Elon, The Pity of It All.  An exception is Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper. The Formative Years.

1 2

A. Joskowicz (*) Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_4

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imperialism and those who see them as implicated nonetheless engage with the same critique, most commonly associated with Edward Said.3 When it comes to Jewish liberalism, however, there is no consensus that scholars need engage with the criticism of the exclusionary history of liberalism—the gendered social order it reflected, its involvement in imperial concerns, its class politics, or its reluctance to give political voice to the allegedly unenlightened masses.4 Historians have interrogated the gendered, class-based, racialized, and imperialist aspects of Jewish history in the era of emancipation, of course, but these contributions have not directly dealt  with the different histories—and legacies—of Jewish liberalism. The politics that Jewish liberals pursued in relation to those whom liberals met with suspicion or stigmatized suggests that the paradoxes of liberalism applied to Jewish liberals as well. Like their non-Jewish counterparts, Jewish liberals told themselves stories about their own enlightenment, which they contrasted with the deficiencies of other groups.5 Much as other liberals, they believed that their abstract political ideas had to be embodied in particular individuals capable of fulfilling them.6 Without a doubt, middle-class men were the most common model for the ideals envisioned by nineteenth-century liberals—themselves most often middle-­ class men—but in certain contexts ideas about who was most likely or unlikely to fulfill liberalism’s promises became even more complex. A ­critical history of Jewish liberalism engages with all these narratives, imagined embodiments, and Jewish liberals’ polemics against other Others with an eye to understanding the ambivalences that Jewish liberalism confronted from its inception. The aim of this essay is to explore what happens when we view society as a fragmented whole in which demands for political recognition often take the guise of boundary-making vis-à-vis other groups. How does our view of Jewish history change when we explore not just whom Jews wanted to be like but also whom they did not want to resemble? Liberalism may be one of the most significant political formations that such an approach can illuminate, but it is not the only one. Taking Jewish 3  See Kalmar and Penslar, eds., Orientalism and the Jews; Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy. 4  See, for example, Fitzpatrick, ed., Liberal Imperialism in Europe; Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History; Mills, “Racial Liberalism.” 5  Freeden, “Introduction,” Liberal Language. 6  Hadley, Living Liberalism, 64–5.

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liberalism as a starting point, this essay subsequently turns to post-liberal examples with an eye to offering a broader methodological reflection on the history of Jews and other Others.

Jews and Other Others: What We Know and What We Miss A particular subset of scholarship on modern Jewish history has already begun to examine the dissociative as well as the associative aspects of Jewish politics in the modern era. This includes work on Jewish life in multi-confessional, multi-ethnic states such as the Russian, Austro-­ Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, where the very concept of a “majority”—demographic or otherwise—did not always apply.7 Studies that systematically explore Jews’ relations to multiple other groups have been particularly notable in places with intense “nationalities conflicts” such as the Czech lands, for example. Here scholars have situated Jews within the competing Czech and German national movements that dominated politics in Bohemia and Moravia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Other scholars have shown that in interwar Czechoslovakia Jews often felt compelled to choose sides in a state with significant Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian populations, all of whom pursued their own nationalist goals.8 More recent work on Ottoman Jews has similarly highlighted the sometimes contradictory attempts that Jews made to align themselves with the Ottoman state, their Muslim and Christian neighbors, foreign Jews and other international interests.9 In such cases Jewish historians have taken it as a given that Jews had to make difficult choices in realms both political and social: the question was clearly not simply whether to assimilate, but also—assuming one had such aspirations—into which group(s) one sought integration. The tendency to explore Jewish relations with multiple other groups is also apparent in much of the newer literature on Jewish life in colonial settings. In places such as nineteenth-century Algeria, Jews had to contend  Rodrigue, “Difference and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire”: 81–90.  Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry; Kieval, Languages of Community; Spector, Prague Territories. King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans; Č apková, Czechs, Germans, Jews; Klein-Pejšová, Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia. On the limits of nationalism in this region, see Zahra, Kidnapped Souls; Rozenblit, “Jews, German Culture, and the Dilemma of National Identity”: 77–120. 9  Cohen, Becoming Ottomans; see also Cohen’s contribution in this volume. 7 8

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with representatives of the French state, European settlers from various Mediterranean states, as well as local Muslim populations as they attempted to make a place for themselves in a fragmented colonial society.10 Similarly complicated relations existed even before the advent of formal colonial rule in North Africa, in Morocco and Tunisia, for example.11 New work on these areas increasingly recognizes that Jews did not simply interact with— or seek to join—a single dominant culture in such contexts. Other authors have brought these insights to their studies of the metropole. Both Maud Mandel’s and Ethan Katz’s histories of Jews and Muslims in France draw heavily on the history of North African Jewry as they trace a triangular relationship between Jews, Muslims, and the French state.12 Various other historians and literary critics dealing with the nexus of decolonization, genocide, and memory have been at the forefront of attempts to insert the histories of other minorities into their accounts of Jewish history.13 Studies of Jews in North America offer another arena in which Jews’ relations to a number of different groups have gained prominence, particularly following intense debates on questions of diversity and inequality in the United States and Canada since the 1960s. The broadest of these literatures pivots around relations between Jews and African Americans, reflecting the dominance of racialized relations in US history.14 Other scholars have turned to the often subtle ways ideas and concepts drawn from the experiences of Jews have influenced the works of Latino, African American, and LGBTQ writers.15 As in the case of colonial history, the debates on multiculturalism in North America have also crossed into other fields. Working in German history, Till van Rahden has challenged traditional discussions of Jewish assimilation in Germany based on critiques developed in interdisciplinary debates on US multiculturalism.16 More than any other scholar, he has theorized how Jews operated within a

10  On the larger debates on colonialism in Jewish history, see Katz, Leff, and Mandel, eds., Colonialism and the Jews. 11  For Morocco, see, most recently, Marglin, Across Legal Lines. 12  Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France; Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood. 13  Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory; Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide. 14  On the public debate, see: Berman, ed., Blacks and Jews; Salzman and West, Struggles in the Promised Land. For scholarship on the subject, see, among others: Diner, In the Almost Promised Land. See also Laura Arnold Leibman’s and Matt Silber’s chapter in this volume. 15  Freedman, Klezmer America. 16  van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer.

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fragmented society rather than in a simple, dichotomous relationship with an imagined “mainstream.” Such studies of Jews’ relations with a range of different groups and institutions have clearly moved the field of modern Jewish Studies well beyond the older paradigms that tended to focus on Jews’ relations with an abstract (and singular) “state” or “society.” Yet, the literature on Jewish liberalism still tends to ask questions predicated on the assumption that there was a single public sphere—shaped by particular liberal paradigms— into which Jews sought entry, and in which they operated. Despite the advances in the field, in other words, scholarship on Jewish liberalism still operates with the implicit idea that something identifiable as a “Leitkultur” (literally, a “leading culture”) existed, as German nationalists have nostalgically claimed in recent years.17 A stronger focus on the history of boundary-­making can help us understand the role liberals played in inventing and defending the very idea of a societal “center.”18 This applies in particular to one of the themes that has proven pivotal to scholarship on liberalism and liberal societies: the question of whether and when Jews were willing to discuss their Jewishness in public. Over recent decades, scholars have offered ever more nuanced pictures of Jews’ self-representation in a variety of public settings, thus moving debates far beyond the notion that liberalism forced Jews to act as men (or women) on the street and Jews at home.19 Yet, even as studies have emphasized the creative ways Jews found to speak of or hint at their Jewish background in public debates, they have not always explored how liberal Jews strategically over- or underplayed their Jewishness specifically in contexts in which they spoke about other marginalized groups. The role of such boundary-making for liberal politics emerges most clearly in parliamentary speeches. Like few other institutions, parliaments embody the promises of liberalism. As the legislative branch of constitutional government, parliament is not just important for liberal political theory but also as a model of the polite, rational discourse it purportedly promotes: it is a highly regulated deliberative body with formalized rules  Pautz, “The Politics of Identity in Germany: The Leitkultur Debate”: 39–52.  Cf. Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France, who uses the terms center and periphery to describe individual Jewish intellectual positions in society. 19  The Jewish enlightener (maskil) Jehuda Leib Gordon coined the best-known version of this phrase in mid-nineteenth-century Russia. Gordon’s version is “Be a man in the street and a Jew at home” in his poem “Awake, My People!” On Gordon, see Stanislawski, For Whom Do I Toil? 17 18

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of decorum, where elected representatives (in practice, only men until the twentieth century) debate major political questions of the day. Parliament is thus arguably a locus of lived liberalism. Yet parliament also embodies the different types of social fragmentation with which liberals have historically had to contend. As the state’s highest legislative body it stands for national unity, yet its daily conflicts offer a constant manifestation of society’s disunity. This disunity, in turn, spurs both formal and informal regulation. Throughout the nineteenth century, for example, parliamentarians were eager to tell each other when they thought one of their own had expressed critiques in an “unparliamentary” way. Parliaments are thus central arenas where societies negotiate the limits of acceptable speech in a formal setting. It is for this reason that studying parliamentary debates can teach us a great deal about liberal expectations of how  Jews should present themselves in a public settings. An analysis of German and French parliamentary debates in the nineteenth century shows that although Jewish deputies were generally inclined to speak as unmarked citizens without referencing their religion they were also willing to invoke their Jewishness when doing so proved useful in particular contexts.20 This was most often the case when parliament discussed matters pertaining to Jewish “interests.” The presence of the term “coreligionists” in parliamentary minutes offers just one indication of this. Jewish deputies serving in the Prussian and in German parliaments throughout the 1870s used the term often, for example. Even when their use of the term waned in later decades, Jewish parliamentarians continued to defend both their coreligionists and Judaism because all participants agreed that standing up to insults against oneself or group was integral to defending one’s masculinity and honor.21 Whereas Jewish deputies appear to have been more at ease speaking as Jews in debates on Jews and Judaism than scholars had previously allowed, they were also more concerned about being identified as Jews in debates about other groups than most studies have recognized. Historians have ignored the latter phenomenon because they have tended to study Jewish liberalism and universalism based on Jewish liberals’ statements about those they considered unmarked, “ideal” citizens rather than through the lens of their statements about those whom liberals critiqued and derided. 20  See Joskowicz, The Modernity of Others, Chapter 6: “Representative Secularism: Jewish Members of Parliament and Religious Debate,” 197–228. 21  Ibid.

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At least in the parliaments of the German Empire and the French Third  Republic in the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, liberal Jewish deputies frequently faced the greatest resistance when they sought to speak about legislation that targeted the Catholic Church, a major topic of debate throughout the era.22 These were situations in which having a Jewish background became an obstacle for Jewish deputies seeking to portray themselves as mere citizens rather than representatives of a denominational or national group. To cite just one example we can turn to the case of the prominent German politician Eduard Lasker. One of the  leading Jewish deputies of Germany’s national liberal party in the 1870s, Lasker was generally careful to emphasize that he spoke as a patriot, not a Jew, in most matters. Yet, he had no problem—and encountered no opposition—when he supported a bill proposed by another liberal Jewish deputy, Ludwig Bamberger, to express parliament’s gratitude to the German government for pressuring Romania to halt anti-Jewish violence in the country.23 Lasker, however, met resistance during discussions of the fate of other groups. Only when he sought to speak against what he considered the threat of political Catholicism or on regulations of the legal protections given to priest’s statements from the pulpit did Lasker face accusations from his enemies that he was breaking decorum. Having spoken publicly about Catholics, Lasker was suddenly told that he had crossed the line of acceptable speech by casting judgement—as a Jew—about Catholics and matters pertaining to the Church.24 This is but one instance in which lived liberalism reached its limits for Jews who sought to assimilate—in this case, into a culture of mostly bourgeois men engaged in parliamentary politics.25 An analysis of Jewish boundary-making vis-à-vis other Others allows us to rethink old dichotomies such as minority/majority or man (and woman) on the street/Jew at home. Lived and practiced liberalism certainly made Jews think hard about where and when they could speak as German, French, or British citizens without experiencing resistance. Only once we 22  Clark and Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars; Michael B. Gross, The War against Catholicism; Manuel Borutta, Antikatholizismus. 23  Lasker, Reichstag, May 22, 1872, 473. Joskowicz, Modernity, 215–6. See also Abigail Green’s chapter in this volume. 24  See, ibid., 218–23 25  This was also the critique of right-wing nationalists in the French assemblée nationale who called out Jewish advocates of secularizing laws for speaking about Catholicism as nonCatholics. Ibid., 223–5.

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think beyond the paradigm of minority-majority relations and instead consider Jews’ relations with members of other marginalized groups do some of the sorest points for Jewish men (and, less commonly, women) operating in the public sphere in nineteenth-century Western and Central Europe becom clear: such individuals tended to be challenged most often when they spoke about other groups whom they accused  of nurturing solidarities beyond state borders. To understand what Jews sought to assimilate into, we also need to understand what they sought to distance themselves (or dissimilate) from within societies that were fighting over the acceptable ways to explain and negotiate their own fragmentation.

The Uses and Pitfalls of Discussing Jewish Power and Privilege Although studying Jews’ relations to other Others offers opportunities to rethink questions of Jewish power, it also comes with certain conceptual pitfalls. The most popular frameworks used to interrogate the notion of Jewish marginality tend to focus on Jews as simultaneous insiders and outsiders. Yet, they do so according to models that ultimately reaffirm static ideas about minorities and majorities. They are also frequently celebratory in nature, depicting Jews as familiar strangers (or simply as the “stranger,” in Simmel’s terms) whose very position predestines them for resistance and creativity.26 Thus, while the literature on Jewish intellectuals as producers of “minor literature” or as participants in hybrid processes certainly addresses the price of Jews’ marginality, it tends to emphasize its generative effects.27 The greatest emphasis on the productive aspects of Jews’ experience of exclusion comes from scholarship on the achievements of Jewish intellectuals.28 David Biale’s portrayal of Gershom Scholem and Susannah Heschel’s analysis of Abraham Geiger as creators of

26  See Biale, Galchinsky, and Heschel, eds., Insider/Outsider, and Issac Deutscher’s famous essay, “The Non-Jewish Jew,” in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, ed. Deutscher Tamara, 23–41. On the stranger, see Simmel, “Exkurs über den Fremden,” 509–12. 27  Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature; Spector, “Hybridity and the Habsburg Jews.” 28  Mendes-Flohr, “The Study of the Jewish Intellectual,” 23–53; Gay, Weimar Culture. Scholars have read Jewish self-hatred as a creative force in this context as well. See Reitter, On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred.

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counter-­histories are prominent examples of such an approach.29 When it highlights the unique perspectives Jews gained on issues of liberal nationalism due to their marginal position in society, scholarship on Jewish liberalism follows this line of argumentation.30 This celebration of Jews as productive outsiders also has its critics. Historian Steven Aschheim has argued that such portrayals of an idealized outsider form part of an “existentialist cult,” associated with a gendered (masculine) idea of the honest nonconformist.31 Aschheim’s early work on German Jews’ stereotyping of Eastern European Jews (Ostjuden) as well as other works on European Jews’ Orientalizing of Middle Eastern and North African Jews reminds us that Jewish communities were themselves fragmented and marked by power hierarchies.32 Rather than think about Jews as strangers (to use Simmel’s term again), scholars working along this vein have interrogated the ways in which Jews have stigmatized other Jews. Yet, such studies rarely address the possibility that Jews might also have power in relation to members of other groups. This is also true of the most prominent attempt to directly address the relationship between Jews and power, namely David Biale’s 1986 book-­ length essay Power & Powerlessness in Jewish History.33 Since his incisive analysis was driven by a concern with Israeli power, Biale focused on “the attempt to exercise strength and authority within a collective framework.”34 His contribution thus challenges ideas about Jews’ historical inability to exert influence as a unit but does not address the question of how individual Jews have come to speak in public and influence powerful institutions. It does not, therefore, explain the political clout of particular Jewish individuals, or, for example, the situation of nineteenth and twentieth-­ century Jewish liberals. Equally important, the book is concerned with understanding Jews’ ability to shape their own environment, not the power that they have managed to exert over other groups  within fragmented political landscapes.

29  Biale, Gershom Scholem;  Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus; Biale, Gershom Scholem. 30  Brocke et al., Visionen der gerechten Gesellschaft. 31  Aschheim, “Reflections on Insiders and Outsiders,” 8–9. 32  Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers; Ivan Kalmar and Penslar, eds., Orientalism and the Jews. 33  Biale, Power & Powerlessness. 34  Ibid., 7.

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Despite its somewhat different focus, Biale’s work remains helpful as a starting point for discussions of power and other terms that might help us describe the complex and often fraught roles Jews occupied in fragmented societies. For Biale, who skillfully plays with the long and insidious history of anti-Jewish theories about Jewish power, the term serves polemical purposes. Others might be more inclined to use a Foucauldian notion of power stripped of its exclusively negative connotations and to thus focus  instead on its ambivalence and potential for productive creation. Both approaches require authors who seek to avoid misunderstandings to clarify that their attempts to write a history of Jewish power depart from long-standing conspiracy theories about dangerous secret Jewish cabals. In short, notions of Jewish power or discussions of Jews’ desire for power invites many difficulties and always come with baggage. Yet it is not clear that avoiding the term altogether offers a better way forward: politics are ultimately about access to power.35 Similar challenges arise if we turn to one of the most potent concepts in debates on power and powerlessness to arise in recent years: privilege.36 In the current politically infused controversies, privilege means primarily “white privilege,” a term that the feminist, anti-racism activist, and scholar Peggy McIntosh popularized in a 1988 working paper.37 In op-eds and on American college campuses the term “Jewish privilege” increasingly crops up with this meaning as well, though commentators regularly challenge this usage.38 In scholarship, it appears primarily in studies that trace how Jews in the United States have grappled with the country’s historic blackwhite binary. Even here, however, scholars have often been leery to use the term, since their aim is generally to highlight how complicated Jewish whiteness was in the context of the shifting urban and suburban landscapes most Jews inhabited during different periods. Even Karen Brodkin— whose How Jews Became White Folks offers a particularly provocative portrayal of the “whitening” of American Jewry in the postwar era—uses

35  Saul Alinsky’s critiques against 1968’ers in his Rule for Radicals was famously that replacing the term power for innocuous phrases like “harnessing the energy” was mere window dressing. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 49–53. 36  Kimmel and Ferber, eds., Privilege: A Reader; Paula S. Rothenberg, ed., White Privilege. 37  McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege.” 38  See, for example, Solomon, “‘End Jewish Privilege’ Poster Circulates on Chicago College Campus,” and “The Grave And Mortal Danger of Calling ‘White’ Jews Privileged.”

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the term sparingly.39 Given the current debates on white privilege, there is the danger of collapsing notions of white privilege with Jewish privilege. Doing so problematically implies that all Jews are allowed to claim whiteness or wish to do so.40 Denying any relevance to the term would be equally unproductive, however, as it might erroneously suggest that most Jews in places such as the contemporary United States do not find it easy to make that claim.  Like the uses of “Jewish power,” use of the term “Jewish privilege” has its hazards but nonetheless forces us to have important conversations. The picture is arguably even more complicated when it comes to modern Jewish history writ large. Discussions of Jewish privilege and privileged Jews have a long history that have all but disappeared in current debates. Today’s usage of the term “privilege” is disconnected from the longer legal history of the concept. Yet, all of these meanings of the term are closely connected, forming an intertwined part of the history of both liberalism and antisemitism. A brief glance at this history helps to highlight the term’s limitations for the historical study of Jews and other Others. Opposition to “privilege” has taken different forms at different historical moments. During the Enlightenment and well into the mid-nineteenth century, various European critics perceived privilege mainly as special rights and duties conferred on individuals or collectives by the sovereign. This is how the scholar of constitutional law, Heinrich Zöpfl, defined it in his 1842 article on “Privileges” for the most influential liberal encyclopedia in Germany, the Staats-Lexikon.41 As Zöpfl highlighted, privileges could be both positive and negative—a privilegium favorabile or a privilegium odiosum. In either case, he argued, they stood against the principle of equal citizenship that required everyone to be subject to the same law. Reluctant to be too sweeping in his condemnation of privileges, Zöpfl did not demand the end of all special rights (including those given to municipalities with city status, for example) but instead called for them to be reduced.42 An addendum to this article by the Prussian politician and administrator Adolf Lette, written 20  years later for the encyclopedia’s 39  Brodkin, How Jews Became White, 183–4. See also studies on Jews and whiteness in other contexts, such as Vink, Creole Jews. 40  See Kaye/Kantrowitz, The Colors of Jews. 41  Zöpfl, “Privilegien; Privilegienhoheit,” 163–172. On Zöpfl, see von Schulte, “Zöpfl, Heinrich” 432–4; Strauch, „Heinrich Zöpfl,“ 207–11. 42  On the tendency to allow for some privileges in private law, see Klippel, “Das Privileg in der deutschen Staatsrechtslehre des 19. Jahrhunderts,” 285–308.

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third edition, was more radical.43 Lette considered both trade monopolies and legal differentiations based on religion—including all limitations on Jewish civil rights—as an anachronism that had to be eliminated. Although they sometimes used “privilege” in the metaphorical sense of “unwarranted advantage,” Zöpfl and Lette shared early liberals’ interest in formal privileges. It was this narrower definition of privilege that Jewish liberals tended to find most attractive. German Jewish champions of Jewish emancipation like Gabriel Rießer promoted their vision of civic equality by contrasting Jews’ collective disadvantages with others groups’ privileges of birth (Vorrechte der Geburt), which revolutionaries, democrats, and liberals alike held in contempt and considered profoundly unfair.44 In this particular guise, privilege was so despicable because it broke the fundamental principle of equality before the law. Focused as such debates were on ending the positive privileges of non-Jews, there was little talk of particular Jewish privileges. Yet, Jewish privileges and privileged Jews were at the center of a different set of European debates about new forms of social differentiation during the nineteenth century. As Hannah Arendt noted in a 1946 article entitled “Privileged Jews,” different types of “privileged” Jews emerged as part of “the most tragic aspect” of the history of Europe  between the French Revolution and World War I, “the slow but steady transformation of the citoyen of the French Revolution into the bourgeois of the pre-war period.”45 While centrist liberals retained their focus on legal privileges, left-wing liberals, democrats, radical republicans, and eventually socialists, increasingly focused their attention on the informal privilege bestowed on those who had  recently accumulated wealth. Antisemites who emerged from the ranks of such critics—and conservatives who picked up some of their populist themes—found it useful to frame their positions in such terms. Early antisemitic texts from the left, such as Alphonse Toussenel’s Les Juifs Roi de l’époque (1845), which aimed their ire against financial feudalism equated ancien régime inequality with wealth.46 The scandal of 43  Zöpfl, “Privilegien; Privilegienhoheit” with an additional commentary by Wilhelm Adolf Lette, Das Staats-Lexikon: Encyklopädie der sämmtlichen Staatswissenschaften für alle Stände, ed. Carl von Rottek and Karl Theordor Welcker, 3rd. ed., 14 vols, (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1956–1966), 12:161–171; Lette’s part is on pp. 167–71. 44  Riesser, Gabriel Riesser’s gesammelte Schriften, 2:593; Isler, Gabriel Riesser’s Leben nebst Mittheilungen aus seinen Briefen, 108. 45  Arendt, “Privileged Jews,” 6. 46  Toussenel, Les Juifs Rois de l’époque.

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power established by financial success was also crucial for conspiracy theories such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which portrayed a Jewish plan to replace the true aristocracy of old with false popular tribunes controlled behind the scenes by rich Jews.47 Although polemics against “Jewish privilege” never became as central as did  campaigns against “Jewish power,” we should not underestimate their influence. Whereas liberals had depicted formal privileges as a deviation from the rule of law, antisemites portrayed informal privilege as a deviation from the principles of popular sovereignty. The informal privileges of families such as the Rothschilds came to stand for a new despotism, requiring a new revolutionary battle against privilege.48 In this context, the fight for the underprivileged—a term coined in the 1880s and popular since the 1930s—became a campaign against the privileges of a hidden, illegitimate group of outsiders.49 Long before the talk of privileges was associated with raising consciousness about the privileges associated with whiteness in the United States, it had already taken on a different meaning among anti-Jewish enemies of liberal politics. Discussing people’s privileges in the nineteenth century without further qualification thus risks anachronistic readings that project today’s meaning back into the past. Not only does  the term “privilege” pose certain pitfalls for studies of  European Jewish history in the age of high liberalism, it also proves problematic in the context of the besieged liberalisms of twentieth-­century Central Europe. In Nazi Germany, the state sometimes referred to Jews who had some form of protected status as privileged—for example if they were in a “privileged” marriage with someone whom the Nazis had classified as an Aryan. Later, the term became popular among Jews in ghettos and eventually in camps, where Jewish functionary prisoners were at times referred to as “privileged.”50 Both contemporaries and later scholars have raised ethically laden questions about the minute distinctions of relative  Marsden, trans., Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.  Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France, 128–54. 49  “underˈprivileged, adj. (and n.)”. OED Online. January 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/211922?redirectedFrom=underprivileged (accessed January 21, 2018). On the popularity of the term between 1940 and 1980, see https:// books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=underprivileged&year_start=1800&year_ end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cunderprivileg ed%3B%2Cc0 50  Brown, “Introduction,” Judging “Privileged” Jews. 47 48

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privilege in such contexts. Here, privilege can only be discussed under quotation marks as the privilege of survival for a short period of time—and at an immense human cost. The issues with the term “Jewish privilege” are ultimately the same as those that arise with the notion of Jewish power—its proximity to crude versions of the concept and the challenge of using historically specific terms across vastly different contexts. When it comes to ideas of the white privilege that many—though  not all—Jews in the United States enjoy today, the discussion has a clear moral and political thrust. What is more, Jews remain only one of many groups whose position in American society might be described this way. When it comes to Jewish privilege tout court there is no equally clear framework. Whatever advantages Jews may have held in the past, until the twentieth century only a small minority of Jews could qualify as privileged in the way we use the term today. My current work on Jews and Roma during and since the Holocaust similarly demonstrates the limitations of discussions of Jewish power and privilege. It also highlights the difficulties in explaining multiple layers of different group’s relational advantage and disadvantage. After the fall of Nazism, Jewish Holocaust survivors and historians of the Jewish Holocaust (many of whom were themselves Holocaust survivors) built up an unprecedented set of victim-centered archives. Their efforts to collect documents and make sense of the sources left by Nazi administrators paradoxically also made possible research on a genocide that was peripheral to their interests: the Romani Holocaust. The biggest testimony archive in the world offers but one example of these dynamics: The USC Shoah Foundation makes available over 500,000 interviews with Jewish survivors and 407 interviews with Romani survivors. Even though the latter set of testimonies represents a miniscule part of the larger collection, the Shoah Foundation’s archive nonetheless constitutes one of the largest public repository of Romani narratives in the world. The archival situation of each group reflects their unequal access to resources signals something about Jews’ relative privilege vis-à-vis Roma in this context—including the privilege not to think about the way other voices might find their way into these archives. The asymmetries between Jews and Roma are hard to miss in other areas of historical representation as well. At nearly every location where Romani activists have chosen to create museums, monuments, and collections dedicated to their history, a Jewish museum, monument, or archive already existed. What is more, scholars interested in hearing the voices of

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Romani survivors have little choice but to consult archives originally built to store the testimonies of Jews. The issue is not simply that Jewish narratives of genocide have become a template for the narration of Romani experiences of genocide as well: this can been said of the relationship between the Holocaust and other cases of mass violence more generally.51 The entangled history of Romani-Jewish relations both during and since the Holocaust goes deeper than that. In many respects, the creation of the largest dedicated Holocaust archives around the world are a reflection of Jewish financial and political security—in the case of the USC Shoah Foundation or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—or of Jews’ claims to sovereignty—in the case of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. In the United States, Holocaust museums, memorials, and archives form part of a liberal language Jews have found to speak about the specificity of their history as Jews while  also retaining the universalism of appeals to defend human rights.52 It is no coincidence that the Shoah Foundation, and, to some extent, the USHMM, see the documentation and prevention of genocides across the world as part of their mission. Focusing solely on American Jews’ relationship to these institutions, which have acquired both national recognition and massive collections, reads as a success story.53 The decades-long battles that Romani activists have fought for representation on the Holocaust Museum’s council and for the  inclusion of their history in the exhibit show that this is not universally true, however. To many, the struggle over representation at the museum appears as a conflict between those with limited access to power and those with greater access to it.54 This is also how many Romani activists have come to depict the situation—sometimes with uncomfortable, generalizing undertones about the power Jews wield in this situation. Yet such readings misconstrue and oversimplify what is in fact a complex and fraught situation. The individuals interviewed for the USC Shoah Foundation and those whose historical experiences are recorded in the USHMM’s holdings were not powerful. The building blocks of these later monuments to Jewish influence were difficult narratives—difficult not just 51  See, for example, Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory; Dean, Aversion and Erasure; Shenker, “Through the Lens of the Shoah”, 141–75. 52  On the human rights investment of Jews and Jewish organizations in the twentieth century, see Nathaniel A. Kurz, “A Sphere above the Nations?”; Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans. 53  Novick, The Holocaust in American Life. 54  Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 240–8.

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because witnesses recounted harrowing experiences but because the very act of testifying forced survivors to relive their trauma.55 Holocaust collections are thus not easily categorized: they are arguably archives of the weak and of the powerful simultaneously. In what sense, then, are these archives—and, in the case of the USHMM, their location next to the National Mall in Washington DC—a sign of privilege, at least of the privilege of being heard when other are not? Are these even the right terms? In spite of the deep asymmetries in Romani and Jewish access to social, legal, and organizational resources, survivor testimonies constitute a limit case in which references to relative power and privilege seem misplaced.56 The Jews who built Holocaust collections originally worked in the face of pressure not to speak about their suffering outside of limited Jewish fora. Often they achieved recognition and received compensation only after decades of willful obstruction from state representatives.57 There is thus little analytical benefit to using the term “privilege” without qualifications in such cases, when one group’s advantages are only relative to others who were even more marginalized. We urgently need new ways to express these asymmetries to understand the social, cultural, economic, and political effects of this unequal access to resources. The challenge of using  terms such as  “privilege” productively holds equally  for the history of European Jews during the height of classical liberalism. Many Jewish liberals (particularly men) in Central and Western Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enjoyed considerable social standing even as they experienced antisemitism. Whether we see them as powerful or powerless is often a matter of perspective. Abraham Geiger offers a good example of this. As Susannah Heschel shows in her important intellectual biography,  Geiger was a highly educated “doctor rabbi”—as university-trained Jewish clergy in Germany came to be called. He was intellectually influential and a builder of crucial Jewish institutions. Yet, he was also ostracized by Christian Bible scholars, denied a secure academic appointment, and viciously attacked by his opponents. To argue that he was privileged clearly misses the mark in significant ways.

 See, Langer, Holocaust Testimonies; Stein, Reluctant Witnesses.  Joskowicz, “Separate Suffering, Shared Archives,” 110–40. 57  Goschler, Schuld und Schulden; Diner and Wunberg, eds., Restitution and Memory; Ludi, Reparations for Nazi Victims in Postwar Europe. On restitution for German Romanies, see von dem Knesebeck, The Roma Struggle for Compensation. 55 56

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Yet, if we define subalterns as individuals with little or no space to speak or be heard, then Geiger was also anything but a subaltern.58 During the Kulturkampf of the 1870s, when German liberals and Bismarck’s government engaged in anti-Catholic campaigns, Geiger apparently felt confident enough about his position in society to write against other groups within Germany society. As he put it, “the new national movement of the united German tribes” required a decisive stance against “ecclesiastical imperiousness.”59 For a brief moment at least, Geiger had the option of jumping on the bandwagon of liberal anti-Catholic criticism and of depicting himself as part of the national “center” in need of liberals’ defense. Although construing him simply as a part of that center as a result would offer an incomplete account of his life and strivings it is also misleading to ignore his ability to claim that position at times.

Toward a New History of Jews and Other Others Geiger’s case as well as broader questions about Jews’ access to power— both in its narrow sovereign and wider discursive sense—has a bearing on the history of Jewish liberals. Depending on the place and time, Jewish men with access to higher education across Western and Central Europe either found entrée into liberal political movements or faced rejection and disappointment—as they did in the 1880s in most parts of Germany, for example. As politically minded individuals, Jewish liberals spent much of their time discussing other groups they believed were in need of state regulation. As they concerned themselves with the big “questions” of their age—such as the Church Question, the Women’s Question, and the Social Question—they did so within the same complicated social environment as those who were not marked as Jews, yet with an awareness that in some strategic moments, their Jewishness mattered to the discussions at hand.60 To fully understand what it meant for Jews to participate in broader political discussions we need to recognize that their Jewishness could serve as both a boon and a hindrance in particular instances, whereas in others it may have been immaterial. Yet this alone is not enough: we need to look more closely at Jewish relations with other Others in ways that illuminate historical alliances between marginalized groups,  See Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.  Joskowicz, Modernity of Others, 236. 60  On the logic of questions that arose in the nineteenth century, see Case, Age of Questions. 58 59

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competition between groups, and various other shades of relations at the same time. A richer history of the Jews—and of Jewish liberalism—requires both entangled histories of Jews and other Others and a terminology that moves us beyond static notions of power and privilege. It is debatable whether the study of Jews and other Others is a field of research—or whether it should be. At first blush, the two principal examples discussed in this essay certainly share little in common. Jewish polemics against the Catholic Church—in parliament and elsewhere—targeted one of the most powerful institutions of nineteenth-century Europe. Yet, since the Church and Catholicism were widely derided by liberals, anti-­ Catholicism offered an opportunity to claim one’s seat at the table among other liberals. It reflected power-asymmetries that were highly contextual in a situation where Catholics were both easy targets of Jewish censure and yet not actual victims of Jewish anti-Church politics—contrary to what certain antisemitic Catholic activists may have claimed.61 Jews did not invent anticlericalism and also played a subordinate role in the processes that led to the institutional decline of the churches, yet anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism helped them define their liberalism and gain a political voice in the modern era. The case of Romani-Jewish relations in the twentieth century offers a stark contrast, for here Jews were able to shape another group’s ability to communicate its history to others. Whereas Jewish liberals in nineteenth-­ century Western and Central Europe found that positioning themselves against political Catholicism helped them announce their own liberal civic values, Jewish-Romani relations are rather marked by the profound indifference most Jews have exhibited toward the experiences of Romanies. It is precisely this lack of interest (or even awareness) that defines the asymmetry of this relationship—an asymmetry that is also reflected in scholarship on both groups. Whereas scholars of Jewish history and the Jewish Holocaust can ignore Romani voices with impunity, those who publish on the Romani Holocaust are regularly asked to compare the lesser-known Romani genocide with the better-known Jewish one. The very act of writing these histories together, and doing so from the perspective of Jewish history, thus challenges some of these asymmetries. However different these two examples appear to be, they both address the common political expectation that different outsider groups might express solidarity with one  another. In the case of Jewish-Catholic  Blaschke, Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich.

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coalitions in the nineteenth century, the historian Jacob Toury expressed these expectations by referring to “unrealized opportunities” that might have changed the tone of German politics had Catholics and Jews banded together politically.62 Ultimately there were many structural reasons— including the antisemitism common in certain Catholic circles—that made these alliances unlikely.63 Yet, there were some in the late nineteenth century who believed that similarities between antisemitism and anti-­ Catholicism should lead to common efforts.64 As a lived political culture rather than an abstract theory, the ascendant liberalism of the nineteenth century made it difficult to see the potential for such connections, however. It became easier for Jewish liberals to conceive of such coalitions once non-Jewish Central European  liberals turned  increasingly to integral nationalism, as they did in the early twentieth century, and Jewish voters in places like Germany decided to vote for Catholics in run-off elections featuring antisemites on the ballot.65 Jewish-Romani relations, by contrast, became politicized much later in the post-Holocaust era. If we want to speak of liberalism in this context, then it would be associated with new attempts to codify anti-­discriminatory measures in national contexts and to advance human rights on an international scale. In terms of the lived liberalism of everyday politics, the period of reconstruction and renewed economic mobility for US and Western European Jews in the 1950s and 1960s—much as in the nineteenth century—was a time when few Jews cared about creating alliances with Roma. Only a small number of Jews followed a countercultural interest in populations that were frequently depicted as resisting integration into regular work regimes. Nevertheless, some alliances did materialize, in particular among academics. As in the case of Jewish-Catholic relations, the most sustained efforts appear in contexts where liberalism was or is in decline, such as in today’s Hungary. Here, in the face of a heated antisemitic and antiziganistic rhetoric, we can see an interconnected fight for a liberal order that can include both Jews and Roma.66 Ironically, both cases indicate that Jews’ alliances with other Others have often faltered in periods of  Toury, Die politischen Orientierungen der Juden in Deutschland, 246–94.  Pulzer, Jews and the German State, 44–68; Blaschke, Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich. 64  See, for example, Leroy-Beaulieu, Les Doctrines de Haine. 65  Toury, politische Orientierungen, 256–57. 66  On antitsiganism and antisemitism, see Selling et  al., eds., Antiziganism: What’s in a Word?; Bartel, “Vom Antitsiganismus zum antiziganism,” 193–212. 62 63

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liberal triumphalism, while gaining in strength as liberal politics are on the wane. These two different examples also illustrate how studies of Jews and other Others can open the door for different types of critical history. First, they can reinsert Jewish history into discussions of the ambivalent legacy of different political languages. Real, lived liberalism has had its share of critics. Jews were sometimes self-reflective liberals who challenged liberalism’s limitations, yet, as we have seen, they could also actively participate in its exclusions. To understand Jewish liberalism—or any other political language adopted by members of minority communities—we need to remain attuned to precisely these moments when Jewish liberalism was as contradictory as the liberalism of others. Second, an open-ended research agenda dealing with the relations of Jews and other Others requires us to have a capacious understanding of the groups this can include. It is not by coincidence that this essay employs terms such as “other Others,” “minorities” and “marginalized groups,” each of which emerge out of ideas about society’s centers and peripheries that this essay has sought to critique. The challenge comes into relief if we turn to Romani and Jewish  Holocaust commemoration again. Israeli, German, and American Jews who support or visit Holocaust museums all have fundamentally different relationships to their states and its past. Clearly, in the Israeli case, the very terms common in Jewish history—such as minority, marginalized, or Others—might apply to Israeli Jews’ past but not to their present. The point in bringing them together as part of a single history of Jewish-Romani relations is not to suggest that the same terms apply in each case but rather to highlight a set of questions that illuminate phenomena that cross state boundaries. Equally important is an awareness of the different types of relations that can become the subject of such a history of Jews and other Others. The notion of “relations” does not limit us to friendly relations or even a conscious attempt to engage positively or negatively with other groups. It also includes the act of boundary-making as well as indifference to, or even obliviousness about, other groups in one’s midst. Put otherwise, Jews’ position in society is defined not only by the collectives to which they seek to belong but also by those they do not want to resemble and those they can afford to ignore. Histories of Jews’ relations with multiple other groups provides us with a new understanding of the multivalent and often shifting nature of Jews’ lives in fragmented societies.

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Cohen, Julia Phillips. 2014. Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohen, Richard I., Jonathan Frankel, and Stefani Hoffman, eds. 2010. Insiders and Outsiders: Dilemmas of East European Jewry. Portland: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Dean, Carolyn J. 2010. Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Diner, Hasia R. 1977. In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935. Westport/London: Greenwood Press. Diner, Dan, and Gotthard Wunberg, eds. 2007. Restitution and Memory: Material Restoration in Europe. New York: Berghahn Books. Dölemeyer, Barbara, and Heinz Mohnhaupt. 1997. Das Privileg im europäischen Vergleich. Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann. Elon, Amos. 2002. The Pity of It All: A History of Jews in Germany, 1743–1933. New York: Metropolitan Books. Fitzpatrick, Matthew P. 2012. Liberal Imperialism in Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Freeden, Michael. 2005. Liberal Language: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Freedman, Jonathan. 2008. Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. Gay, Peter. 1968. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. 1st ed. New  York: Harper & Row. Goschler, Constantin. 2005. Schuld und Schulden: die Politik der Wiedergutmachung für NS-Verfolgte seit 1945. Göttingen: Wallstein. Graetz, Michael. 1996. The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gross, Michael B. 2004. The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-­ Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hacohen, Malachi Haim. 2000. Karl Popper, the Formative Years, 1902–1945 : Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Hadley, Elaine. 2010. Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heschel, Susannah. 1998. Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joskowicz, Ari. 2014. The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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———. 2016. Separate Suffering, Shared Archives: Jewish and Romani Histories of Nazi Persecution. History and Memory 28 (1): 110–140. Kalman, Julie. 2010. Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kalmar, Ivan Davidson, and Derek J. Penslar, eds. 2005. Orientalism and the Jews. Hanover: University Press of New England. Katz, Ethan. 2015. The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Katz, Ethan, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud Mandel, eds. 2017. Colonialism and the Jews. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kaye/Kantrowitz, Melanie. 2007. The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kieval, Hillel J. 1988. The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870–1918. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000. Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kimmel, Michael S. and Abby Ferber S. 2010. Privilege: A Reader. 2nd ed. Boulder: Westview Press. King, Jeremy. 2002. Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Klein-Pejšová, Rebekah. 2015. Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kurz, Nathaniel A. 2015. ‘A Sphere above the Nations?’: The Rise and Fall of International Jewish Human Rights Politics, 1945–1975. PhD Dissertation, Yale University. Langer, Lawrence L. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press. Leroy-Beaulieu, Anatole. 1902. Les Doctrines de Haine: L’antisémitisme, l’antiprotestantisme, l’anticléricalisme. Paris: C. Lévy. Linenthal, Edward Tabor. 2001. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum. New York: Columbia University Press. Loeffler, James. 2018. Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. Losurdo, Domenico. 2011. Liberalism: A Counter-History. London/New York: Verso. Ludi, Regula. 2012. Reparations for Nazi Victims in Postwar Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mandel, Maud. 2014. Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marglin, Jessica M. 2016. Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Marsden, Victor E., ed. 2011. Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Austin: RiverCrest Publishing. McIntosh, Peggy. 1988. White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies. Working Paper, Center for Research on Women, Wellesley. https://nationalseedproject.org/white-privilege-and-male-privilege Mendes-Flohr, Paul R. 1991. Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity, Culture of Jewish Modernity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Mills, Charles W. 2008. Racial Liberalism. PMLA 123 (5): 1380–1397. Novick, Peter. 1999. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Pautz, Hartwig. 2005. The Politics of Identity in Germany: The Leitkultur Debate. Race & Class 46 (4): 39–52. Pulzer, Peter. 1992. Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848–1933. Oxford: Blackwell. Rahden, Till van. 2000. Juden und andere Breslauer: die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Grossstadt von 1860 bis 1925, Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft 139. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Reitter, Paul. 2012. On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Riesser, Gabriel. 1867. Gabriel Riesser’s gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Riesser-Stiftung. Rodrigue, Aron. 1995. “Difference and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire.” Interview by Nancy Reynolds. Stanford Humanities Review 5 (Fall): 81–90. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rothenberg, Paula S., ed. 2005. White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. 2nd ed. New York: Worth Publishers. Rozenblit, Marsha L. 2013. Jews, German Culture, and the Dilemma of National Identity: The Case of Moravia, 1848–1938. Jewish Social Studies 20 (1): 77–120. Salzman, Jack, and Cornel West. 1997. Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States. New  York: Oxford University Press. Selling, Jan, Markus End, Hristo Kyuchukov, Pia Laskar, and Bill Templer, eds. 2015. Antiziganism What’s in a Word? Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Shenker, Noah. 2016. Through the Lens of the Shoah: The Holocaust as a Paradigm for Documenting Genocide Testimonies. History & Memory 28 (1): 141–175. Simmel, Georg. 1908. Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.

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Solomon, Daniel J. ‘End Jewish Privilege’ Poster Circulates on Chicago College Campus. The Forward. Accessed 28 Dec 2017. https://forward.com/fastfor ward/366240/end-jewish-privilege-poster-circulates-on-chicagocollege-campus/ Spector, Scott. 2000. Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2006. Hybridity and the Habsburg Jews. http://soi.journals.yorku.ca/ index.php/soi/article/view/7994 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Carl Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Stanislawski, Michael. 1988. For Whom Do I Toil?: Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry. New York: Oxford University Press. Toury, Jacob. 1966. Die politischen Orientierungen der Juden in Deutschland; von Jena bis Weimar, Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts 15. Tübingen: Mohr. Toussenel, Alphonse. 1845. Les Juifs Rois de l’époque : Histoire de La Féodalité Financière. Paris: A la Librairie de l’École sociétaire. Vink, Wieke. 2010. Creole Jews [Electronic Resource]: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname. Leiden: Brill. Zahra, Tara. 2008. Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zöpfl, Heinrich. 1842. Privilegien; Privilegienhoheit. In Das Staats-Lexikon: Encyklopädie der sämmtlichen Staatswissenschaften für alle Stände, ed. Carl von Rottek and Karl Theordor Welcker. 3rd ed. 14 vols. Altona: Hammerich, 1834–1847. Vol. 13: 163–72.

PART II

Living Liberalism

CHAPTER 5

The Material of Race: Caribbean Jews, Clothing, and Manhood in the Age of Emancipation and Liberal Revolution Laura Arnold Leibman

When Sephardic silversmith Isaac Lopez died in 1804, he left behind a house cluttered with mahogany furniture, a soft feather bed and five pillows, over forty books, and an enslaved man named King. Lopez also left an array of apparel that suggested a preoccupation with fine dress: a silk umbrella with walking stick, stocking breeches, a silk cap, two cotton caps, three pairs thread stockings, and three spectacles.1 Isaac was not the only Jew on the island to obsess over men’s clothing. Throughout the 1790s, Caribbean Sephardic women often requested special assistance to clothe their sons, far more often than they asked for money to dress their daughters.2 This careful attention to men’s dress anticipates experiences  Inventory Isaac Lopez, 1809. Barbados Department of Archives.  Nidhe Israel Minute Books, Volumes 2 & 3. For a transcription of these records see Hoberman, Leibman, and Surowitz-Israel, Jews in the Americas, 227–242. 1 2

L. A. Leibman (*) Reed College, Portland, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_5

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and concerns around manhood and clothing that would emerge more clearly as Jewish men throughout the Dutch and British Caribbean petitioned for civil rights. In the 1820s–1830s, Caribbean men routinely used clothing to display their civic virtue, race, and proximity to power.3 Clothing became a battleground on which the war over Jewish equality was waged. During the 1790s–1830s emancipation movements that swept the Caribbean, Jews and their supporters argued for Jewish political and social equality. Clothed in the language of liberalism, they argued that Jewish men deserved the same rights as other full citizens. Yet gentiles increasingly depicted Caribbean Jews as physically and mentally inadequate, and they employed the language of dress to depict Jews’ inherent inferiority. To combat these visual claims of Jewish deficiency, Sephardic men used clothes to proclaim their whiteness, manhood, and power in their own portraits. Clothing exposed one’s political virtue or virtù—one’s ability to act as a positive agent in government and history.4 This virtue was inherently gendered, as virtù was the “supreme expression of manliness.”5 While Sephardic men were not alone in using clothing to emphasize virtù, the issues surrounding Caribbean Jewish men’s clothing reveals both how Caribbean Jews took part in a larger discussion of Jews and liberalism, and the Caribbean’s contribution to the standard history of Jewish emancipation. This Caribbean example underscores how whiteness was entangled with virtù, and how Jews used clothes to stage their whiteness and political capabilities. In using clothing to proclaim their fitness for governing, Sephardic men took part in a larger hemispheric discussion about emancipation. The notion that full liberation was to be given only to those with the “right capacities” would influence European and American debates about 3  Women’s dress in this era also changed, but largely to accentuate the body’s lines such that “gender distinctions became all the clearer.” In Europe, women’s dresses accentuated “messages of social difference.” In the Caribbean this was deeply racialized, in large part due to the sumptuary laws that prohibited women with varying degrees of racial ancestry the right to cover all or part of their chests and/or from revealing their hair. This difference meant that “white” and Jewish women alike tended to dress more modestly in the British and Dutch Caribbean than their counterparts in the Northern United States. The association of hair coverings with women of African ancestry also appears to have impacted Jewish women’s willingness to cover their hair in Suriname. Hoberman, Leibman, and Surowitz-Israel, eds., Jews in the Americas, 110–14. 4  Furstenberg, “Beyond Freedom and Slavery, 1299. 5  Brown, Manhood and Politics, 14.

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potential Jewish involvement in politics. Although the “right capacities” were often alleged to be intellectual, debates about who should be liberated often played themselves out through the body and the language of dress. Because liberalism sought to remake and redefine social hierarchies, and because men were the primary beneficiaries of the new opportunities in political life, emancipation movements “put enormous stress on male dress and the signification of the male body.”6 Clothing underscores how gender and the body were part of living liberalism. Indeed, clothing proclaims liberalism’s ideals in some of the most iconic European depictions of liberty. In Liberty Leading the People (1830), for example, Eugène Delacroix famously uses clothing to define liberalism following the overthrow of King Charles X of France. Through clothing, Delacroix underscores his sense that liberalism was based on proportional rather than radical equality. Sometimes called geometric equality, proportional equality relied on the logic of ratios to argue that rights should be distributed proportionately to people’s supposed capacities.7 At the painting’s center Marianne, the Goddess of Liberty, wears a classically-inspired gown and a Phrygian cap. Her red cap connects the French insurgents (who wore similar hats) to classical libertas. During this era, the Phrygian cap was associated with the pileus worn by Brutus on a coin after the assassination of Julius Caesar. Like Brutus’s headgear, Marianne’s cap proclaims a return to republican liberties of the Roman type—that is, to a proportional equality.8 Hats similarly define male figures in the painting as Royalist soldiers, factory workers, students, peasants, or the bourgeoisie.9 French sumptuary laws in France politicized dress, including specific types of hats.10 Delacroix uses these hats to underscore his argument that the new liberty will unite men across class and political lines even as it arranges them in a new order with the royalists, bourgeoisie, and students above the peasants.11 Although other revolutionaries of different stripes later embraced the painting, Delacroix originally used it to defend a specific early 6  Hunt, “Freedom of Dress in Revolutionary France,” in Melzer and Norberg, eds., From the Royal to the Republican Body, 237. 7  Arena, Libertas and the Practice of Politics, 104. 8  Korshak, “The Liberty Cap as a Revolutionary Symbol in America and France,” 53. 9  Hughes, Hats, 61. Petrey, In the Court of the Pear King, 99–104. 10  Melzer and Norberg, From the Royal to the Republican Body, 228. 11  Edith Warren Hoffman, “A Footnote to Eugene Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People,’” 26. Toussaint. La Liberté Guidant Le Peuple De Delacroix: Catalogue, 44, 47–50.

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understanding of liberalism, namely Orléanist freedom.12 This early precursor to later liberalism would serve as a model for early nineteenthcentury Caribbean emancipation movements. In the Dutch and British colonies emancipation never meant complete rights for everyone. Even after slavery was abolished, civil rights movements in the Dutch and British Caribbean focused on extending the right to vote, bear witness, and serve in government to limited segments of society, namely those who could prove their virtù.13 Delacroix’s Liberty similarly emphasizes the transformation of unworthy bodies into ideal citizens: Marianne’s golden gown flows around her knee like the Nike of Samothrace’s chiton.14 While her bare breast reminded over a dozen reviewers of “the most ignoble courtesan from the dirtiest streets in Paris,”15 to become Liberty, the courtesan had undergone a transformation, regenerated from her past into “Platonic perfection.”16 For Jews living throughout Europe and the Americas in the 1790s–1830s, the belief that rights should be distributed proportionately to people’s supposed capacities would have enormous repercussions for 12  Petrey, In the Court of the Pear King, 99–104. Orléanist liberalism struck a middle ground between monarchists and revolutionaries. It was, as political theorist Annelien de Dijn notes, an “‘elitist’ liberalism,” since for Orléanists, only those with the “right capacities” should be able to participate in politics. Orléanist liberalism was “liberal” in that it rejected the divine right of monarchs and did not seek to reinstate the aristocracy; yet it was seemingly “unequal” in that it still positioned the bourgeoisie over the proletariat. de Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville, 135. 13  Furstenberg, “Beyond Freedom and Slavery,” 1299. The desire for an uneven or “limited” equality shaped how liberalism was defined historically, and reveals the difference between what emancipation movements in the Caribbean typically meant by “equality” and how we tend to understand equality today. Limited equality had a long history that is sometimes obscured. The enlightenment understanding of equality was borrowed from classical works on the subject. The word late eighteenth-century thinkers translated as “equality” from classical works on liberalism encompassed two key Greek concepts: (1) isotês (ἰσότης), fairness, proportionate equality or harmony; and (2) isonomia (ἰσονομία), equal participation and distribution. When we speak of equality today—meaning everyone has the same rights— we reference the tradition of isonomia. In contrast, Caribbean emancipation movements, like the Orléanists, typically argued for isotês. That is, they believed rights should be distributed proportionately to people’s supposed capacities. Thus even after freedom was theoretically available to all, those who sought the right to vote or hold office needed to show that they were worthy. 14  Hoffman, “A Footnote,” 26. This statue was a representation of Athena Nike (“Athena the Victorious”), the ancient symbol of Athens. 15  Petrey, In the Court of the Pear King, 101. 16  Ibid.

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how Jews experienced emancipation. If access to rights was proportional to one’s fitness, Jewish men needed to prove their fitness. Men’s apparel signaled their readiness for citizenship. Slavery made the stress on male dress and bodies even more vexed for Jewish men in the Caribbean than in France. Prior to 1825, the largest, wealthiest, and best educated Jewish communities were in the Caribbean, particularly in Curaçao, Suriname, Jamaica, and Barbados. On some islands, Jews made up as much as 25–50% of the free population. Yet in many colonies, Jews had existed in a category between slave and free, and between “black” and “white,” both with respect to rights and their position in society. As colonial slave regimes crumbled, the categories of “citizen” and “slave” changed, as did the way power relations were invested in the body.17 In the Caribbean, the distribution of rights to Afro-Caribbean and Jews was often entangled. Bodies of Jewish, “black” and multiracial men were called upon to perform fitness for political participation. Clothing was key to these claims. In turning to dress to understand Jewish manhood in the emancipation era, I challenge perceptions about Jewish portraits during this era. While previous scholars have argued that there is nothing particularly “Jewish” about portraits commissioned by early American Jewish men,18 I argue that Jews used portraits to convey an important new sense of Jewish identity in an era of change. The very aspects of “Jewishness” that later historians have hoped to find—ethnic dress, religious artifacts, or physiological signposts—are the hallmarks of Jewishness sitters most wanted to downplay. To be Jewish, the sitters argued, was to be white, manly, upright, and virtuous, in exactly the same way that non-Jewish full citizens were. Today we tend to be more interested in arguments regarding Jewish difference rather than sameness, but in the 1790s–1830s Jewish equality was highly contentious, hence sameness carried great political weight. By revealing the visual code of nineteenth-century men’s dress, I expose how Jewish men used fashion to proclaim their elite racial status. I support my argument about how Jewish men used clothing to enact civic virtue through an analysis of Sephardic men’s portraits from the 1790s–1830s. These men all lived significant portions of their lives in major Caribbean Jewish communities. This analysis is placed in dialogue 17  Colwill, “Sex, Savagery, and Slavery in the Shaping of the French Body Politic,” in Melzer and Norberg, From the Royal to Republican Body, 199. 18  Brilliant, Facing the New World, 2; my emphasis.

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with contemporary art hostile to Jews. I have chosen to focus on Western Sephardic men because Sephardic Jews dominated the early Jewish Caribbean social world, even when Sephardim were outnumbered by their poorer Ashkenazi brethren. The men in these portraits were not only key players in their respective Jewish communities; they also often actively participated in local Jewish—and sometimes Afro Caribbean—emancipation movements. In both Jewish and broader political arenas, these men helped redefine Jewish manhood for a generation in crisis. Clothing was key to the new manhood’s success.

Fashion, Citizenship, and Race Radical changes in men’s fashion during the emancipation era made men’s clothing key to citizenship through North America and the Caribbean. Dress in the Americas became increasingly racialized in ways that would impact both Jewish men and men of African descent in the colonies. On the one hand, disenfranchised men benefitted from industrialized fabric production and the rise of the ready-made trade. Better, cheaper cloth was available to a much wider swath of society, and this availability seemed to democratize clothing. On the other hand, despite clothing’s democratic turn, elites continued to use fashion to restrict the body politic. As fashion historian Kate Haulman explains, fashion served as the “corset” for citizenship by restraining who reached the top of society’s social pyramid.19 Elites used fine fabrics and expert tailoring to distinguished themselves from the masses. As a result, a new fashion for male elites emerged. Unlike the early- to mid-eighteenth century’s aristocratic ideal, this new male ideal was racially excellent. In stark change from the much-satirized macaroni of the early- to mid-eighteenth century, whose dress and manner reflected aristocratic values, the new fashion sculpted a structured, orderly, virtuous, ideal, white male body (Figs. 5.1 and 5.2).20 For men like Beau Brummel, a commoner who had risen into high society despite his mother having been a courtesan and his grandfather a valet, the new style meant one no longer needed a title to “ascend the social ladder.” Tailoring and elegance showcased “highly prized gentility.”21 This shift was bad news, however, for western Sephardic Jews, who had often styled  Haulman, Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America, 225.  Kelly, Beau Brummell, 103–5. 21  Takeda, Reigning Men: Fashion in Menswear, 1715–2015, 174. Kelly, Beau Brummell, 2. 19 20

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Fig. 5.1  Macaroni Ensemble: Suit, Italy, probably Venice, c. 1770, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

themselves as aristocratic. Western Sephardic Jews tended to emphasize their nobility,22 incorporating heraldic symbols into their funerary traditions and, in the Caribbean, even placing them above entrances to their homes.23  Endelman, Comparing Jewish Societies, 74.  For example, No. 14 Gravenstraat or the house of the Bueno de Mesquita family in Paramaribo. Groll, D Dutch Overseas, 383. 22 23

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Fig. 5.2  c.1825–1830 Men’s wool suit, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

While Sephardic Jews had benefitted from earlier hierarchies that relied on aristocratic lineage to define “elites,” the new race-based social system disproportionately disadvantaged Sephardim, since at least some non-Jews believed Western Sephardim were even more “swarthy” or “black” than other Jews.24 In general, scientists debated Jews’ specific place in late eighteenth-­ century racial hierarchies, as well as the exact criteria for  Famous examples of the early racializing of Western Sephardim have been noted by Sander Gilman, David Katz, Irven Resnick, Jonathan Dentler, and Willis Johnson. 24

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whiteness. Racial scientists disagreed whether whiteness meant Caucasian—a category to which Jews as a Semitic people could belong— or whether only Saxons or Aryans—groups that explicitly excluded Jews— were white.25 Whatever the answer, new racial theorists agreed that the foundation for race lay in a person’s physical form. Men’s fashion changed to draw out these embodied differences. Earlier eighteenth-century fashions had used wigs and “silk, glittering, and swathing” to hide the body. In contrast, the ideal of the 1790s–1830s used fabrics and tailoring to sculpt the body, exposing how the wearers’ bodies reflected classical ideals. The new clothing aimed to reveal an ideal man “expressed not in marble but in natural wool, linen, [and] leather” (Figs.  5.2 and 5.3). This perfect man was part gentleman, part natural Adam, part naked Apollo.26 Men’s fashions displayed the body’s naked lines, muscles, and bulges so clearly, the new pants were often known as “inexpressibles” (Fig. 5.3).27 The result was a “metropolitan masculinity: restrained, muscular, unfoppish.”28 This new fashion not only sharpened gender distinctions, but also reshaped the ideal male form according to geometry.29 The ideal body was a proportional male body, measured precisely. The qualifications for citizenship were staged via male anatomy. The new metropolitan masculinity was also racialized, thereby disenfranchising both Jews and people with African ancestry. Indeed, the classical Apollonian ideal glorified by the new male fashion was the very same model early scientific racists used to argue for the inherent superiority of “whites.” By the middle of the nineteenth century, Jews had begun to replace people of African descent as the “physiognomic antitype” to the white, Saxon ideal thought to be embodied in the Apollo Belvedere statue, now at the Vatican.30 Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, Jews’ bodies—particularly nose, beard, and skin tone—became the focus when racializing Jews. While anti-Semitic caricatures during the emancipation era did invoke some of these stereotypes, scholars have tended not to notice clothing’s contribution to the new vision of Jews. However, as I demonstrate here, clothing played a crucial role in forging Jewish identity during the emancipation era (1790s–1830s). Although clothing’s role  Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 16–18.  Hollander, Sex and Suits, 92. Kelly, Beau Brummell, 101–2. 27  Kelly, Beau Brummell, 121. 28  Ibid., 101. 29  Hunt, “Freedom of Dress,” 237. 30  Bindman, Ape to Apollo, 225. 25 26

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Fig. 5.3  Detail from Horace Emile-Jean Vernet, Incroyable et Merveilleuse (1814). Style and pose of legs modelled on Apollo Belvedere. (Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum)

may at first be more visible in the racial nexus of the Caribbean, we can find later correlative instances among Viennese Jews and high profile British politicians of Jewish descent such as Benjamin Disraeli.31 The Caribbean provides an early example of the backlash against full Jewish emancipation, thereby predicting some later Jewish experiences. 31  See for the forthcoming PhD dissertation of Lindsay Alissa King (UCLA) and the chapter by Jonathan Kwan in this volume. Despite being a careful and elegant dresser, Disraeli regularly depicted by Punch as a “Jewish old clothes man, his head crowned with a stack of top hats, or as an importuning secondhand clothing dealer.” Endelman, “A Hebrew to the End” in Richmond and Smith, eds., The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli, 1818–1851, 114.Kirsch, Benjamin Disraeli, 44. A special thanks to Rebecca Abrams for pointing out the Disraeli connection to me.

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Fig. 5.4  Pierre Jacques Benoit, Jewish Shopkeeper in Paramaribo (ca. 1831), Voyage a Surinam . . . cent dessins pris sur nature par l’auteur (Bruxelles, 1839), plate xvi, fig. 32. (Courtesy of John Carter Brown Library, Brown University)

Clothing was essential to the Caribbean’s new embodied hierarchy. Just as the right clothing revealed elite men’s underlying physical perfection, so too imperfect, loose-fitting attire was believed to reflect imperfect bodies. While early artists did notice skin-color and physiology, they primarily used clothing to proclaim their subjects’ race. In his Suriname prints, for example, Pierre Jacques Benoit uses loose baggy clothes to racialize the Jew’s body. By the 1830s, this fashion indicated a lack of manliness and an inability to control the body politic (Fig. 5.4). In Benoit’s caricature, clothes reveal Jewish men to be small, unmanly, morally suspect, and unworthy of full citizenship. Baggy clothing supported Benoit’s other visual arguments about Jews and racial slippage. Just as the clothes literally slip off the Jew’s body, so too artists underscored Jews’ racial slippage by placing them alongside lower primates and allegedly “uncivilized” races. Benoit emphasizes the analogy through visual parallels: Isak Abraham Levy Aron uses the same gesture as the monkey and Petro Cofey Abouka, the multiracial tailor. The monkey is not merely a tropical adornment: monkeys are key symbols in fashion satire, as they

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underscore people’s futile attempts to “ape” their betters through clothes. Jews, too, were becoming increasingly associated with “clothing fails.” Isak Abraham Levy Aron’s job as a peddler of trinkets and cheap clothes parallels the stereotypical Jewish peddler commonly found in late-­ eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century prints such as George Woodward’s depiction of “A Jew Pedlar” (London, c. 1795).32 In an era when the best things were made specifically for one person’s body, peddlers sold pre-owned, recycled, and remade goods. The Jewish peddler became a symbol of the con-man who persuades people that through changing their appearance, they could be something—or someone—else. In Woodward’s print, for example, the peddler holds gilt-­framed portraits of the King and Queen of England, whose proper attire contrasts with his own. The Jews’ claim that the “gold” frames “be worth all de monish” he sells them for even without “de pictures” further underscores his trickery.33 Benoit similarly reinforces the Jews’ slippery nature through the shop sign. Isak Abraham Levy Aron, is a “Vette Warier”—literally a seller of fat wares or candles—which can be seen hanging in the shop’s left section. Although the term “vette warier” translates as a petty retailer, it also gets at Isak’s “greasy” Jewish character, as seen through Benoit’s eyes. Satires of the flabby, ill-suited Jew would haunt Jewish Caribbean men as they sought political equality. Although most Jews were not enslaved in the Caribbean, they were subject to the same limitations that plagued Jews in Western Europe at the time. Jewish emancipation began in France in 1791 and slowly spread across Western Europe, reaching the United Netherlands in 1834 and the United Kingdom in 1858. Yet, emancipation came slightly earlier to the Dutch and British West Indies where most Caribbean Jews lived, paralleling the civil rights movements for Afro-­ Caribbean peoples. For example, whereas in the Netherlands Jews were barred from politics and certain guilds until the 1830s, in Curaçao and Suriname, Jews gained the right to enter the political arena in 1825.34 Moreover while European fashions certainly made their way to the Americas, anxieties about revolutions and violence spawned in the Caribbean made their way back to Europe, providing a certain amount of cross-fertilization in body politics and the enactment of everyday 32  Felsenstein, The Jew as Other: A Century of English Caricature, 20–31. Mendelsohn, The Rag Race, 22–5. 33  Felsenstein, The Jew as Other, 24. 34  Vink, Creole Jews, 78. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband, 49, 346.

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liberalism. Reports of violence and “black ‘atrocities’ committed in the bloody war of liberation” in Haiti not only impacted racial policies in the Dutch and British Caribbean, but also racialized European conceptions of the body politic. At the most extreme end, leaders like Napoleon banned “Antillean blacks and people of mixed race from entering France.”35 Likewise French discussions of liberty and rights often intertwined Jews’ and “mixed race” people’s potential for regeneration.36 Jewish emancipation in the Caribbean provided a testing ground for trends that would be seen later in Europe. Indeed, in Barbados and Jamaica, Jews and Afro-Caribbeans received rights concurrently. In 1815 Barbadian free men of color were placed “on the same footing” with Jews in that they could testify in court and pass along property onto their heirs, but not participate in politics.37 Although Barbadian Jews attempted in 1819–20 to overturn their exclusion from politics, they didn’t gain the vote until 1831 when the so-called “Brown Privilege Bill” extended the right to vote to both Jews and free men of color—so long as they could pass the appropriate property requirements.38 This act gave Jews privileges they would not have had in England at the time. Both Jewish men and free men of color specifically argued for the narrow implementation of rights, that is for proportionate equality, not equal participation for all. Rather than arguing that all people of African ancestry be freed, free people of color agitated instead for their own right to own slaves: in 1803, over three hundred free men of color petitioned the island’s Assembly to reject a bill that would have limited their ability to own land and slaves.39 It was the most popular petition for rights they made. Likewise, in the Vestry debates of 1819–20, elite Jewish men sought to limit women’s participation in Jewish governance and argued that female congregants shouldn’t be allowed to sign political petitions.40 They

 Colwill, “Sex, Savage, and Slavery,” 222.  Stepinwall, “Eliminating Race, Eliminating Difference,” in Peabody and Stovall, eds., The Color of Liberty, 29–31. 37  Snyder, “Customs of an Unruly Race,” in Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-Ruiz, eds., Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 151, 154–5, 159. 38  Hoyos, Barbados Comes of Age, 23. 39  Newton, The Children of Africa in the Colonies, 66 quotes “The Humble Petition of the Free Coloured People, Inhabitants of the Island,” cited in Handler, The Unappropriated People, 76. 40  Leibman and May, “Making Jews,” 17–20. 35 36

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also undercut poorer Jewish men, whom they depicted as lawless, unmanly, and unable to support their families without Synagogue pensions.41 In Jamaica Jewish men’s rights were intertwined with those of free men of color. Moreover, both had rights limited to the “right” men, namely propertied male elites. Jamaican Jews and free men of color both received the privilege of voting and holding public office in 1830–1831.42 As in Barbados, this right was contingent upon owning enough property.43 The linking of Jewish and Afro-Jamaican rights came about in part because according to the Jamaican caste system, Jews were neither “white” nor “black,” nor “brown,” but comprised their own specific racial caste. “Whites” and free men of color alike acknowledged Jews’ strange status.44 Jewish men and free men of color staked their claims for citizenship on demonstrating not that they were like all white men, but that they were like a specific type of white man, namely those qualified to vote. Dress was a crucial proof: any freed “black or brown person who did not own land and at least ten slaves” was required to wear a blue cross on his clothing’s right shoulder. When wealthier men of color gained the right to vote, the mark became a constant, visible reminder that poor freedmen lack the qualifications to vote.45 Elite Caribbean Jewish men also argued for their proportional equality through their daily actions, including how they dressed. Dress was a key place Jews challenged anti-Jewish hostility and claims regarding Jews’ inherent inferiority. To combat the specters of being a race “in between” incapable of properly controlling themselves or participating in political life, between 1800 and 1830, Caribbean Jewish men commissioned portraits on ivory that depicted them as worthy Apollonians: rigid, upright, firm, and capable of rationally governing themselves and others. In the sections that follow, I examine how Caribbean Sephardic men used (1) fabric and (2) tailoring to combat stereotypes and to style their bodies to meet the new racialized masculine ideal.

 Ibid., 22.  Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 64. Snyder, “Customs of an Unruly Race,” 151, 154–55, 159. 43  Salih, Representing Mixed Race, 54. 44  During a maroon rebellion in the 1760s, for example, a rebel leader attempted to appeal to a Jewish militiaman guarding him by arguing that Jews and people of African ancestry were “one people,” and that Jews “differ from the rest of the Whites, and they hate you.” Snyder, “Customs of an Unruly Race,” 151, 154–5, 159. 45  Salih, Representing Mixed Race, 49, 54. 41 42

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Fabric First, in the language of nineteenth-century dress, fabric embodied a person’s race, individual’s political capabilities, and virtues. Whereas high-end fabrics hugged the body and held their shape, fabrics that sagged were thought to conceal flaccid bodies and minds. Satires of Jewish men denigrate Jews and racialize them as “not quite white” by depicting Jews wearing unstylish colors and cheap cloth. In contrast, portraits made for Caribbean Jews skillfully used refined fabrics to reinforce the elite social status Jewish men desired. During the emancipation era, fabric and race were deeply intertwined. Both tailors and shopkeepers openly labeled products by race, and fabric was key to these categories. Various grades of fabric from fine to coarse signaled one’s status, with cloth at the coarse, drab end being reserved for what was un-euphemistically referred to as “Negro clothing.”46 Wearing the scratchy, stiff cloth was perceived as a stigma by those forced to endure it,47 and slave owners in both the U.S. and Caribbean strategically used poor grades of fabric to reinforce hierarchies.48Given all this, nineteenth-­ century Americans reading Benoit’s book would have noticed Benoit’s Jew wears cheap fabric, and they would have associated the fabric’s weave, garish color, and shapelessness with non-whites (Fig. 5.4). Benoit skillfully uses fabric’s social code to reinforce the racial hierarchies of his drawings. White men are dressed according to the Apollonian ideal made famous by Beau Brummell; they wear “fine” flat, matte fabrics that can be shaped to reveal the wearer’s form (Fig.  5.5). In contrast, impoverished and enslaved people of African descent, whether at the slave market or engaging in festivals, wear rough, sturdy cloth that droops and whose loose weave Benoit visualized via cross-hatching (Fig.  5.6).49 As abovementioned, by placing Isak Abraham Levy Aron in coarse, cheap 46  “Negro clothing” was advertised at least 938 times in historical newspapers between 1772 and 1857. In comparison, “trowsers” were advertised 4847 times. America’s Historical Newspapers; Caribbean Newspapers, Series 1, 1718–1876. 47  Southern slaves, for example, sometimes “referred scornfully to osnaburg as ‘[d]at ole nigger-cloth,’” and those who could, sold it to other slaves in order to buy “more refined” fabrics. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 36. 48  Skilled male slaves and house slaves, for example, received more clothes and of better quality of fabric. Unskilled women received the least and worst types of cloth. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 39. 49  While such clothing was also typically mass-produced or poorly tailored, the cloth itself was incapable of holding the kind of form that the new style required.

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Fig. 5.5  Pierre Jacques Benoit, “House Servants Going to Church, Paramaribo, Suriname, ca. 1831.” Voyage a Surinam. (Bruxelles, 1839), fig. 24. (Courtesy the John Carter Brown Library)

cloth, Benoit reinforced the Jewish shop-owners’ marginal racial status and positioned him as “non-white” in the colony’s social system. The fabric positions Levy as coarse, low, and uncivilized. In contrast to Benoit’s “coarse” Jew, Caribbean Sephardic men used fabric’s idiom in their own portraits to fashion themselves as refined, elevated, and full of virtue. For example, in his 1820–1830 portrait, Surinamese Jew Judah Eleazer Lyons wears the right kind of cloth: smooth, crisp, and tightly fitting (Fig. 5.7).50 Lyons’ dress carefully conforms to wealthy whites’ clothing style, particularly in his attention to wool coats and linen shirts (Fig. 5.5).51  Brilliant, Facing the New World, 70.  Benoit, Voyage à Surinam. Miniatures such as the portrait of Lyons were typically commissioned by the sitter or close family members. The portraits required at least three sittings to complete and the wearer’s clothes helped determine other aspects of the portrait, such as background colors. Whittock, The Miniature Painter’s Manual, 8, 33, 44. 50 51

Fig. 5.6  Detail of Pierre Jacques Benoit, Voyage a Surinam (Bruxelles, 1839), fig. 38. (Courtesy John Carter Brown Library [Left]). Detail of Pierre Jacques Benoit, Voyage a Surinam (Bruxelles, 1839), fig. 32. (Courtesy John Carter Brown Library. [Right]) Fig. 5.7  Anonymous, “Judah Eleazar Lyons.” Ca. 1820–1830. Watercolor on Ivory Miniature. (American Jewish Historical Society)

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Fig. 5.8  John Ramage, “Jacob de Leon.” 1789. Watercolor on Ivory Miniature. (American Jewish Historical Society)

Lyons was not alone in his clothing choices: portraits of Caribbean Sephardic men from the first three decades of the nineteenth century unilaterally depict them wearing dark woolen coats with stiff linen shirts. Lyons’ fine wool and crisp linen contrasts sharply with the fabrics worn by earlier Caribbean Sephardim, who favored colorful velvets and lace (Fig.  5.8). The late eighteenth-century portraits of plantation owner Abraham Moise (now in a private collection)52 and Jamaican Jacob de Leon (Fig. 5.8) provide excellent examples of the earlier use of soft velvet. In these earlier portraits, the soft folds of the velvet signaled an aristocratic dignity and restraint. Yet, as the nineteenth century beckoned, velvet became seen as too soft and unmanly. Wool, more capable of retaining a rigid shape, dominated the white men’s suit market. The velvet of the earlier generation had also become unseemly by the 1790s because of the rich colors velvet tended to employ. Just as a fabric’s  Of Dutch St. Eustatius and French Santo Domingo.

52

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weave conveyed race and prestige, so too a fabric’s color correlated to one’s status. Again, the new men’s fashion rebelled against egalitarian impulses. Brightly colored silks and velvet had distinguished the early eighteenth-century gentleman from his social inferiors. By the 1790s, however, brightly colored cloth was widely available, thanks to the industrial revolution.53 Bright colors were no longer elite. Moreover, within the Caribbean, brightly colored fabrics took on a racial cast. As Steeve Buckridge notes, such cloth was popular among people of African descent in the Caribbean, as it was “reminiscent of the vibrant colors of West African dress.” Indeed, European travelers of the era made disparaging comments about how the blending of bright colors like red, green, and pink was popular among the “mulatto and negro population” of the Caribbean.54 Both Pierre Jacques Benoit and Jamaican Jewish artist Isaac Mendes Belisario use brightly colored fabric to distinguish white men from non-whites and women. In Belisario’s work white men and Jews’ muted palette sets them apart from men of African descent, whom Benoit depicts wearing bright, contrasting colors, such as suits that combine blue and white striped pants and red and white striped tops (Fig. 5.9).55 Indeed, to a large extent Belisario’s 1837 work Sketches of Character is all about clothing and the “character” of a people. Sketches of Character is perhaps most famous for its portrayal of the clothes worn in Kingston during Jonkonnu street parades—a Jamaican festival with roots in Igbo, Yoruba, and other West and Central African cultural practices (Fig. 5.9). Belisario’s depictions of Jonkonnu remain a subject of great debate. Theater critic Peter Reed argues that the costumes depicted by Belisario subvert the racialized discourse of clothing: The whiteface mask and wig mimic the island’s English residents, reversing white theatre’s popular blackface acts with deliberate irony. Gloves evoke the elitism of hands that need not engage in dirtying work.56  Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 46. Hollander, Sex & Suits, 58–59.  Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 62. 55  See for example Belisario’s “Samuel Sharpe,” (1839) and “Rev. Isaac Lopez,” (1846) in contrast to “French Set Girls” from Sketches of Character (1837). Ranston, Belisario: Sketches of Character. 56   Reed, “‘There was no resisting John Canoe’: Circum-Atlantic Transracial Performance,” 65–85. 53 54

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Fig. 5.9  Isaac Mendes Belisario, Sketches of Character, 1837. (Yale University)

Yet for other scholars, Belisario’s images of Afro-Jamaicans contains rather than exposes the “subversive element of the carnivalesque.”57 Cloth color is a key part of this containment: the vibrant display marks the participants as socially subordinate. For Belisario, women and people of color wear vibrant colours: white men do not. Indeed, in contrast to the colorful dress of women and Afro-Jamaicans, Belisario depicts Jewish men’s clothing—like that of white men—as subdued. In Belisario’s portrait of Rabbi Isaac Lopez (1846), for example, the only color other than the staid black and white of the rabbi’s clothes lies literally at the fringes of his costume on his silk tallit—a garment that would only be worn while praying and otherwise would be folded up and tucked away, and in many cases left behind in the synagogue in cabinets built into seats. Colored garments were something Jewish men put on for religious purposes, then removed as they went about their daily lives. The 57  Ward, “Redrawing Jamaica,” Stuart Hall, “Afterword: Legacies of Anglo-Caribbean Culture,” in Barringer, Forrester and Martinez-Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 181.

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timing of Belisario’s claims was crucial: Sketches of Character was published in 1837 just as the “apprenticeship” of formerly enslaved people was ending. The book appeared just after elite Jews and elite men of color obtained the vote and the ability to hold public office.58 Belisario’s color hierarchies reflect his audience: “About a third of the subscribers to Belisario’s folios were Jamaican Sephardim.”59 Belisario depiction of Jewish men’s clothing underscores Jews’ ability to cross racial boundaries into whiteness in ways that Belisario’s Afro-Jamaican performers emphatically do not. Whereas the portraits of Jewish artist Isaac Mendes Belisario use clothing to align Jews with whiteness, we find something quite different from Benoit’s anti-Jewish hostility. In Benoit’s images, Jewish men are aligned with Native Americans and men of African descent through their mutual use of vibrantly colored clothing (Fig. 5.4). In contrast, Benoit paints the clothing of white men as subdued (Fig. 5.5). In order to denigrate Isak Abraham Levy Aron, for example, Benoit depicts him as wearing a vibrant blue coat that echoes the colors of a nearby Native American woman. The color and position of Levy’s sleeve mirror the similarly colored scarf that covers only part of the bottom of the Native American women visiting his store, thereby underscoring Benoit’s argument about  the instability of Jews as a racial category. As in Belisario’s work, ivory miniatures commissioned by Caribbean Sephardic men adhere to a color palette that suggested Jews should be racially assigned to the category “white.” The shift in men’s color palette was key to the new, white elite male fashion. The new neoclassical man favored clothes that used “white, skin tones, [navy] blue, gray and black.”60 In England, these colors owed their allegiance to the clothing regulations of Eton and the military, but also reflected a misunderstanding of classical sculpture, which was known to men of the era only in stark, white simplicity.61 Whereas Sephardic men a generation earlier had felt free to wear bright blue or deep maroon velvet (Fig. 5.8), portraits of the 1800s–1830s unilaterally favor a dark black jacket and white shirt, usually accompanied by a white vest, as in the portrait of Judah Eleazer Lyons (Fig. 5.7). These portraits give us an unusual glimpse into the daywear worn by early  Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 64.  Schorsch, “Sephardic Business,” 483–503. Dian Kriz, “Belisario’s ‘Kingston Cries’,” in Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 166. 60  Kelly, Beau Brummell, 102. 61  Later scholars would reveal that classical sculpture had originally been painted in vivid colors. 58 59

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American Jews. Today Museum collections tend to favor evening vests, such as the plain white formal satin vest from the 1830s at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the silk brocaded wedding vest from the marriage of Barbadian-born John Montefiore, now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (Fig. 5.10).62 Born to multiracial parents of Jewish, British, and African ancestry, John was given the racial designation “free coloured person” in his Barbadian baptismal records.63 By the time of his wedding in England to Julia Norman, however, his race was left undesignated.64 Racially ambiguous, John’s wealth and ability to travel helped him

Fig. 5.10  John Montefiore vest, 1840s. (Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum)

 “Evening Vest,” MET.  John Montefiore Baptism 23 Feb 1820, “Barbados Church Records, 1637–1887.” 64  20 January 1845. Lambeth District, Vol. 4, p. 205. England, Marriages, 1538–1973. 62 63

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Fig. 5.11  Anonymous, “Portrait of Isaac Lopez Brandon” (Early Nineteenth Century). Watercolor on Ivory, Miniature. (Courtesy of American Jewish Historical Society)

cross color lines. His children were accepted as white, voting citizens. His clothing choices reinforce his status. John Montefiore was not the only person of mixed Jewish ancestry to use clothing in strategic ways. An intriguing use of the “dark jacket, white shirt, and white vest” trio associated with white elites appears in the portrait of young Isaac Lopez Brandon of Barbados (Fig. 5.11). Brandon’s portrait was made ca. 1810–1820, a decade when his racial status was openly disputed and just prior to his reclassification from “free colored” to white. As the son of Abraham Rodrigues Brandon and an enslaved woman named Sarah Esther Gill, Isaac Lopez Brandon had found himself at the center of debates about Jewish emancipation in Barbados in 1819–20.65 The Anglican legislature amended the proposal to increase Jewish rights as long as Isaac and other Jews with African ancestry were barred from voting. After a fierce debate, the synagogue went along with this request 65  Nidhe Israel Minute Books, 8.23. For a transcription of these debates see Hoberman, Leibman, and Surowitz-Israel, Jews in the Americas, 334–350.

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(though the British King later overturned the bill). Isaac—now cast to the margins of the synagogue—chose to immigrate to the United States. Racially ambiguous, Isaac’s racial assignment changed as he moved around the Atlantic world. In the earliest documents, such as his former owner’s 1807 will, Isaac is referred to explicitly as “a free mulatto boy.”66 When he was in Suriname in 1812 to convert to Judaism, local census takers categorized him as “free colored.”67 Yet, by 1824, both Isaac and his sister (also born enslaved) had married into the Jewish community of New York’s Shearith Israel. In 1820, census takers deemed Isaac’s sister white. By 1829 Isaac had been naturalized as a US citizen, a privilege that was denied to “colored persons” at that time. He had also become a voting member of Shearith Israel. Clothing helped solidify his case as being worthy of rights. Unlike Benoit’s shopkeeper whose fabrics reinforces his racial slippage, the fabric and color of Isaac Lopez Brandon’s suit insists upon his solidity as a white, enfranchisable citizen. The limited palette of the suits of Lyons, Brandon, and other Sephardic men of the era underscored the “sculptural qualities” of the new suits, whose lines required a great deal of money and specialized labor to construct.68 This leads me to the second part of my argument about the new language of Sephardic dress: expert tailoring.

Tailoring Just as men on both sides of the emancipation debates used fabric to style Jewish men’s fitness for enfranchisement, so too did tailoring play an important role in placing Jews in the newly formulated racial hierarchies. Innovations in how suits were cut and sewn were as essential to the new male fashion as the fabrics and colors suits used. These new innovations help sculpt the ideal male body so as to suggest that the wearer was not only self-governing, but also capable of governing others. The new tailoring restyled men’s bodies from their necks to their feet; however, since most portraits of Jewish Caribbean men were painted in miniature depicting men from the waist on up, I focus here solely on innovations in the coat, collar, and shirt. Satires racialized Jews through sagging, limp torsos  Will of Hannah Ester Lopez.  A list of 1351 “free black and coloured” heads of families. Conversion and Circumcision of Isaac Lopez Brandon. 68  Kelly, Beau Brummell, 102, 115–117. 66 67

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and loose shirts and necklines. Sephardic miniatures combatted stereotypes of flaccid Jewish men. They used coats, collars, and shirts to present the men as upright and self-governed citizens. One of the key sculptural innovations of the early nineteenth-century suit was how coats were shaped. Starting in the 1790s, tailors redesigned suits to make the torso appear upright and firm. A generation earlier, jackets had favored narrow, sloping shoulders and limp collars (Fig. 5.8). Such coats were worn long, and fuller at the bottom than at the top. Indeed, the ideal eighteenth-century male up through the 1780s was pear-shaped, round, and bottom heavy. Using today’s standards, the pear shape may seem more feminine than masculine, but in the mid-eighteenth century, the soft, limp, sensual coats emphasized an elegant, graceful, aristocratic manhood.69 By the 1790s, however, this ideal had fallen out of fashion. Men signaled their self-governance through a new type of tailored coat that sculpted the torso into a more V-like shape. The coat called attention to a man’s “strong shoulders and chest, narrow waist, and shaped hips.”70 In their own portraits, Sephardic men unilaterally embraced this new fashion. The new coat was created through a system of darting that along with flatter fabric helped “mold the coat inward from the widest point at the shoulders” to create an idealized torso similar to those found in classical statues.71 If a man’s torso was naturally lacking, padding was added to enhance the frame, to give it a military-like look, and to ensure that it fit the classical model.72 The tailoring required to create the white, elite, structured look was precise, time consuming, and extremely expensive. Literally thousands of individual stitches “in patterns like cornrows” ensured that the fit was correct and stayed in place.73 Some men even wore corsets to help them achieve the newly desired “stiff perfection” of the torso’s V. Ideally, however, a man’s body was self-disciplined enough to pull off the look without artificial restraints.74 The jackets of Isaac Lopez Brandon, Judah Eleazer Lyons, Alexandre Lindo, and Abraham Lindo reveal this new exquisite tailoring (Figs. 5.11 69  Brilliant, Facing the New World, 77; Vincent, The Anatomy of Fashion, 69–70; Hollander, Sex and Suits, 83. 70  Takeda, Reigning Men, 174. 71  Kelly, Beau Brummel, 114–115. 72  Ibid., 116. 73  Ibid., 115. 74  Vincent, The Anatomy of Fashion, 53.

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and 5.7).75 Unlike the loose jacket of Levy in Benoit’s drawing, Sephardic men’s jackets hug their torsos and sculpt their bodies. Like classical statuary, math and proportion governed the artistic process. To ensure the ensemble’s perfect fit, tailors used a new device—the measuring tape. Standardized measurements allowed tailors to understand the body’s geometry and use anthropometry—the science of ratios—in their patterns.76 The result was so profound that Lord Byron once noted about fashion icon Beau Brummell, “you might almost say the body thought.”77 Byron’s word choice is significant, since the beautiful body was also a logical, thinking body. At each step in the process, new exquisite tailoring revealed the “classical” male body lying below the cloth. Anthropometry could also be used against men, however, as seen in Benoit’s depiction of the shop of Isak Abraham Levy Aron (Fig. 5.4). Benoit places a tape measure in the hands of Petro Cofey Abouka, the multiracial “snerie” (tailor) to underscore the inability of certain races to “measure up” to the ideal. Jews too often found themselves at the wrong end of the anthropometric measuring stick.78 Sephardic men countered the new racial discourse by using tailored coats to show their bodies fit the classical ideal. In addition to a close-fitting jacket, a well-made collar, neckcloth, and shirt further reinforced the wearer’s upright morals and suitability for self-­ governance. Unlike Jacob de Leon’s floppy velvet collar, elite men began to favor stiff collars whose stitches lifted the material up to frame the body’s muscles and head—the centerpiece of rational manhood. A neck cloth reinforced the new sculptural collar by stiffening the masculine form and providing a pedestal for the cranium. Made from yards of heavily starched, “fine Irish muslin,” the neck cloth was so rigid that once tied, it “prevented you from seeing your boots while standing,” a look exemplified by Beau Brummell.79 The rigid neckline was complemented by a starched linen or cambric shirt. Whereas the previous generation had

 Reproductions of the portraits of Alexandre and Abraham Lindo in Ranston, Belisario.  Takeda, Reigning Men, 173. 77  Kelly, Beau Brummell, 115. 78  Efron, Defenders of the Race, 15, 22, 95. Wade, “From Eighteenth- to NineteenthCentury Racial Science: Continuity and Change,” in Lang, ed., Race and Racism in Theory and Practice. Hrdlička, “Physical Anthropology,” 5–6. Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science. Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots, 3–14, 30–44. Hoyme, “Physical Anthropology and Its Instruments,” 410–13. 79  Vincent, The Anatomy of Fashion, 24–5. 75 76

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favored lace to connote aristocratic elegance, the new code of manhood eschewed lace in favor of a crisper front. By the early nineteenth century, then, loose tailoring, limp collars, and open shirts implied bad self-governance; however, in the Caribbean, they also took on racial associations. Benoit’s depiction of military dress underscores the racial message (Fig. 5.12). In many parts of the Caribbean, the militia were divided into racial regiments, with whites, Jews, and “mulattos” marching separately. Thus, when the militia marched in formation, they enacted the colony’s racial hierarchy. Yet the militia also called attention to the possible instability of these “inherent” racial divisions: for example, in 1769, Curaçaoans disagreed whether the offspring of

Fig. 5.12  Pierre Jacques Benoit, Voyage a Surinam (Bruxelles, 1839), fig. 28. (Courtesy the John Carter Brown Library)

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“mulattoes” and whites should serve in the white or “mulatto” militia. By 1789, they had joined the rear of the white flanks.80 In his drawings, Benoit uses tailoring to reinforce racial difference: although the multiracial and white men may appear to wear the same uniform, the tailoring of non-white men’s clothes underscore their allegedly inferior bodies: for example, their shoulders are unfashionably sloped and their collars less rigid. In the colonies and Europe, Jewish men were similarly attacked for having bodies “unsuited” to military life.81 Both satires and Jewish portraits use collars, neck cloths, and shirts to stage Sephardic manhood. Like Benoit’s portraits of “mulattos,” satires of Jews relied upon loose collars, missing neck cloths, and flaccid shirts to emphasize how Jews were “unsuited” for self-governance. In Benoit’s drawing, Levy’s collar sags. His shirt is similarly loose (Figs. 5.4 and 5.6). No stabilizing cloth swathes his neck or holds up his head. Levy’s loose garments stage him as unmanly, morally suspect, and unworthy of full citizenship. In contrast, Sephardic men’s actual collars, neck cloths, and shirts underscore disciplined bodies and heads. Judah Eleazar Lyons’ collar is so high it touches his ears. It holds his chin upward, a look also embraced by Jamaicans Alexandre and Abraham Lindo (Fig.  5.7).82 Full citizenship required a firm body led by an upright mind, and the portraits center the men’s heads on a cloth pedestal. By wearing the new fashion, Sephardic men emphasized their “natural” suitability to governance and their status as economic leaders. If the owner wanted to maintain his neck cloth’s crispness, the carefully tailored costume required a significant budget. Washing and starching the cloth meant time, labor, and access to starch, which was often taxed in the era. In wearing the starched, upright, sculpted ideal, Sephardic men revealed not only their body’s natural civility, but also their status as elites. Economic success was not inconsequential as property was inextricably linked to enfranchisement in the British West Indies. Given tropical heat and humidity, today it is hard to imagine enduring yards of stiff cloth wound around one’s neck. Living at the pinnacle of liberalism’s pyramid of proportionate equality, however, required that men bind themselves to fashion.

 Klooster, “Subordinate But Proud,” 294.  Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 40–42. Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, 127. Vink, Creole Jews, 136–8. 82  Ranston, Belisario, 3 80 81

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Clothing, Emancipation, Liberalism In conclusion, I have argued that during the emancipation era, Sephardic men in the Caribbean used clothing to enhance their position in the colonies’ rapidly shifting racial hierarchies. Thinking about Jews and liberalism in the Caribbean challenges our understanding of modern Jewish history. As Jane Gerber notes, Caribbean Jewish life “was neither simply an extension of the Jewish communities of London and Amsterdam nor an appendage of North America.”83 In the Caribbean, Jewish emancipation openly invoked the specter of race if for no other reason than Jewish and Afro-­ Caribbean emancipation movements were entangled. As fear of Caribbean violence spread to Europe and as racial science grew increasingly influential, Jews in Europe would similarly find their attempts at emancipation entangled with discussions of race. Caribbean Jews early manipulation of dress to stage claims about manliness, citizenship, and virtue would predict later struggles in mid- to nineteenth-century Europe and England. Looking at how Jews lived liberalism in the colonies also underscores how the body (rather than just minds or words) was a key site for Jewish struggle. Even as Jewish men sought to conform to a “universal” archetype of manhood, they found themselves mired in physicality, forced to display the worth of their various body parts. Thus while today the antiquated apparel detailed in Isaac Lopez’s estate inventory at the beginning of this essay may seem arbitrary, the items reflect an inordinate attention to the same embodied manhood that would become de rigueur for Caribbean Jewish men over the next two decades. Isaac’s stocking breeches are none other than Brummell’s beloved “inexpressibles”—the light-­ colored cloth trousers made to fit so tight that they were knitted like stockings. Isaac’s inventory reveals his attention to casting himself according to classical ideals. Like portraits a couple of decades later, Isaac’s wardrobe also obsessed over the head, the centerpiece of rational manhood. Isaac had not one, but three hats and pairs of eyeglasses. Cranial accessories staged his head, much as the sculptural collars and winding yards of linen later posed the heads of younger Caribbean men. Even Isaac’s silk umbrella and walking stick are indebted to the new sculptural aesthetic—they are mobile versions of the tree stump added to classical marble statues to

 Gerber, ed., Jews in the Caribbean, 2.

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support the ideal contrapposto pose.84 Material culture retrains our eyes. Focusing on objects can help us contextualize the written sources. Liberalism was written upon the body itself and bids for emancipation infused daily lives and habits.

Bibliography America’s Historical Newspapers. Naples: Readex, 2004. Arena, Valentina. 2012. Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barbados Church Records, 1637–1887. BDA. https://familysearch.org/search/ collection/1923399 Benoit, P.J. 1839. Voyage à Surinam. Societe des Beaux-Arts: Brussels. Bindman, David. 2002. Ape to Apollo. London: Reaktion Books. Brilliant, Richard, ed. 1997. Facing the New World: Jewish Portraits in Colonial and Federal America. New York: Jewish Museum. Brown, Wendy L. 1998. Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory. Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Buckridge, Steeve O. 2004. The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Caribbean Newspapers, Series 1, 1718–1876. Naples: Readex, 2004. Cohen, Robert. 1991. Jews in Another Environment: Surinam in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Colwill, Elizabeth. 1998. Sex, Savagery, and Slavery in the Shaping of the French Body Politic. In From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg, 198–223. Berkeley: University of California Press. Conversion and Circumcision of Isaac Lopez Brandon, 24 December 1812, trans. Aviva Ben-Ur, Naational Archief Netherlands, Naederlandse Portugees Israelitisch Gemeente in Suriname. de Dijn, Annelien. 2008. French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Efron, John M. 1994. Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-siècle Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press.

84  Roman and Greek marble copies of bronze statues required some sort of additional support to prop up the extra weight of the marble while maintaining the contrapposto pose. Often these struts are carved, typically in the shape of a tree trunk such as is found on the Apollo Belvedere statue. Both walking sticks and umbrellas were key to Brummell’s look, though few have suggested why. Köhler and von Sichart, A History of Costume, 388. Eisenberg, The Figure of the Dandy, 38, 67.

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Eisenberg, Davina Lee. 1996. The Figure of the Dandy in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s “Le Bonheur Dans Le Crime”. P. Lang. Endelman, Todd M. 1997. Comparing Jewish Societies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1998. ‘A Hebrew to the End’: The Emergence of DIsraeli’s Jewishness. In The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli, 1818–1851, ed. Charles Richmond and Paul Smith, 106–130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. England, Marriages, 1538–1973. Salt Lake City: FamilySearch, 2013. “Evening Vest” (Ca. 1830). American. Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Wismer H. Townsend, 1966. Accession number 2009.300.904. Faber, Eli. 2000. Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight. New York: NYU Press. Felsenstein, Frank. 1995. The Jew as Other: A Century of English Caricature, 1730–1830: An Exhibition, April 6–July 31, 1995. New York: Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Furstenberg, François. 2003. Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse. Journal of American History 89 (4): 1295–1330. https://doi.org/10.2307/3092544. Gerber, Jane S., ed. 2014. The Jews in the Caribbean. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Gilman, Sander L. 1991. The Jew’s Body. New York/London: Routledge. ———. 1999. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goldstein, Eric L. 2006. The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Groll, Temminck, et  al. 2002. Dutch Overseas: Architectural Survey: Mutual Heritage of Four Centuries in Three Continents. Zwolle: Waanders. Hall, Stuart. 2007. Afterword: Legacies of Anglo-Caribbean Culture – a Diasporic Perspective. In Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, ed. T.J. Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, 179–195. New Haven: Yale University Press. Handler, Jerome. 1974. The Unappropriated People: Freedmen in the Slave Society of Barbados. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Haulman, Kate. 2011. Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hoberman, Michael, Laura Arnold Leibman, and Hili Surowitz-Israel. 2017. Jews in the Americas, 1776–1826. New York: Routledge. Hoffman, Edith Warren. 1990. A Footnote to Eugène Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’. Source: Notes in the History of Art 9 (3): 24–30. Hollander, Anne. 1994. Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress. New York: Alfred A Knopf.

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Hoyme, Lucile E. 1953. Physical Anthropology and Its Instruments: An Historical Study. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 9 (4): 408–430. Hoyos, F.A. 1987. Barbados Comes of Age: From Early Strivings to Happy Fulfilment. London: Macmillan Caribbean. Hrdlička, Aleš. 1918. Physical Anthropology: Its Scope and Aims; Its History and Present Status in America. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 1 (1): 3–23. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.1330010102. Hughes, Clair. 2017. Hats. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Hunt, Lynn. 1998. Freedom of Dress in Revolutionary France. In From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg, 224–250. Berkeley: University of California Press. Johnson, Willis. 1998. The Myth of Jewish Male Menses. Journal of Medieval History 24 (3): 273–295. Jones, C. 2007. Engendering Whiteness: White Women and Colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627–1865. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Katz, David S. 1999. Shylock’s Gender: Jewish Male Menstruation in Early Modern England. The Review of English Studies, New Series 50 (200): 440–462. Kelly, Ian. 2006. Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style. New York: Free Press. Kirsch, Adam. 2008. Benjamin Disraeli. New York: Nextbook. Klooster, Wim. 1994. Subordinate But Proud: Curaçao’s Free Blacks and Mulattoes in the Eighteenth Century. Nieuwe West-Indische gids 68 (3): 283–300. Köhler, Karl, and Emma Von Sichart. 1963. A History of Costume. New  York: Dover Publications. Korshak, Yvonne. 1987. The Liberty Cap as a Revolutionary Symbol in America and France. Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1 (2): 53–69. Kriz, Kay Dian. 2007. Belisario’s ‘Kingston Cries’ and the Refinement of Jewish Identity in the Late 1830s. In Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, ed. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, 165–177. New Haven: Yale University Press. Leibman, Laura Arnold, and Sam May. 2015. Making Jews: Race, Gender and Identity in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation. American Jewish History 99 (1): 1–26. A list of 1351 ‘free black and coloured’ heads of families with the total number of their families and of their slaves, together with the first batch of population [census] returns number 1–200 collected as required by the governor’s proclamation of 17 October 1811. Colonial Office and Predecessors: Surinam Original Correspondence. CO 278/22. National Archives, Kew, UK. Melzer, Sara E., and Kathryn Norberg. 1998. From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Mendelsohn, Adam. 2015. The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire. New York: New York University Press. Newton, Melanie J. 2008. The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Nidhe Israel Minute Books, Volumes 2 & 3. Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation Archives. London Metropolitan Archives, London, England. Petrey, Sandy. 2005. In the Court of the Pear King: French Culture and the Rise of Realism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ranston, Jackie. 2008. Belisario: Sketches of Character. Kingston: Mill Press. Reed, Peter. 2007. ‘There Was No Resisting John Canoe’: Circum-Atlantic Transracial Performance. Theatre History Studies 27 (1): 65–85. Resnick, Irven M. 2000. Medieval Roots of the Myth of Jewish Male Menses. Harvard Theological Review 93 (3): 241–263. Rupert, Linda M. 2012. Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Salih, S. 2010. Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present. London: Routledge. Schorsch, Jonathan. 2010. Sephardic Business: Early Modern Atlantic Style. Jewish Quarterly Review 100 (3): 483–503. https://doi.org/10.1353/jqr.0.0088. Snyder, Holly. 2007. Customs of an Unruly Race: The Political Context of Jamaica Jewry, 1670–1831. In Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, ed. T.J.  Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, 151–161. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stanton, William Ragan. 1960. The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–59. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stepan, Nancy. 1982. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960. Hamden: Archon Books. Stepinwall, Alyssa Goldstein. 2003. Eliminating Race, Eliminating Difference: Blacks, Jews, and the Abbé Grégoire. In The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed. Sue Peabody and Tyler Edward Stovall. Durham: Duke University Press. Takeda, Sharon Sadako, et  al. 2016. Reigning Men: Fashion in Menswear, 1715–2015. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Toussaint, Hélène. 1982. La Liberté Guidant Le Peuple De Delacroix: Catalogue. Paris: Éditions De La Réunion Des Musées Nationaux. Vincent, Susan. 2010. The Anatomy of Fashion: Dressing the Body from the Renaissance to Today. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Vink, Wieke. 2010. Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname. Leiden: KITLV Press. Wade, Maurice L. 2000. From Eighteenth- to Nineteenth-Century Racial Science: Continuity and Change. In Race and Racism in Theory and Practice, ed. Berel Lang, 27–44. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Ward, Candace. 2011. Redrawing Jamaica: The Art and Worlds of Isaac Mendes Belisario. Eighteenth-Century Studies 44 (2): 289–291. Wedding Waistcoat | V&A Search the Collections. V and A Collections, February 15, 2017. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O230705. Whittock, Nathaniel. 1844. The Miniature Painter’s Manual: Containing Progressive Lessons on the Art of Drawing and Painting Likenesses from Life on Card-Board, Vellum and Ivory: With Concise Remarks on the Delineation of Character and Caricature. London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper. Will of Hannah Ester Lopez. Proved 23.

CHAPTER 6

Liberalism, Antisemitism and Everyday Life in Vienna: The Tragic Case of Heinrich Jaques (1831–94) Jonathan Kwan

In his compendious three volume memoirs, the long-term liberal leader Ernst Plener noted the developing antisemitic environment in Vienna during the 1880s. He asserted that sensitive Jews had been affected, in particular the liberal parliamentary representative of Vienna’s first district, Heinrich Jaques.1 “I don’t believe myself to be mistaken,” Plener wrote, “if I hypothesise that the suicide of the parliamentary representative Dr. Jaques, a highly educated lawyer, can be traced to this motive [antisemitism].”2 A parliamentarian, lawyer, financier and journalist, Heinrich Jaques committed suicide in his legal office on 25 January 1894. Jaques, who never married, had lived for many years first with his mother 1  This was for the Reichsrat or Cisleithanian parliament, which encompassed the so-called Alpine lands, Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, amongst other territories (but not Hungary). 2  Plener, Erinnerungen. Band 2 234.

J. Kwan (*) Department of History, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_6

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(until her death in 1877) then with his sister Louise Beyfuss (until her early death in 1883), before setting up his own house and caring for his nephew and nieces. One of his nieces had married his former trainee Raimund Grübl, the current liberal Deputy Mayor of Vienna. Just one year later Grübl—now as Mayor—would definitively lose council elections to the antisemitic, Christian Social party of Karl Lueger.3 Two letters were found on Jaques’s desk: one addressed to his immediate heir, his great-­ nephew (Grübl’s son, the painter Hermann Beyfuss), the other to his long-term housekeeper, a local businesswoman. While there is a considerable historiography on Viennese Jewry, this article presents two different perspectives.4 First, Jaques’s career as a parliamentarian necessitates a discussion of Jews in the wider political world— a relatively neglected topic in the Austrian context.5 Second, this article will focus on the intersection between Jaques’s private, social and political lives. He had a variegated and rich life. Not only was Jaques a committed liberal activist in politics, he also tried to live up to liberal, humanist ideals in his everyday life. Elaine Hadley has recently argued that the attempt to live according to liberal ideals—striving to become a disinterested, moderate, “objective” individual; someone who embodied abstract principles—involved considerable tension with the realities of a corporeal life and concrete social conditions.6 For Jewish liberals the tensions and risks of living the liberal life were considerably heightened. By embracing liberalism and its reforms, Jews often shed the patterns of life that had defined them as Jews and moved away from traditional conceptions of close-knit Jewish communities. A liberal society based on equal, individual rights meant integration into the wider world. But, if the ideal liberal society of abstracted individuals could not be attained and integration 3  The obituaries in the newspapers are a good source of information about Jaques’s life and death. Neue Freie Presse (NFP), January 25–26 and 29, 1894; Neues Wiener Tagblattes (NWT), January 26, 1894; Die Presse, January 26 and 29, 1894; Wiener Sonn– und Montags-Zeitung, January 29, 1894 and Neues Wiener Journal (NWJ), January 26, 1894. 4  The emphasis has been on cultural, social, intellectual and general political history (especially the rise of antisemitism). See, amongst many other works, Beller, Vienna and the Jews; Pulzer, The Rise of Political Antisemitism in Germany and Austria; Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914; and Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph. 5   A recent exception is Stachowitsch and Kreisky, eds., Jüdische Identitäten und Antisemitische Politiken, which is mostly concerned with antisemitism rather than Jewish parliamentarians. Gary Cohen has written on the very active role of Jews in Prague politics. Cohen, “Jews in German Liberal Politics,” 55–74. 6  Hadley, Living Liberalism

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proved problematic, then assimilated, secularized liberal Jews would be caught in-­between worlds, no longer entirely comfortable within Jewish institutions but also not fully accepted in wider society. Jaques provides a compelling case study of a wealthy, successful Jewish politician continuing to believe in liberalism and its promised life, yet facing the dilemmas of rising, widespread antisemitism and the evident failure of liberal dreams. For Jaques and other traditional liberals, antisemitism was an outdated prejudice that might occasionally appear but would, over time, naturally fade. Yet, in reality, from the 1880s onwards, antisemitism both strengthened and broadened, becoming a permanent factor in politics and social life. The effects on liberals—even more so for liberal Jews—could be emotional, psychological and immensely dislocating. “Wherever I look, I am confronted by disgusting vulgarity. Lichtenstein, Lueger etc. [The leaders of the Christian Socials]. Barbarity is breaking out,” wrote Josephine Wertheimstein, a distant relative of Jaques.7 In his final years, overcome with depression and melancholy, the immensely rich Jaques believed he had no money to live on and continually enquired at the local bank about his income—a tragic image of the failing symbiosis between liberalism and Jews in Vienna.

Becoming a Jewish Liberal: Thinking and Living in Mid-Century Vienna In temperament, sensibility and way of life, Jaques represented a typical, “notable” liberal of the mid-nineteenth century. He dressed in an old fashioned, Vormärz style and spoke with flourish as well as a hint of vanity. He played virtuoso cello and frequented the fashionable salons while also conducting a prominent and successful legal practice (both in trials and general business matters). He had broad learning and took leading position in many public associations. From a young age Jaques was extremely ambitious.8 Progressive Jews like Jaques formed the intellectual, organizational and electoral vanguard of the liberal movement.9

7  Kann, ed., Briefe an, von und um Josephine von Wertheimstein, 417–8. Letter to T. Gomperz dated 10 March 1891. 8  Gomperz, ed., Theodor Gomperz 1832–1912. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen. Vol. 1, 31. 9  Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 123 and 141.

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Jaques, through his mother Charlotte von Wertheimstein, came from one of the richest and most prominent Jewish banking families in Vienna.10 His father, Karl Jaques, a businessman from Hannover, joined his wife’s family bank, Hermann von Wertheimstein and Sons, and moved to Vienna, where Jaques was born in 1831. Jaques’s milieu was centred around wealthy, educated, cultured, Western-oriented Viennese Jews.11 His circle of friends overlapped with his wider extended family. His oldest and closest friend was Theodor Gomperz, a distant cousin, who would later become Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Vienna. Gomperz and Jaques met as teenagers at a family gathering.12 While his social circle was mainly upper class Viennese Jews, there was significant intermingling with progressive, liberal non-Jews (though even here, mild prejudices against Jews often persisted). Jaques sought friendship with the older poet and politician Anton Auersperg (pen-name Anastasius Grün) and became a regular correspondent. One of Jaques’s best friends was Johann Nepomuk Berger, whose grandparents on his mother’s side were converted Jews. Berger, like many in Jaques social and political world, was intensely intellectual, argumentative and self-confident.13 Within Jaques’s milieu, there was often an ambivalent relationship towards Judaism and Jewish traditions. Theodor Gomperz’s grandfather Lazar Auspitz, for example, was a committed believer in the Enlightenment and broke with all religious rituals and ceremonies.14 In spring of 1849 he said to the young Theodor that “in fifteen or twenty years the forms of Jewishness will be destroyed [vernichtet].”15 Along with the move away from Jewish traditions, there was a concomitant drive for assimilation and integration into Austrian society.16 Conversion was one indicator, though there could be many motives apart from conviction (e.g., career progression  Gaugusch, Wer einmal war, is an invaluable resource tracing the various family trees.  For background see Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 71–98 and 127–74. A wonderful evocation of Jaques’s world can be found in Rossbacher, Literatur und Bürgertum. 12  Gomperz, Theodor Gomperz, 30. 13  See the remarkable book, Berger and Berger, Im Vaterhaus. 14  Gomperz, “Lebenserinnerungen,” in Essays und Erinnerungen, 5. 15  Gomperz, “Lebenserinnerungen,” 5. 16  See, for example, Hanak, “Problems of Jewish Assimilation in Austria-Hungary in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries,” in Thane, Crossick and Floud, eds., The Power of the Past, 235–50; Klein, “Assimilation and the Demise of Liberal Political Tradition in Vienna, 1860–1914,” in Bronsen, ed., Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933, 234–61; McCagg, “The Assimilation of Jews in Austria,” in Vago, ed., Jewish Assimilation in Modern Times, 127–40 and Rozenblit, “Jewish Assimilation in Habsburg Vienna,” in Frankel and Zipperstein, eds., 10 11

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or marriage). Vienna had the highest rate of conversion in Europe.17 Theodor Gomperz wished his sons to convert, which they both did in the early twentieth century.18 Jaques’s three immediate heirs—his great-­ nephew and his great-nieces (the daughters of Raimund Grübl)—all converted to Catholicism. Part of the assimilationist drive was a dedication to the intellectual traditions of Western Enlightenment culture, in particular German humanism. Civilization or “culture” promised universal values and a “neutral” field where only intellect, learning and knowledge counted, rather than religious affiliation or family background.19 For many Jews, German and European culture provided guidance, inspiration, meaning and solace to their lives. Jaques’s close circle of friends was intensely intellectual. In their late teens and early twenties Jaques and Gomperz exchanged letters discussing ancient Greek philosophers, the topic which would later make Gomperz’s reputation.20 In another letter, Gomperz, at the impressionable age of twenty-one, described the tremendous effect of reading John Stuart Mill’s “System of Logic.” Gomperz immediately began translating the text into German and visited Mill, becoming his friend and overseeing the translation of Mill’s works into German. Jaques’s cultural interests revolved around literature and music. He would become a director at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Music Lovers), Vice-President of the Theater –und Musikausstellung (Theatre and Music Fair) and a co-­founder of the Viennese Grillparzer-Gesellschaft. In politics, like many in his generation, the great defining event in Jaques’s life was the 1848 revolution. Only seventeen years old at the time, he participated in the early student meetings at university in March 1848.21 There is no record of Jaques’s experiences and activities in 1848, though he would later write in a generalized sense about the course of the revolutions and the aftermath. Overall Jaques supported the standard liberal demands—freedom of speech, citizen rights, constitutional rule—and Assimilation and Community, 22,545 along with the general works on Austrian and Viennese Jews. 17  Rozenblit, “Assimilation,” 237. 18  Rossbacher, Literatur und Bürgertum, 316 and Gaugusch. Wer einmal war, 970–9. 19  Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 144–64; Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna, 131–63 and Wistrich, “The Modernization of Viennese Jewry,” in Katz, ed., Toward Modernity, 43–70. 20  Gomperz, Theodor Gomperz, 80 and 97–98. 21  Wienbibliothek, Nachlass Ludwig August Frankl von Hochwart, 101,705. Letter From H. Jaques to L.A. Frankl, 13 March 1869.

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the desire for a progressive Austrian state. The idea of a Greater Germany where Austria would be a simple province, however, did not attract him.22 The greatest problem with the series of revolutions in 1848–49, Jaques argued, was its separatist tendencies, especially from the Czechs, who quickly became pan-Slav, and the Hungarians, who pursued their nationalist policies with “suicidal fanaticism.”23 After the end of absolutism, the German part of Austria was, above all, striving for political freedom. Yet it saw itself isolated between Magyar and Slav opposition forces, threatened through numerical and physical predominance, drowned.24

In the wake of the revolution, Austria faced a difficult task. Jaques conceded that the administrative aspects of the new bureaucratic, unified state had been organized well, though he disagreed with its absolutist tendencies.25 As Austria opened to reform following its defeat in Northern Italy in 1859, Jaques wrote prolifically on the pressing political issues, taking advantage of the relaxation in censorship. Jaques, like other Jewish liberals, was shaping and pushing the political agenda, both in the press and organizationally. In general, Jaques argued for a juste milieu allowing as much free political movement and parliamentary life as was compatible with the unity of the Empire and the equality of nationalities.26 This could be provided for by a constitution, which would secure the rights of citizens, create a political framework and temper any possible excesses of absolutist government. Here Jaques steered a moderate, middle course between the “integrated state, the Great Power status of Austria” and the “constitutional, liberal development in the sense and spirit of the people.”27 His output included a bestselling pamphlet on the position of Jews; his most famous work. In the secondary literature, it is often cited as a typical example of the liberal, assimilationist position within the Jewish community

 Jaques, Österreichs Desorganisation und Reorganisation, 41–3.  Ibid., 43–58. Quote p. 58. 24  Ibid., 58. 25  Ibid., 194. 26  Ibid., 202. These ideas are also evident in Jaques, Über unser Parlament. 27  Jaques, Die Verfassung und unsere dringendsten Aufgaben, 19. 22 23

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and it certainly contains those sentiments.28 Yet the pamphlet should also be placed in the context of Jaques’s other contemporaneous publications and the ongoing articulation of Austrian liberal ideas. For Jaques, the status of Jews was part of and subordinate to the ambitious, wide-­ranging, idealistic liberal project to modernize, reform and rejuvenate Austria. In his words: “our question [the Jewish question], which I regard in general as a minor one, is nevertheless an organic part of the whole …”29 He emphasized in the introduction that the purpose of the pamphlet was not primarily “for the matter of my Jewish co-religionists,” rather “for the development and ennoblement of my Austrian fatherland.”30 Significantly, it is in his pamphlet on the Jews that the clearest articulation of Jaques’s overall political views can be found. Yes … I want a great, strong, unified, monarchical and, at the same time, liberal Austria – an Austria with orderly state finances, [an Austria] that is a refuge and shield facilitating the development of all intellectual and material forces, an Austria that is strong in the brotherhood of all its nationalities and all its confessions, a brotherhood that will develop and be strengthened because all feel that in Austria they live well and free under the protection of enlightened laws … And, finally, I want an Austria that has the closest link to Germany … because everything that Austria is eagerly striving for [individual rights, autonomy of associations] is and will remain only and exclusively the product and the fruit of the real German spirit.31

These ideas reflected the fundaments of mainstream Austro-German liberalism—an integrated state, a constitutional system (with guaranteed rights) and faith in Austria’s fundamentally German nature.32 What was the place of Jews in Jaques’s vision? According to Jaques, Jews would be fully emancipated with equal citizenship rights, no special taxes and no restrictions on residence or property-ownership. He writes “the Jews, with an enthusiasm like never before, will strive to become free 28  Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 135; Grunwald, History of Jews in Vienna, 397–400; Kobler, “The Contribution of Austrian Jews to Jurisprudence,” in Fraenkel, ed., The Jews of Austria, 28; and Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna, pp. 142–4. 29  Jaques, Denkschrift über die Stellung der Juden in Österreich, cvi. 30  Ibid., viii. 31  Ibid., cxvii–cxviii. 32  Kwan, Liberalism and the Habsburg Monarchy, 1–24. On Austrian liberalism and the Jews specifically see Kwan, Liberalism and the Habsburg Monarchy, 143–56 and Pulzer, “The Austrian Liberals and the Jewish Question 1867–1914,” 131–42.

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people (Menschen) and, at the same time, will also be useful, beneficial and honorable citizens.”33 A modern constitutional, progressive state would be mutually beneficial for Austria and its Jews, Jaques argued. On the one hand, the Austrian state and the general welfare of all its peoples would profit from the contribution of the Jews, with their intelligence, capital, work ethic and business-sense. On the other hand, the Jews would feel positive effects from engagement and membership in the wider world. According to Jaques, the Jews had been too isolated for centuries so with integration “in the place of stagnation, a fresh, lively current (Strömung) enters.”34 Constitutional rights coupled with a legislative and institutional framework would then finally offer legal security to Jewish people both as a religious community and as individual citizens. There would be fixed rules and regulations for all citizens, rather than specific decrees only applicable to Jews. Jaques wrote that If somehow, the Imperial legislation, following the wise policies of State, [Staatsklugheit], adopts the task of creating a work of humanity through ‘modern’ regulation, it would remove the sword of Damocles from the existence of a million people [the Jews] … finally [there will be] fixed ground under [our] feet.35

Jaques assumed that, after full emancipation and with assured legal security, Austrian Jews would, over the course of time, assimilate and become Austrian citizens. Some might think, Jaques conceded, that there were too many differences between Jews and Christians, for this ever to happen. However, he asserted that if a politics was based on “individual race and nationality,” this would go against “world history” and would not be for the “general welfare and interest.”36 In conclusion, Jaques acknowledged that his pamphlet only really addressed assimilated Western Jews. He grouped Jewish “savages” (Eastern Jews) with other “savages” (such as the worst of Polish farmers). For Jaques, all races had savage elements in need of a little Western civilization.37  Jaques, Denkschrift, cix–cx.  Ibid., xii. 35  Ibid., xcvi. Hannah Arendt wrote that Jews had a “fetish of legal equality … to them it was the unquestionable basis of eternal security.” Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 117. 36  Ibid., 44–45. 37  Ibid., 46–47. 33 34

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Many of these ideas were explored in Jaques’s most mature consideration of politics; a study of Tocqueville published in 1876.38 In particular, through discussion of Tocqueville, Jaques grappled with the nature of democratic government and its manifold implications and possibilities. According to Jaques, Tocqueville did not present democracy as a “shiny dream.”39 Tocqueville recognized the dangers of democracy; namely “the excesses of passions, the incapacity for freedom, the political immaturity that flows again and again towards the precipice of revolution.”40 There were, however, benefits from a free constitution; namely, the feeling of individual independence and personal worth.41 Tocqueville’s mission upon entering politics, Jaques asserted, was to guide through the passions towards practical realizations.42 In the conclusion, Jaques again sought a middle path that would lead towards a harmonious polity and society. He reaffirmed his belief that only “through the freest development of individuals, states and nations can attain their glory, happiness and greatness.”43 Yet freedom and equality required law, morals, religion and civilization to restrain and harness emotions and passion.44 Ultimately, there was a choice between an ordered, moral democracy and one that was chaotic and unstable. If statecraft (Staatskunst) combining “calm and resolve” was followed then a functioning democracy could be built in the future.45 In a speech in parliament a decade later, Jaques continued to warn against the dangers of “democracy without limits.”46 Here and throughout his many publications, Jaques expressed views on government, state, society and the Jews within the traditions of mid-­ nineteenth century Central European, German-speaking liberalism. He sought a balance between an ordered state and individual freedom, between oppressive control and revolutionary chaos, between respect for Jewish traditions and the demands of an integrated polity. In many 38  He had been working on this for at least fifteen years. See the Foreword to Jaques, Alexis de Tocqueville, and references in Claremont Colleges Library, Theodore and Heinrich Gomperz collection, Folder 9, 41946. Letter H. Jaques to T. Gomperz, April 23, 1863. 39  Jaques, Alexis de Tocqueville, 28–29. 40  Ibid., 66. 41  Ibid., 15–16. 42  Ibid., 40. 43  Ibid., 106–7. 44  Ibid., 31. 45  Ibid., 107–9. 46  Stenographische Protokolle des Abgeornetenhauses des Reichsrats (SPAR), February 16, 1886, 643

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respects, Jaques was a typical, committed, engaged, active liberal hoping for a progressive Austria and a revitalized, integrated Jewish community.

Life as a Liberal, Jewish Politician in Vienna, 1879–94 With his ambition and interest in politics, it is not surprising that Jaques was a candidate in the Lower Austrian diet elections of 1861, the first since 1848. In his candidate speech, Jaques commented on all the major issues of the day from his mainstream liberal perspective. He also acknowledged that he belonged to a confession that was subject to prejudice but stated that he should receive votes because of his Jewishness, not in spite of it. Perhaps Jaques meant that a positive vote for a Jew was one in favour of tolerance and liberal values. In any case, he came second in the voting and did not attain a seat.47 In subsequent elections, first to the Lower Austrian Diet (1867) and then, with the introduction of direct elections to the Reichsrat (Cisleithanian parliament) in 1873, Jaques was mentioned as a possible candidate in Vienna’s first district but had to remain patient as others were chosen ahead of him.48 His time came at the 1879 Reichsrat elections, when many of the semi-­ official associations named Jaques as a candidate. His election speeches were not particularly distinctive. Each expressed loyalty to the Constitutional Party and its general tenets—protecting and building the constitution, controlling state spending, improving economic policy, amongst many other issues. This time he never mentioned his Jewish religion. He was duly elected and this should have been the beginning of a notable political career, possibly with a ministerial post, which had been attained by some in his youthful circle (e.g., Johann Nepomuk Berger— Minister without Portfolio, 1867–70—and Joseph Unger, a childhood friend, turned rival, who had converted and was Minister without Portfolio from 1871 to 1879). Instead the 1879 election coincided with the fall from power of the Constitutional Party and a move into opposition. Internal divisions along with a foolhardy challenge to the Emperor’s foreign policy had led to a 47  The final margin was Cajetan Felder (a future Mayor of Vienna) 418, Heinrich Jaques 201. Die Presse, March 22, 1861. 48  NFP, January 31, 1867 and NFP, October 4, 1873, October 10, 1873, and October 11, 1873.

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loss of the majority in parliament and the naming of a Conservative-Slav supported government. Many liberals believed an Austrian government could not be run without their support and predicted a short, unsuccessful stint for the new Minister President Eduard Taaffe.49 In fact, Taaffe would stay in post for fourteen years. For the liberals these were bitter years in opposition away from the levers of government. Throughout these difficult times Jaques was a loyal member of the various manifestations of the liberal party, nearly all under the leadership of Ernst Plener. Jaques attacked the Taaffe government in various budget speeches, worked on many parliamentary committees, especially the ones concerning legal matters, and focused his attention on the Justice Department. He probably had ambitions that when the liberals returned to power, he would be considered for the post of Justice Minister. Annually he spoke at the debates on the Justice Department’s budget—becoming, to some extent, the liberals’ justice spokesman. Yet the parliamentary liberals were not only under pressure from the Conservative-Slav government, they also faced an internal challenge from younger political activists. One group based around the erratic but charismatic Georg Schönerer, pushed for a German-nationalist agenda, often mixed with racial and antisemitic sentiments. Another group, which would eventually evolve into the Christian Social party, formed in the Viennese City Council and began attacking official corruption. The focal point here was the young Karl Lueger, and his Jewish mentor Ignaz Mandl, operating from their base in Vienna’s third district (Landstrasse). Both groupings used the tactic of criticizing official corruption; a useful tactic since after almost two decades of liberals in power, the worlds of high finance, big business (especially railways) and the governing party (both in the Reichsrat and the Viennese City Council) were intimately intertwined. The changing political dynamics of attacks on corruption, challenges to the liberals and increased antisemitism can be illustrated through a case study of 1882. Jaques began the year in typical fashion attacking the Taaffe government. In a parliamentary speech he proclaimed “German genius is at the same time the genius of education and freedom in Austria.”50 He was speaking, he said, on behalf of “the whole liberal, German population in Austria.”51 Schönerer would have disagreed since at the same time he  For these events see Kwan, Liberalism and the Habsburg Monarchy, 91–140.  SPAR, February 14, 1882, p. 6801. 51  SPAR, February 14, 1882, p. 6802. 49 50

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was trying to exclude Jews from German associations.52 Antisemitism was emerging as a serious political issue due to a number of events including the influx of refugees from the Russian pogroms, a blood libel trial in Hungary (the Tiszaezsler case), and legal action between the Rabbi Joseph Samuel Bloch and a member of Schönerer’s group over alleged quotes from the Talmud. Karl Lueger had not yet embraced antisemitism but his fight against corruption and big business had brought him to the attention of these activists and to the general public. Lueger’s positioning as a “man of the people” fighting the liberal establishment led to a confrontation with Jaques in late February 1882. A court action for slander against Lueger was brought by two city councilors—Theodor Goldschmidt, who was Jewish, and Rudolph Gunesch, an experienced railway engineer—concerning the construction of a city railway. Jaques represented Goldschmidt and Gunesch in court. Essentially Lueger had heard second-hand information that two members of the city railway commission (Goldschmidt and Gunesch) had been promised directorships, if an English consortium run by Joseph Fogerty won the contract for the railway.53 Lueger also alleged that he was offered a directorship or a legal consultancy position in return for support of the bid. Lueger mentioned these allegations at a political meeting and also, as chairman of the railway committee, sent an official letter to the Mayor. In his testimony Goldschmidt assigned purely political motives to Lueger’s allegations. In late 1881 Lueger’s council fraction, which had almost reached the ­numbers to challenge the ruling coalition of liberals, was breaking apart. Goldschmidt believed that Lueger wanted to create a scandal to hold together his fragmenting political supporters. Lueger countered by talking about a conflict of interest since Goldschmidt’s father worked for a Rothschild-owned ironworks that was supposedly part of the English consortium. Jaques also had very close connections, through business and family, to the Rothschilds. On the final day of the trial, a letter from Albert Rothschild outlining minimal contact with the English firm was read out in court.54 52  See Pulzer, The Rise of Political Antisemitism in Germany and Austria, 146–7. For background see Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna, 205–37 and Whiteside, The Socialism of Fools, 80–106. 53  See Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna, 203–4 and Boyer, Karl Lueger, 89–90. 54  Accounts are taken from Die Presse, February 26, and March 1–3, 1882; Das Vaterland, March 2–3, and 5, 1882 and NFP, March 1–3, 1882.

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In his summing up speech, Jaques accused Lueger of having cynical political motives. According to Jaques, Lueger had chosen a sensationalist, populist career based on “a struggle against capital and against the leading intelligentsia.”55 He compared the allegations as repeating what one had overheard in a pub. The councilors, Jaques said, were simply acting in good faith for the welfare of Vienna, whereas Lueger was “careless, unsubstantiated and frivolous.”56 The courtroom was packed with Lueger supporters who listened to Jaques in silence then cheered Lueger’s defence lawyer. Lueger was fined 100 fl for repeating hearsay to the city council, but was cleared on the libel charge. At a local meeting for a vote of confidence he was cheered and celebrated as a conquering hero. In his speech he described “international capital as almost invincible; it recognizes no Fatherland, it only recognizes its own interests.”57 This speech was a turning point in Lueger’s political career.58 He no longer contemplated a possible alliance with the ruling liberals and focused on appealing directly to the public as a “man of the people.” Two months afterwards, a series of articles appeared in the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung calling for a new liberal, German party. Lueger had a number of discussions with the old 1848er Adolf Fischhof (Jewish) about a new party along federalist lines, though nothing eventuated. Politics was clearly in flux and Lueger was positioning himself for the future. By contrast, Jaques remained absolutely loyal to the liberal party (now called the United Left). At an electoral meeting on 1 December 1882, Jaques gave a speech to his electors.59 He reaffirmed the position of the liberal party; namely, opposition to the Taaffe government and a defense of the Deutschtum (Germanness) since Austria’s spiritual and social development depended on it.60 How would Jaques have assessed such a turbulent year? In all his statements Jaques did not waver from his moderate, idealistic liberalism and loyalty to his party. For him, the liberals had to stay the course, continue to attack Taaffe and hope for a return to government. This is essentially what he argued in a lengthy brochure published six years later  Die Presse, March 3, 1882.  Ibid. 57  Die Presse, March 7, 1882. 58  This argument is made in Brinkmann Brown, Karl Lueger, the Liberal Years, 313–15 and is followed in Boyer, Karl Lueger, 90–1. 59  NFP, December 2, 1882. 60  Ibid. See also NWT, December 2, 1882 and Morgenpost, December 2, 1882. 55 56

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under the title Österreichs Gegenwart und nächste Zukunft.61 What, then, of the appearance of antisemitism? Jaques, like other liberals and progressive Jews, continued to believe it was simply the unfortunate appearance of old prejudices, which would disappear over time.62 Persistent, increasing and electorally successful antisemitism simply did not make sense in Jaques’s conception of “world history” or his hopes for a progressive, ordered Austria. In any event, as he argued in his book on Tocqueville, wise policies could circumnavigate the dangers of emotional, even irrational, currents in democracy. Yet, events were not following this pattern. The liberals were not in government, while passionate, emotional politics was gradually attracting support and gaining influence, especially as the electorate slowly expanded (in 1882 there was a lowering of the tax requirement for the Reichsrat franchise to 5 gulden). The middle to late 1880s was a period of transition in the liberal camp as many of the older liberal leaders retired or died. The younger generation continued to push the liberals towards increased German nationalism. This change in emphasis was evident in Jaques’s later speeches and writings, where defending the Deutschtum took a prominent place. In general, the political landscape was broadening, becoming more diverse and fragmented. Jaques was not accustomed to the populist rhetoric associated with the newer groups (it was called the “sharper tone”), nor the horsetrading between many competing interest groups and parties.63At the council level, while Jaques’s protégé Grübl rose through the liberal ranks, Lueger was constructing a formidable party machine (with the help of Catholic Church networks) and honing his political ideas. Lueger now aligned himself with Catholic voices calling for social reform, corporatism and restraints on capitalism.64 Lueger had initially been cautious about using overt antisemitism but by 1887 he was prepared to specifically target 61  Heinrich Jaques, Österreichs Gegenwart und nächste Zukunft (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1888). 62  Jaques, Über die heutige innere Lage. Unsere Justizverwaltung und Justizreform, 13–14. Similar sentiments can be found in Lippert, Der Antisemitismus, and Angerer, Die Judenfrage im österreichischen Parlament. Some pushed for a stronger defense by Jews. See Singer, Presse und Judenthum, and Bloch, Gegen die Anti-Semiten. 63  The classic essay on the “sharper tone” is Schorske, “Politics in a New Key: An Austrian Trio” in Schorske, Fin-De-Siecle Vienna, 116–80. For details on political deal making see Hoebelt, Kornblume und Kaiseradler. 64  Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna, 166–81 and 203–46 and Boyer, Karl Lueger, 11–177.

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Jews, particularly their role in liberalism and capitalism.65 Shortly afterwards, Schönerer was forced to leave politics for a time following a newspaper scandal and Lueger became the unofficial head of the antisemites. Lueger’s popularity, particularly in Vienna, continued to increase. Progressively, he began winning curial elections in Vienna. Antisemitism had proven it could be a vote-winner and a factor in politics, mobilizing forces against the rather remote and intellectual liberals. In 1890 a bill for the regulation of the external legal status of the Jewish religious community came up for debate in the Reichsrat. Taaffe was still in power, the liberals continued in opposition and, in the circumstances, it is not surprising that the discussion included antisemitic attacks. Lueger, who had shortly before been elected to the Reichsrat, gave a long speech. He began by expressing jealousy at the extensive autonomy of the Jewish religious community, while the Catholic Church was subject to state appointments. He then stated that only a small number of Jews were officially in the Israelistische Kultusgemeinde (the official religious association) but “in fact, the Jews are everywhere.”66 Lueger spoke of the terrorism exerted by the “so-called Jew press.”67 He painted a world of Jews, on one side, and Christians, on the other. “Is it the fault of Christians,” he asked, “if the Jews dominate the stock exchange?” He continued in this vein, “Is it the fault of the Christian farmers, that the Jews dominate the grain market?”68 Turning to schools, he alleged Christian children had been targeted by “Jewish liberal teachers” and called for separate confessional schools.69 Above all, “we hate nothing more than oppressive great capital, which is in the hands of the Jews.”70 He concluded by saying that the Christian people had to free themselves from Jewish domination. Jaques responded the next day by noting that it was a simple law for regulating the legal relations of a religious community. He regretted that the debate had become an opportunity “to express … the fanatical hatred 65  John Boyer has argued that Lueger’s antisemitism was a political tactic and he was not personally antisemitic. Boyer, “Karl Lueger and the Viennese Jews,” 125–41. For the corrosive effects and a more critical view of Lueger’s antisemitism see Geehr, Karl Lueger. Mayor of Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, 171–207. Somewhere between the two is Wistrich, “Karl Lueger and the Ambiguities of Viennese Antisemitism,” 251–62. 66  SPAR, February 13, 1890, 13,385. 67  Ibid., 13,388. 68  Ibid., 13,389. 69  Ibid., 13,390. 70  Ibid., 13,391.

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against the most-hated confession.”71 Jaques is clearly dismayed at Lueger’s speech. In his speech he professed his personal political goal as raising the level of mankind and turning away from the bad.72 By contrast, Lueger, according to Jaques, simply spoke of bad people, theft, murder, and unethical profits. While Jaques could not see any evidence of a rich Palestine oppressing Christian Austria, he did concede two points.73 First, greed for money was sometimes too great, and, second, there were many Jews in journalism (possibly more than desirable). Jaques, however, asserted that the “mistakes of the Jews” must and will disappear over time so that Jews become “as any other citizen … [dedicated] to the noblest interests of mankind.”74 He characterized antisemitism as a “business” implying that Lueger only used it for political purposes. While antisemitism was “a sad illness of the time,” Jaques asserted that, it would dissolve with “the first pale rays of such a liberal dawn in Austria and … yes, it has already broken out.”75 In his final election campaign a year later, Jaques continued to follow liberal ideals and conventions.76 In one speech Jaques listed work on his pet topics: electoral verification, the postal bank, improving conditions in the civil service, amendments to criminal law and civil procedure, and scrutiny of the Justice ministry budget. He also stated that he had fought against the “fanatical brutality of the anti-Semites.”77 In a later speech, Jaques opened up about antisemitism. For these men [the antisemitic leaders] every capitalist, yes, and the great industrialists are ‘Jewish’ [verjudet], Jewish liberal, corrupt  – every great business establishment a seat, a source of corruption. These men have the greatest aversion to expert knowledge. They are half-knowledgeable or totally ignorant dilettantes in all areas…. These party leaders want a Vienna without intelligence and without capital.78  SPAR, February 14, 1890, 13,415.  Ibid., 13,416. 73  Ibid., 13,417. 74  Ibid., 13,420. 75  Ibid., 13,422–3. 76  These were collected and published as Jaques, Fünf Reden über Österreich und Wien. 77  NFP, February 25, 1891. 78  NFP, March 2, 1891. 71 72

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In his final campaign speech Jaques asserted that antisemitism was starting to die out.79 In fact, the opposite was occurring. Antisemitism was growing and expanding in influence and the Jews were being targeted as corrupt, immoral outsiders. Lueger stood on the cusp of political success. For a number of years Jaques had been suffering from depression or, in the terminology of the time, neurasthenia. In the early 1890s he spent time in Mariagrün, on the outskirts of Graz, under the care of Professor Richard Krafft-Ebing, an expert on nervous illnesses and the author of the famous Psychopathia Sexualis.80 For the final two years of his life, Jaques could not engage in any strenuous intellectual work, suffered from insomnia and worried about a lack of money. The frenzied political environment and the continued rise of antisemitism was, in all probability, a considerable contributing factor to his condition.

Conclusion: A Lasting Legacy? It is impossible, without uncovering new material, to state conclusively the reason for Jaques’s suicide. There are some hints in the newspapers of a close friendship to a young former stenographer in parliament.81 Remaining single could be a sign of homosexuality. Nevertheless, it was also very common to marry late in life—Plener married when he was forty-five years old, Joseph Unger at the age of 54—and perhaps the circumstances had never been in place for Jaques to marry. Or maybe, like Lueger who also remained unmarried, he was too ambitious to settle down. Alternatively, his housekeeper could have been his wife in all but name. There are many possibilities. In any case, Plener’s assessment that the oppressive, antisemitic atmosphere in Vienna contributed to Jaques’s suicide came from someone politically and socially close to Jaques. Antisemitism represented an unexpected, shocking and dislocating challenge for Jaques’s generation of liberals, particularly his Viennese Jewish milieu. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, due to economic modernization and an expanding financial world, some privileged Jewish families had experienced an astonishing upswing in fortunes. These families had prospered,  NFP, March 3, 1891.  NWJ, January 26, 1894. 81  Die Presse, January 26, 1894 and NWJ, January 26, 1894. It was stated that Jaques and the young lawyer, Eduard Weiss, often went for walks together. 79 80

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made Vienna their home, and had adopted its prevailing culture and values. Jaques and his circle of mostly Jewish friends attended Gymnasium followed by University and were infused with idealism. The 1848 revolutions opened a myriad of possibilities and opportunities. Liberal ideals and Jewish emancipatory impulses coalesced around the vision of a progressive, constitutional Austria based on individual talent and achievement. While the 1850s represented a setback for liberals, many talented Jews prospered during the decade, including Jaques. The onset of the constitutional era of the 1860s and 1870s seemed to justify the faith that Western-­ oriented Jews had placed in the liberal movement. With an overwhelming majority in parliament and a series of liberal governments, history seemed to be following the template of liberal progress. Yet in 1879 the liberals lost power and a Conservative-Slav government began to reshape the state and its institutions. Radical German nationalist voices and a reinvigorated Christian camp also challenged many liberal assumptions. The broadening franchise and a new form of populist, emotional democratic politics provided the context for a rise in antisemitism.82 As well as more specific uses, antisemitism could operate as a “cultural code” (a term coined by Shulamit Volkov); signifying a cultural identity— mainly conservative, German nationalist; against liberalism, capitalism, socialism, tolerance, universalism and a meritocratic, individualist society.83 Through these vicissitudes, Jaques stayed loyal to liberalism and the liberal party. In many aspects he represented the mind-set of the established, wealthy, successful, assimilated Viennese Jews who instinctively looked to liberalism both as an emancipatory spirit and as a protector of rights and status.84 This was an influential, even dominant, strand in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet there had always been a wide spectrum of opinions amongst Viennese Jews about emancipation, integration and modernity—from Orthodoxy to partial acculturation to desire for full assimilation. An important factor for subsequent developments was the dynamic nature of Vienna’s Jewish population. Within Jaques’s lifetime it expanded and diversified at a tremendous rate. In 1857 there were 2617 82  Stachowitsch, Jüdische Identitäten, 277 and for a well-argued essay covering England, France and Germany (but not Austria-Hungary). Feldman, “Was Modernity Good for the Jews?,” in Cheyette and Marcus, eds., Modernity, Culture and “the Jew,” 171–87. 83  See Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 25–46 and more recently Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites, 67–155. 84  On Jewish loyalty to liberalism see Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 122–43 and Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna, 131–63.

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Jews officially resident in Vienna (1.3% of the overall population), though the number was probably substantially higher. By 1890 there were nearly 100,000 Jews resident in Vienna (up 3500% and 12.1% of the overall population). Successive waves of Jewish immigrants to Vienna came from Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia and Galicia, especially after the lifting of restrictions in 1867. Many from Galicia were Orthodox, poor and relatively uneducated—the so-called Eastern Jews. At the same time, the Jewish presence in higher education, the free professions, commerce, finance, the press and cultural institutions appeared dominant. The collapse of liberalism coupled with the sudden growth and apparent success of the Jewish population in Vienna created a potent mix. Lueger and the Christian Socials (but also Schönerer and the German nationals at the Reichsrat level, especially around 1897) drew advantage from the changing conditions while the liberals declined into electoral insignificance. For Jews like Jaques the new environment represented an end to their liberal dreams. How could they contribute and be accepted as Austrian patriots and respected public individuals when they were increasingly branded as outsiders who could never belong no matter what they professed and achieved? To whom could the assimilated, Western-oriented Jews turn politically? Both the new German nationalism and the Christian Social Party had antisemitism as a fundamental component of their ideology and political tactics.85 Many Jews found Socialism more accepting yet baulked at the anti-capitalist line and emphasis on working class identity and activism.86 What of Zionism? Theodor Herzl’s Judenstaat (The Jewish State) was published in Vienna a year after Jaques’s death. Herzl’s response to rising antisemitism was recognition that Jewish integration in Europe had failed and that a Jewish state needed to be founded.87 While many recent Galician Jewish migrants were attracted to Herzl’s ideas, Theodor Gomperz immediately wrote against Zionism, regarding Herzl’s ideas as divisive and a rejection of a common humanity.88 Gomperz continued to hold onto his liberal dreams and pushed for further assimilation. In the rarified milieu around Jaques and Gomperz, even though liberalism had faltered and antisemitism was increasing, Vienna and Western culture  There is some discussion of this in, Lchtblau, ed., Als hätten wir dazugehört, 106–14.  See Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews, 209–10. 87  Herzl, The Jewish State. 88  Gomperz, “Der Zionismus,” in Gomperz, Essays and Erinnerungen, 196–9. See also the comment in Gomperz, “Autobiographical Remarks,” in Gomperz, Philosophical Studies, 15. 85 86

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remained a home and refuge. The achievements, successes and, above all, the sense of possibilities and hope from the generation of Jewish liberals around Jaques would remain a beacon for many until the fateful years of the mid-twentieth century.89

Bibliography Angerer, Johann. 1888. Die Judenfrage im österreichischen Parlament. Vienna: Verlag der ‘Deutschen Worte’. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Meridian. Beller, Steven. 1989. Vienna and the Jews: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996. Patriotism and the National Identity of Habsburg Jewry, 1860–1914. Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 41: 215–238. Berger, Alfred, and Wilhelm Berger. 1901. Im Vaterhaus. Vienna: Carl Konegen. Bloch, Joseph Samuel. 1882. Gegen die Anti-Semiten. Eine Streitschrift. Vienna: D. Löwy. Boyer, John. 1981a. Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna. Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848–1897. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 1981b. Karl Lueger and the Viennese Jews. Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 26: 125–141. ———. 2010. Karl Lueger (1844–1910). Christlichesoziale Politik als Beruf. Eine Biographie. Vienna: Böhlau. Brinkmann Brown, Karen. 1987. Karl Lueger, the Liberal Years: Democracy, Municipal Reform, and the Struggle for Power in the Vienna City Council, 1875–1882. New York: Garland Publishing. Clare, Georges. 2007. Last Waltz in Vienna. London: Pan Macmillan. Cohen, Gary. 1986. Jews in German Liberal Politics: Prague, 1880–1914. Jewish History 1 (1): 55–74. Feldman, David. 1998. Was Modernity Good for the Jews? In Modernity, Culture and “the Jew,”, ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus, 171–187. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gaugusch, Georg. 2011. Wer einmal war. Das jüdische Großbürgertum Wiens, Vol. 1: A-K. Vienna: Amalthea. Geehr, Richard. 1990. Karl Lueger. Mayor of Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Gomperz, Theodor. 1905. Essays und Erinnerungen. Stuttgart/Leipzig: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. 89  This is evoked well in the context of his own family in Clare, Last Waltz in Vienna, 8–32. See the comment in Beller, “Patriotism and the National Identity of Habsburg Jewry, 1860–1914,” 238.

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Gomperz, Heinrich, ed. 1936. Theodor Gomperz 1832–1912. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen. Vol. 1: 1832–1868. Vienna: Gerold. ———. 1953. Autobiographical Remarks. In Philosophical Studies, ed. Heinrich Gomperz, 15–28. Boston: The Christopher Publishing House. Grunwald, Max. 1936. History of Jews in Vienna. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America. Hadley, Elaine. 2010. Living Liberalism. Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hanak, Peter. 1984. Problems of Jewish Assimilation in Austria-Hungary in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries. In The Power of the Past. Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, ed. Pat Thane, Geoffrey Crossick, and Roderick Floud, 235–250. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herzl, Theodore. 2010. The Jewish State. London: Penguin. (German original 1895). Hoebelt, Lothar. 1993. Kornblume und Kaiseradler: Die Deutschfreiheitlichen Parteien Altösterreichs 1882–1918. Vienna: Oldenbourg. Jaques, Heinrich. 1859. Denkschrift über die Stellung der Juden in Österreich. Vienna: Carl Gerold’s Sohn. ———. 1861a. Österreichs Desorganisation und Reorganisation. Rechtsgeschichtlich-­ politische Studie. Vienna: Zamarski and Dittmarsch. ———. 1861b. Über unser Parlament. Vienna: L.C. Zamarski & C. Dittmarsch. ———. 1861c. Die Verfassung und unsere dringendsten Aufgaben: Eine Denkschrift. Vienna: Carl Gerold‘s Sohn. ———. 1876. Alexis de Tocqueville. Ein Lebens- und Geistesbild. Vienna: Carl Gerold’s Sohn. ———. 1888a. Österreichs Gegenwart und nächste Zukunft. Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot. ———. 1888b. Über die heutige innere Lage. Unsere Justizverwaltung und Justizreform. Zwei Reden. Vienna: Manz. ———. 1891. Fünf Reden über Österreich und Wien. Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot. Kann, Robert, ed. 1981. Briefe an, von und um Josephine von Wertheimstein. Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Klein, Dennis. 1979. Assimilation and the Demise of Liberal Political Tradition in Vienna, 1860–1914. In Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933: A Problematic Symbiosis, ed. David Bronsen, 234–261. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Kobler, Franz. 1967. The Contribution of Austrian Jews to Jurisprudence. In The Jews of Austria. Essays on their Life, History and Destruction, ed. Josef Fraenkel, 25–40. London: Vallentine Mitchell. Kwan, Jonathan. 2013. Liberalism and the Habsburg Monarchy, 1861–1895. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Lichtblau, Albert, ed. 1999. Als hätten wir dazugehört österreichisch-jüdische Lebensgeschichten aus der Habsburgermonarchie. Vienna: Böhlau. Lippert, Julius. 1883. Der Antisemitismus. Prague: Sammlung Gemeinnütziger Vorträge. McCagg, William. 1981. The Assimilation of Jews in Austria. In Jewish Assimilation in Modern Times, ed. Bela Vago, 127–140. Boulder: EEM. Plener, Ernst. 1921. Erinnerungen. Band 2: Meine parlamentarische Tätigkeit 1873–1891. Stuttgart/Leipzig: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Pulzer, Peter. 1963. The Austrian Liberals and the Jewish Question 1867–1914. Journal of Central European Affairs 23 (2): 131–142. ———. 1988. The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria. London: Peter Halban. Rossbacher, Karlheinz. 2003. Literatur und Bürgertum. Fünf Wiener jüdische Familien von der liberalen Ära zum Fin-de-Siecle. Vienna: Böhlau. Rozenblit, Marsha. 1983. The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1992. Jewish Assimilation in Habsburg Vienna. In Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven Zipperstein, 225–245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schorske, Carl. 1981. Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New  York: Vintage Books. Singer, Isidore. 1882. Presse und Judenthum. Vienna: D. Löwy. Stachowitsch, Saskia, and Eva Kreisky, eds. 2017. Jüdische Identitäten und Antisemitische Politiken im österreichischen Parlament 1861–1933. Vienna: Böhlau. Volkov, Shulamit. 1978. Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany. Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 23 (1): 25–46. ———. 2006. Germans, Jews, and Antisemites. Trials in Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whiteside, Andrew. 1975. The Socialism of Fools. Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wistrich, Robert. 1982. Socialism and the Jews. The Dilemmas of Assimilation in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ———. 1983. Karl Lueger and the Ambiguities of Viennese Anti-Semitism. Jewish Social Studies 45: 251–262. ———. 1987. The Modernization of Viennese Jewry: The Impact of German Culture in a Multi-Ethnic State. In Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model, ed. Jacob Katz, 43–70. New Brunswick/Oxford: Transaction Books. ———. 1989. The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Giving and Dying in Liberal Italy: Jewish Men and Women in Italian Culture Wars Luisa Levi D’Ancona Modena

Living the Secular In his will, Tullo Massarani – freemason and revolutionary, liberal politician and Milanese municipal dignitary, artist, poet, and literary art critic – requested that his remains be “purified through incineration after a funeral according to the ritual of [his] venerated parents,” and arranged for the “customary rituals in the synagogue to be performed one week and one year after the burial of [his] ashes.”1 After providing for many Jewish and non-Jewish institutions, he established a secular professional school for women in Milan as his sole beneficiary, ensuring that it would accept all I would like to thank the editors of the book, and in particular Professor Abigail Green, for her patience, precious advice, and inspiration. 1  Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (BNCF), BIOGR M450, Disposizioni testamentarie del fu Comm. Dott. Tullo Massarani, senatore del regno, written November 20, 1900, opened on August 5, 1905. All translation from original Italian are mine.

L. Levi D’Ancona Modena (*) European Forum, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_7

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girls “without distinction.” This will, in which a well-known figure reflected publicly and self-consciously on his place in Italian society as a secular Jewish liberal was understood by contemporaries precisely in these terms, as “a monument that he builds to himself as a generous benefactor.”2 It was at once deeply personal and surprisingly typical of social practices embraced by growing numbers of Italian Jews, both men and women. In different but complementary ways, philanthropy – in particular the education of women – and the battle for a secular death became crucial sites for performing both secularism and liberalism during the culture wars in Liberal Italy. This article explores these issues through a focus on two men Prospero Moisè Loria (1814–1892), Tullo Massarani (1826–1905) and one woman Sara Nathan (1819–1882).3 All three were high-profile figures, who belonged roughly to the same political generation: born between 1814 and 1826 during the first phase of the Risorgimento, which framed their engagement with liberalism. They were also Jews whose lives and choices represent three different ways of engaging with secularism in a still deeply Catholic society. In all three cases their personal commitment to a liberal vision of politics and society entailed a continuous negotiation of secularism that was far from being a static “nullification of religion,” or indeed of Jewishness.4 Furthermore, secularism and religion were experienced differently by men and women, reflecting the different opportunities they had – and the different limitations imposed upon them by the structures of religious life and secular civil society. Thinking about how real people make their secular choices allows us to see “that the world has no significant binary features, that it is, on the contrary, divided into overlapping, fragmented cultures, hybrid selves.”5 For, as Talal Assad has argued, exploring secularism as a set of processes allows a more nuanced understanding of “how people live the 2  “Dopo la morte.” La Tribuna, August 6, 1905. No mention of Massarani’s will in the most recent works on him: Bertolotti, ed., Tullo Massarani; Renard, “Il nazionalismo cosmopolita di un critico d’arte ottocentesco,” in Carrera, D’Agati and Kinzel, eds., Tra Oltralpe e Mediterraneo, 51–62. 3  All three have been the object of recent biographical works: on Loria, Pellegrino, Il Filantropo. On Nathan, Isastia, Storia di una famiglia del Risorgimento. On Massarani, see note no. 2. In this article I use these works, but I focus on how they lived their liberal lives. 4  Joskowicz and Katz, eds., “Introduction. Rethinking Jews and Secularism,” in Secularism in Question. Jews and Judaism in Modern times, 7. For challenges to a clear-cut opposition between tradition and modernity in Jewish history, see Garb, “The modernization of Kabbala,” 1–22; Stern, The Genius. 5  Asad, Formations of the Secular, 15.

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secular – how they vindicate the essential freedom and responsibility of the sovereign self in opposition to the constraints of that self by religious discourses.”6 Here too, we should consider that this applied not just to “people,” but rather to men and women in different ways. Throughout nineteenth-century Europe, the emergence of nation states “was accompanied by intense conflict between Catholics and anticlerical forces over the place of religion in a modern polity.”7 The Roman question and the peculiarly entrenched influence of the Catholic Church over civil society gave the culture wars in Italy a distinctive quality that sets them apart from other European contexts.8 These wars were fought on different platforms, from parliament to civil society, through secular philanthropy and through battles over civil marriage, divorce, and cremation. As Michael Borutta has argued, in Italy “Not only did (the conflict) cause a culture war, but also a real war between the nation and the Papal State, and it divided society into secularist (bourgeois, male, urban) and Catholic (clerical, female, rural).”9 Italian Jews fully participated in the “real” Risorgimento wars and, once Italy was formed, were relatively largely represented in parliament, although Jewish deputies and senators usually refrained from interfering in church-state relations at least in the first decade of the state’s existence.10 Their caution may partly be explained by the fact they were integrating in a weak state still involved in the process of legitimizing itself, and facing at the same time a strongly Catholic society.11 Moreover, in the 1870s, many Jewish deputies were connected to political parties of the right whereas anti-clerical issues such as education for women, divorce, and cremation were first proposed by radicals on the left.12 Despite their rhetoric to the contrary, the political agendas of Italian Jewish deputies were framed by a precarious sense of their belonging, reinforced by the 1873 Pasqualigo  Ibid., 16.  Clark, and Kaiser, eds., “Introduction,” in Culture Wars, 1. 8  Papenheim, “Roma o morte: culture wars in Italy,” in Clark, Culture Wars, 202–36. See also Verucci, L’Italia laica prima e dopo l’Unità 1848–1876. 9  Borutta, “Anti-Catholicism,” in Patriarca and Riall, eds., The Risorgimento revisited, 191. 10  For a survey on Italian Jews and Risorgimento, see Catalan, “Les juifs italiens et le Risorgimento,” 127–37. In English, see Jonathan Druker and L. Scott Lerner, The New Italy and the Jews. Annali di Italianistica, 36 (2018). 11  Riall, The Italian Risorgimento. 12  For example, Salvatore Morelli, emancipationist and first proposer on a law on cremation, on whom see Odoriso, Salvatore Morelli. 6 7

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case, which highlighted the discomfort even liberals felt about the presence of Jewish deputies in parliament.13 Even the future prime minister Luigi Luzzatti, an active participant in parliamentary debates, did not publicly discuss issues of church-state relations in the 1870s, although he was already elaborating theories of religious tolerance.14 This caution began to dissipate in the early 1880s, when the Jewish deputy and freemason Cesare Parenzo spoke up in defense of divorce, insisting that “as far as conscience goes, there is no question of majority and minority.”15The law did not pass, but the debate provoked an upsurge of publications for and against divorce by Jews and non-Jews, as well as antisemitic attacks, mostly in clerical circles but also among liberals.16 These debates continued throughout the 1880s and 1890s demonstrating the variety of responses of Italian Jews to the culture wars as well as their contested position within them. The notion of the place of minorities within the new liberal state was at stake here, and civil society was an important battleground in this conflict. Women like Sara Nathan could not participate in these battles within the formal structures of parliamentary politics, but they ­nevertheless had a role in liberal society more generally – as salonnières, philanthropists, and social activists. After 1871 the newly formed state could guarantee the juridical defense of freedom of religion for individuals – although even this was repeatedly contested – but civil society was still in the making and not yet secular in a country where Catholicism infused the whole social order.17 Within this framework, liberals – both Jewish and non-Jewish – had to discover how 13  For a recent discussion on the Pasqualigo case in English, Calimani, The Venetian Ghetto. Chapter 24. For Massarani’s cautious attitude see letter to Luzzatti, January 1, 1874, in Barbiera, ed., Una Nobile Vita. Carteggio inedito di Tullo Massarani, 187. 14  Facchini, “Luigi Luzzatti e la teoria della tolleranza religiosa,” 275–300. 15  “Disegno di legge Villa, Relazione Parenzo,” in Atti del Parlamento italiano, Camera dei Deputati, 23 January, 1882, 1–2, quoted in Franceschi, “I progetti per l’introduzione del divorzio in Italia”, 23. http://www.statoechiese.it/images/uploads/articoli_pdf/ franceschi2_i_progetti.pdf 16  On the debate on the Italian Jewish press, see Ferrara degli Uberti, Making Italian Jews, 140–156. Among the non-Jews, the liberal Salandra emphasized the foreignness of divorce to Italian culture, while the jurist Francesco Gabba wrote on divorce as a “new antichristian plague, a Jewish machination against society.” Gabba, Il divorzio nella legislazione italiana (Pisa, 1885) quoted in Capuzzo, Gli ebrei nella società italiana, 148. On debates on divorce in Italy, see Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy, 97. 17  Piccioni, “La libertà religiosa e il rapporto stato Chiesa,” in Bruni, ed., Libertà e modernizzazione, 175–202.

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they might “live the secular” in the emerging national society they sought to build. In this context, liberalism went beyond a narrowly political sphere because it entailed forging an entirely different relationship between the individual and society. For secularism did not just imply the separation of church and state or the defense of civil and religious liberty. Secularism required individuals to make personal choices about what faith might mean to them, and to create a space in which they could express this. Indeed, both philanthropy and the battle for a secular death quite literally entailed the creation of secular spaces as a tangible and material reality. In this way, these two practices – which often came together at the moment of death through a final will and testament – were in fact closely related. Understood as connected practices in an Italian context, secular giving and secular dying represented an attempt to create a space – social, physical, and conceptual  – free from institutional religion, to which all had access without distinction. Both were areas in which Italian Jews played a disproportionately active part. Intrinsically connected to memory and legacy, as well as being social practices and statements towards religious authorities, they were also the only two arenas were women could be agents, taking charge of how to dispose of their bodies and their wealth. In Liberal Italy, secular philanthropy was a crucial arena for the expression of anticlerical liberal politics. Jews, like Catholics, had previously given within their traditional, communal context.18 Conceptual differences divided Jewish Tzedaka [sic] (charity related to justice and support to the poor to become self-sustaining) from Catholic almsgiving (with a redemptive purpose, spiritual rescue, etc.) although in practice institutions often influenced each other.19 Since the eighteenth century and even before, there had been a place for women within traditional Jewish institutions such as the Soed Holim confraternity in Modena, but this place diminished in the nineteenth century – in contrast to the “feminization of religion” that characterized the surrounding Catholic society.20

18  Jewish charity in nineteenth century Italy is still mostly studied per city, see for example Luzzatto Voghera, Il prezzo dell’eguaglianza. For one attempt to a general overview on the subject, see Miniati, “L’insostuibile pesantezza del povero,” in Rassegna Mensile Israel, 275–97. 19  Adam, “Interreligious and Intercultural Transfers of the Tradition of Philanthropy,” in Lieberman and Rozbicki, eds., Charity in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. 20  Francesconi, “Confraternal Community” in Terpstra, Prosperi eds., Faith’s Boundaries, 251–271. On feminization of Catholicism in Italy, see Bartoloni ed. Per le strade del mondo.

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Modern philanthropy differed from both Catholic and Jewish giving by virtue of its strong emphasis on structural change rather than almsgiving, and its use of concepts such as rationalization, prevention, and, to different extents, secularization.21 Italy lagged behind other Western countries in terms of philanthropic modernization by means of organization, and professionalization. But throughout the nineteenth century attempts were made to rationalize public and private beneficenza (beneficence), although their implementation struggled with its “culture of alms,” even after the novelties introduced by the Crispi laws in 1890.22 Although it had occurred before, from the mid-1870s, Italian Jewish engagement in secular philanthropy reached unprecedented heights. Freshly emancipated, to demonstrate their patriotism, to both enhance and represent their integration into local elites, to enlarge their political rootedness in the territory and in the national historical narrative, secular giving by Jewish men and women spanned in many different directions from restructuring historical monuments to hospitals and schools, to foundations for the betterment of society and women’s education and welfare.23 In the beneficenza guides of cities like Florence and Milan, Jews always appear as major donors and among the promoters of new initiatives with a particular focus on education.24 One specific feature distinguished secular donations made by Jews from those of non-Jews: the expression “senza distinzione” (without distinction), which was intended both to ensure that Jews were included among potential recipients and to underline their philanthropic performance as Jewish liberals. Here, as elsewhere, Jewish philanthropists signaled the integration of Jews in national society, as well as their emulation of and adaptation to mainstream bourgeois ­values.25 But in Italy philanthropy enabled Jews to play a more active role by shaping a secular civil society still in the making, distinct from the institutions of the Catholic Church and its ubiquitous influence. Secular philanthropy represented a new twist on older practices of Jewish giving, but the battle for a secular death represented something radically new, tied into modern ideas about science, hygiene, and the search for alternative rituals  – most strikingly, cremation. The issue of  Zunz, Philanthropy in America.  Quine, Italy’s Social Revolution. 23  In English, see Levi D’Ancona, “Philanthropy and Politics,” 83–100. 24  See for example Rossi, Milano benefica e previdente; Sarfatti, Guida della assistenza. 25  Leglaive-Perani, “De la charité à la philanthropie,” 4–16. 21 22

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secular burial had already surfaced in Italy during the Enlightenment and Jacobin republics, but only after unification did the state make each city build or restore municipal cemeteries open to all, even if it did not implement clear policies for their de-sacralization, in constant tension with the Church authorities.26 Among the various forms of secular burials, cremation was the most extreme. From the 1870s modern cremation was “a transatlantic concern … part of a broader movement for sanitary reform and … social reform impulse.”27 Italy took the lead both in terms of law and scientific techniques.28 In a country where the cult of saintly relics (often body parts) was still very present, the right to a secular, hygienic and modern death spoke to the anticlerical struggle embraced by liberal freemasons, intellectuals and professionals. As the practice gained popularity, the opposition of the Catholic Church increased, reinforced by violent anti-masonic attacks.29 Whereas radical cremationists, like Salvatore Morelli proposed to abolish cemeteries altogether, liberals like the Jewish physician Mosè Uzielli, one of the founders of the secular cremation society in Florence in 1882, argued that cremation was not in itself anti-religious, but rather an anticlerical statement opposing the Church’s authority.30 Italian Jews occupied a distinctive position within these disputes. Cremation was accepted among American reform Jews, and among Jewish secularists in Berlin.31 In Italy – where reform Judaism failed to take off – a small minority of orthodox rabbis supported cremation and, in rare cases, chose it for themselves.32 The debates this provoked in the Jewish press predate those in other countries, and a relatively high number of self-­ consciously “secular” Jewish men and women chose cremation over burial. In Turin, for instance, 9.6 percent of those who chose cremation were Jewish, with an even higher percentage among women, yet Jews made up  Mengozzi, La morte e l’immortale, 47–57.  Prothero, Purified by fire, 66. 28  Conti and Comba, eds., La morte laica. 29  Conti, “La cremazione a Torino dalle origini al 1925,” in De Luna, ed., Le radici della città, 18–21. 30  Uzielli, Cremazione. 31  On Reform Jews and cremation in America in the early 1890s, see Prothero, Purified by fire, 137. On Germany see Weir, Secularism and Religion in nineteenth century Germany. 32  On Vittorio Castiglioni and other Italian Rabbis in favor of cremation, see Malkiel, “La cremazione dei defunti.” 37–70; see also Di Segni, “I rabbini di Roma nell’Ottocento e agli inizi del Novecento,” in Procaccia, ed., Ebrei a Roma tra Risorgimento, 155–9. 26 27

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only about 1 percent of the total population.33 The phenomenon usually spread through family networks, but those wives who independently chose cremation here were all Jews.34 Indeed in most cities with a significant Jewish community, Jews figured among the founders, board members and benefactors of local secular cremation societies, often but not always also choosing the option for themselves.35 Some Livornese Jewish freemasons even exported the practice to Tunis, where the strong clash with local conservative traditions highlighted a transnational twist on secular wars.36 But as we shall see, opting for cremation did not necessarily entail a total rupture with Jewish culture, rituals, or society. Individual communities decided if and where to keep the ashes of Jews who chose cremation, and these policies changed through time. In 1897 it was still possible to have ashes buried in the Jewish cemetery in Florence even if the local rabbi was one of the most vehemently opposed to the practice and later prohibited it. In Pisa, a scandal over where to temporarily bury the corpse of a Jewish man who had opted for cremation showed how issues of sacred-secular space were still contested.37 The complex relationship between cremation, Jewishness, secularism, and philanthropy is underlined by the fact that some prominent Italian Jews who chose cremation – not just Loria and Massarani, but also Baron Giorgio Levi (the most generous supporter of the secular cremation society in Florence) and Benedetto Foa, president of the Turin Jewish community – were also generous supporters of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU).38 But how did secular choices made in life and in death play out for individuals?

 Maida, Dal ghetto alla città.  Mana, “Associarsi oltre la vita,” in Mana and Comba, eds., La morte laica, 30–9. 35  List of founders of the Florence Società Cremazione (Socrem) (1882), Florence, Socrem archive; for Venice (1882), see http://socremvenezia.sitonline.it/1/la_nostra_storia_3085639.html 36  Liana, “Massoneria e minoranze religiose nel XIX secolo,” in Conti, ed., La Massoneria a Livorno, 408. On cremation in Livorno, Sonetti, Una morte irriverente. 37  Gestri, Le ceneri di Pisa, 192–197. 38  On Levi, see Mancini, “Giorgio Enrico Levi,” 75–95. On Foa, see Tucci, “Dizionario biografico,” in Le radici della città, 102–3. 33 34

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Giving and Dying Sara Levi Nathan was one of Giuseppe Mazzini’s most generous and committed supporters: first in London where she had moved after her wedding to Meyer Nathan, then in Lugano, and subsequently in various Italian cities, always actively mediating between Italian patriotic networks in exile and in the peninsula.39 She lived and died a Jewess, but her relationship with the Catholic but anticlerical Mazzini was characterized by a shared spirituality. This set her aside from his other disciples during his last years and after he died in the house of her daughter Janet in Pisa in March 1872. Sara became actively involved in the secularization of death in Liberal Italy in 1876, when she fought for a secular funeral and tombstone for her close friend and Mazzinian co-activist Maurizio Quadrio in the Verano municipal cemetery.40 After the fall of Rome, the Catholic Church had devolved its authority over this cemetery to the city council, but in practice the ecclesiastical authorities remained very much in charge. In the context of the guerre di sepolture (burial wars) between the state and the Catholic authorities, Quadrio’s secular funeral and tombstone were perceived as a profanation of sacred space.41 After months of legal debates, pressured by Sara, the city council allowed Quadrio a secular burial because he had been baptized, and started the process of opening a section for atheists and free thinkers in the Verano cemetery. By challenging the Church’s monopoly on the administration of death, Sara began the transformation of the cemetery from a sacred space to a municipal cemetery open to all: a process that took decades to complete. For herself, Sara requested a secular funeral, unaccompanied by Jewish rituals; after her death in London in 1882, she too was buried in the non-Catholic section of the Verano cemetery. At her death she was praised in the press  – Jewish and non-Jewish, alike.42 Among the many eulogies, the Mazzinian weekly Il Dovere wrote: “She showed how a woman can harmonize domestic and national 39  On Sara Levi Nathan (1819–1882), see Isastia, Storia di una famiglia del Risorgimento. See also Pesman, “Mazzinian Discipleship,” 33–50. On Mazzini, Sara and Sara’s daughter Janet, see also Pesman, “Mazzini and/ in love,” 104–9. 40  On Sara Nathan’s battle for secular death in Rome, see Isastia, Storia di una famiglia del Risorgimento, 154–60. See also Id., La laicizzazione della morte a Roma. 41  I borrow the expression “guerre di sepolture” from Mengozzi, La morte e l’immortale, 76. 42  “Necrologio di Sara Nathan,” in Vessillo Israelitico (VI) 1882, 82.

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sentiments, the virtues of private life with the virtues of public life; how it is possible to rise above the restricted horizons of the house to the wider sphere of humanity. She will remain as the ideal type of the Italian woman.”43 The anniversary of Sara’s death was celebrated by Sara’s children and their families through a ritual secular gathering at her tomb, which they followed by a ceremony at the Scuola Mazzini: one of the networks of philanthropic institutions the Nathan family had established and continued to fund for decades in Rome. In this way, Sara’s efforts to create a secular space in Rome’s municipal cemetery mirrored her social activism, highlighting the connection between the practices that grew up around giving and dying amongst Jewish secularists in Liberal Italy. Although she had engaged in philanthropy before, it was particularly after Mazzini’s death that Sara focused her activity on a series of initiatives designed to promote the emergence of a secular civil society designed to promote Mazzinian values and underpin his place at the center of a secular cult of the nation.44 It was in memory of Mazzini that the Nathan family initiated a subscription “to establish a popular institution to include evening schools and libraries.”45 They promoted the publication of his writings and donated the house in which he had died to the state as “a sanctuary of faith and patriotism.”46 After inaugurating a series of co-­ educational adult courses based on Mazzini’s teachings, Sara opened the private Mazzini girls’ elementary school in Rome in 1873, a pioneering establishment in which “civil morality” replaced catechism. By 1880 it already had 100 pupils, despite the refusal of priests to give the girls communion, castigating them as “the Devil’s prey.”47 This focus on educating patriotic girls dovetailed with the Nathan family’s engagement with other women’s causes. Together with a group of English Mazzinian women active in Italy, Sara was instrumental in bringing ideas, causes and networks from Britain to Italy – and vice versa. In

 “Sara Nathan,” Il Dovere, a.5, no. 20, February 26, 1882, 1.  Pietro Finelli, “«È divenuto un Dio.»,” in Ginsborg and Banti, eds., Il Risorgimento. 665–95. 45  Ernesto Nathan, letter published in L’Emancipazione, March 30, 1872, quoted in Levi, Ricordi della vita, re-edited by Andrea Bocchi, 45. 46  Inaugurandosi la Domus Mazziniana, 4. On Ernesto’s role in the publication of Mazzini’s writings, see Finelli, Il monumento di carta, 39–42, 59–70. 47  Isastia, Storia di una famiglia del Risorgimento, 196. 43 44

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particular, she embraced the abolitionist campaign of Josephine Butler.48 Thus, in 1875, she pressured her recently widowed son Giuseppe to establish the Italian section of the Federation for the Abolition of State Regulation of Vice; after his death this activity was taken up by another of Sara’s sons, Ernesto.49 Once both Giuseppe and Sara had died, surviving members of the Nathan family used funds they had left to establish the Unione Benefica in 1889. By 1903, this Roman refuge for young girls of all nationalities and religions admitted 153 girls of all faiths.50 It continued to be funded and managed by members of the Nathan family, until the 1938 racial laws forced them out. Here, and elsewhere, Sara’s children worked to perpetuate her philanthropic legacy and her secularizing agenda. As mayor of Rome, her son Ernesto oversaw in 1911 the passing of new regulations that finally silenced attempts by the church authorities to preserve the confessional purity for the Verano municipal cemetery.51 It was here that the Nathan family members were buried next to each other with respect for their various choices for a Jewish or civil funeral, burial or cremation. The path Sara trod was her own, but the social and political context in which she operated also enabled other Italian Jews – not least her children and grandchildren  – to navigate the boundaries between individual spirituality, institutional religion, and liberal secularism in a highly personal fashion, and one which allowed an unusual scope for female agency. Born in Mantua in 1814, the philanthropist Prospero Moisè Loria made his fortune in Egypt where he thrived as a wood importer for major public projects.52 In Egypt, Loria encountered networks of Italian exiles, freemasons, and Saint-Simonians whose ideas framed his future performance as a philanthropist. When in 1862, he returned as a millionaire to Italy, he chose the booming city of Milan where he quickly rose within the ranks of the local Masonic lodges. Freemasonry was common among Italian Jews at this time, representing both a “key institution of a successful integration,” and a distinctive ideological commitment which often cross-fertilized with elements of Saint-Simonianism, patriotism, and

48  On the abolitionist movement in nineteenth century Italy, see Wanrooij, “Josephine Butler and Regulated Prostitution in Italy,” 153–71. 49  Isastia, Storia di una famiglia del Risorgimento, 70–119. 50  V.N. “Unione Benefica di Roma,” in Unione Femminile, 1904, 221–2. 51  Isastia, La laicizzazione della morte a Roma, 1. 52  Pellegrino, Il Filantropo, 81–89.

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Judaism.53 After unification, masonic philanthropy played a crucial part in shaping and secularizing civil society, and Loria’s initiatives should be understood in this context.54 Loria’s place in Italian memory is defined by his generous bequest to the city of Milan for the creation of a Società Umanitaria (Humanitarian Society) for the disinherited poor, with no distinction – the classic liberal formula adopted by Italian Jewish donors. The goals of this institution were explicitly secular, but a close attention to his philanthropy in life and choices in death reveal the complexities of his secularism. Since his return to Italy, he gave to many causes, with a particularly important impact on women’s professional education both in Milan and Rome, where he helped establish the first municipal school for women in 1876. But historians overlook the fact that his donation was framed in such a way as to support poor girls from the former ghetto, for which he earned the gratitude of the leaders of the Roman Jewish community.55 It was, in other words, a secular initiative with an implicit Jewish dimension. This combination of Jewishness and secularism found expression in Loria’s generous support for the AIU – he was its most generous Milanese supporter – and in his support for Jewish immigrants and professional formation in Libya.56 Indeed, Loria initially intended to make the AIU his sole heir, but changed his mind just a few months before his death. He chose instead to use his will to make the largest registered bequest to the city of Milan in the nineteenth century, for the creation of the Società Umanitaria which was to become the most progressive secular philanthropic foundation in Italy in the early twentieth century.57 53  Sofia, “Gli ebrei risorgimentali tra tradizione biblica, libera muratoria e nazione,” in Cazzaniga, ed., Storia d’Italia. Annali 21, 244–65. See also Sofia, “Davide Levi,” in Levi, ed., Gli ebrei e l’orgoglio di essere italiani, 23–60. 54  Conti, “Massoneria e sfera pubblica nell’Italia liberale, 1859–1914,” in Storia d’Italia. Annali 21. La Massoneria, 594–602. 55  Tranquillo Ascarelli, “President Report,” in Società di Fratellanza per il progresso civile degli Israeliti poveri di Roma, 7 (1883), 11. See also documentation in Rome, Archivio Comunità ebraica di Roma (Ascer), busta 94 fasc. 6. See also “Corrispondenza del Vessillo, Roma,” March 8, 1882, in VI (1882), 82–83. 56  CAHJP, AIU Archives, Italy, Milan committee, dossier Loria. See Levi D’Ancona, “Prospero Moisè Loria.” 57  For bibliography on the Umanitaria and its role in reform and socialist circles in Milan, see Della Campa, Il modello Umanitaria. See also Letizia D’Autilia, Il cittadino senza burocrazia. On Loria’s highest registered estate in nineteenth century Milan, Licini, Guida ai patrimoni milanesi, 63.

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In parallel with his social activism, Loria played an important part in the battle for a secular death in Milan through his enthusiasm for cremation, another cause strongly supported by Milanese freemasons.58 For Loria, this enthusiasm was linked to a progressive faith in science. Before joining the local Società di cremazione (cremation society) in 1883, he had established the Istituzione Loria per le autopsie gratuite (Loria Institute for Free Autopsy), in order to provide everything needed to perform autopsies in the city cemetery; the annual surplus from this society was to be devolved to the cremation society.59 As he explained, “Our corpses, sectioned, can help medical science”; and cremation “saves space, which can be used instead to give work and bread to many poor.”60 This institution was highly appreciated by doctors because it promoted pathological anatomy.61 However the Loria Institution faced opposition not only from Catholics, but also from other freemasons for whom the political dimension of cremation took precedence over Loria’s faith in science.62 Loria’s progressive vision, which found expression in his social activism and in his faith in science, was underpinned by an explicitly messianic and utopian liberalism that drew, perhaps, on his Jewish upbringing.63 In an 1884 pamphlet he expressed his hope that the Società Umanitaria would “help find a solution for the Social Question and therefore [hasten] the coming of the Messiah, offering progress, civilisation, universal peace, redemption of the suffering classes, human brotherhood.”64 Interpreted by some as a sign of his closeness to reform Judaism, this vision may rather have been influenced by Saint-Simonian ideas filtered through Loria’s secretary, the socialist activist Osvaldo Gnocchi-Viani.65 Interestingly, however, Gnocchi-Viani and other non-Jewish seculars in Loria’s milieu could 58  Dalle Nogare “Andrea Verga”, 137–43; Zocchi, “Tra autopsie cremazione e suicidio,” in Cosmacini and Vigarello, eds., Il medico di fronte alla morte (secoli XVI–XXI), 159–84. 59  Milan Socrem Archive, Loria to Milan Municipality Board, May 21, 1883. 60  Milan Socrem Archive, Loria to Milan Municipality Board, April 2, 1888. 61  Andrea Verga “Prospero Moisè Loria,” quoted in Dalle Nogare “Andrea Verga,” 141. 62  Along with Catholic and popular opposition, this internal struggle explains the limited success of the institution, which declined yet continued to operate at least until 1938. 63  On Jewish secularisms and Messianism, see Schulte, “Messianism without Messiah,” in Joskowicz and Katz, Secularism in Question, 79–97. 64  Loria, “Preface,” French Edition of the Società Umanitaria, 1884, in Milan, Archivio Società Umanitaria. 1.1 Fondazione. Eredità Loria. 65  On Gnocchi-Viani and Saint-Simonian ideas, see Angelini, Osvaldo Gnocchi Viani, 7–43. For an interpretation of Loria as close to Jewish Reform, see Salvadori, “Prospero Loria e Osvaldo Gnocchi-Viani,” in Storia in Lombardia, 17/1 (1997), 21.

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not relate to his “mystical” secularized notion of the coming of the Messiah “as the event of human redemption.”66 His choices in death reveal a further twist to this story. In his will he requested that the autopsy and cremation of his body be accompanied by a second-class funeral, yet he also asked to be buried in the Jewish section of the municipal cemetery with an epitaph that reads: “Ashes of he who wanted autopsy and cremation, useful custom.” In death as in life, he embraced secularism in a Jewish key, and a faith in science that went hand in hand with an explicitly progressive spirituality. Whereas Sara’s mode of activism was deeply influenced by her Mazzinian nationalist faith, Prospero Moisè Loria’s was less concerned with building a national liberal society. They supported many of the same causes, but his worldview was more universalistic and his choices in both life and death were, at the same time, more clearly Jewish. Tullo Massarani, a well-known personality of the Belle Époque, was a versatile intellectual engaged in politics and philanthropy, as well as a poet, literary art critic and painter himself.67 Massarani was born, like Loria, in Mantua, but into a patriotic family and was soon active as a young patriot revolutionary. Like Sara Nathan, he supported Mazzini and lived in exile from the revolutions of 1848 until 1851. He then returned to Milano, where he took an active political role during the formation decade before unification. In 1861 he joined the Liberal moderates, amongst whom he was elected as one of the first three Jewish deputies in 1861 and then senator in 1876, supporting legislation on women’s and children work and on protection of cultural heritage by regulating the export of works of art and antiquities.68 In both these sectors Massarani believed in limiting profit for public utility; private property, he believed, should “care for souls…It cannot lock itself, but should do as much as possible in favour of the less fortunate.”69 This vision of the “duties” of private property framed his philanthropic performance.

 Valera, Vita intima e aneddotica di Prospero Moisè Loria, 10.  For bibliography on Massarani, see note 2. See also Roberto Balzani, “Tullo Massarani,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 71 (2008), http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/tullo-massarani_(Dizionario-Biografico). On Massarani in English, see Bertolotti, “Giacobbe and Tullo Massarani.” 68  Brignani, “Tullo Massarani e la tutela del patrimonio storico e artistico,” in Bertolotti, Tullo Massarani. un patriota, 114–26. 69  Massarani, Ricordi Parlamentari, Serie 2. In Senato, 61. 66 67

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As “a follower of the religion of patriotism,” Massarani never questioned his patriotic ideals.70 By the early 1880s, however, he was becoming disillusioned with national politics, and devoted his energies to local activism, as he believed in the power of “association to achieve precise, special local objectives.”71 For decades, in Milan, he was engaged in the municipality and provincial boards, in cultural organizations such as the Brera Academy and the Lombard Institute for Science and Letters and in progressive philanthropic institutions such as the Pious Institute for rickets sufferers and, most notably, the Mantegazza secular school for women. He supported this school from its beginnings in the early 1870s to his death in 1905 when he made it his sole heir with the condition that it continue perpetually to accept girls “without distinction.”72 Massarani’s multiple interests and international networks framed his cosmopolitan nationalism, isolating him from the exclusivist nationalists around him.73 His cosmopolitan culture, open to exchanges with mostly French, but also German intellectuals, involved an interest in “Eastern” culture, poetry and religions which may also – ultimately – have influenced his decision to be cremated. He was, for instance, deeply fascinated by India, “that ideal eternal father land, from which the regions, the languages unleash luminous fantasies and intelligent dialectics of the most civilized people of the world”; and “whose magnificent visions … fill me with light.”74 This interest in the East influenced also his literary work and perhaps indeed his decision to be cremated.75 It underlines the sense that he was a complex man whose cultural identity was multifocal, notwithstanding his deep Italian patriotic commitments. Massarani’s Jewish identity, too, was much more complex than has been appreciated. Indeed, he continually negotiated and renegotiated his position as a liberal Jew in Italian society, contradicting himself but never  Bertolotti “Di Giacobbe e Tullo Massarani,” in Bertolotti, Tullo Massarani. 40.  Massarani to Pasquale Villari, April 24, 1871 in Una Nobile Vita, 129–132. 72  Disposizioni testamentarie di Tullo Massarani. Massarani’s support of the cause of women’s education was known as shown by his mediation for another donation by Loria to the “secular and liberal” women’s school in Turin in 1876. See Massarani to De Gubernatis, February 19, 1876, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (BNCF), Fondo De Gubernatis, Cass 84/3 published in Fabbri, “Tullo Massarani ad Angelo De Gubernatis,” 234–5. 73  Renard, “Il nazionalismo cosmopolita,” 51–62. 74  Massarani to De Gubernatis, November 4, 1874; January 20, 1886, BNCF, Fondo De Gubernatis, cass 84/1, 11–14. On the orientalist De Gubernatis in Florence, see Vicente Lowndes, Altri orientalismi. 75  Massarani, Il libro di Giada. 70 71

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rejecting his faith or refusing to publicly display it. Like Loria, he contributed to international Jewish causes supporting the Jews of Bulgaria in 1877 through the AIU, and a committee founded in response to the pogroms of 1882 by a mixture of Jews and non-Jews.76 In Milan, his presence at the 1892 grand opening of the new main synagogue was noted by the press.77 A prolific writer, Massarani chose not to address Jewish concerns except in his very copious correspondence, which he asked to have published “to survive the consuming flames of the crematorium.”78 He believed that antisemitism had not developed in Italy “mainly because Jews here have demonstrated their intellectual and civil activity in all fields, with complete assimilation of all citizens devoted to their country and the cause of civil equality.”79 He understood Zionism as a response to specific situations. Thus, he could understand how “a need for independence for a new far away patria (fatherland)” could rise “in regions semi-barbarous, where civility is only in the appearance” or in a country like France, “where equality is guaranteed in words but denied by a military oligarchy, pompous in its vanity and irreducible in its old prejudices.”80 But he added “Where civility is at a good point and assimilation of all its citizens is nearly triumphing in habits and laws, why go backwards on the road so painstakingly done and return to the ancient separation?”81 Yet Massarani did not understand assimilation as a complete erasure of identity. As he continued, “One should not fear that in the mix, we would lose the intrinsic qualities of our race and the supreme comfort of faith. Not so easily does the atavist disposition of nature get lost. Under the rough cortex, the vital core remains intact and comes alive.”82 Assimilation for Massarani was not an issue of identity lost; the “vital core” of his Judaism – defined by nature with the comfort in faith – was to remain true to itself in the mix of a society of equals which he helped to shape. We can see what this meant in practice through Massarani’s understanding of the municipal cemetery as perpetuating in death a particular 76   CAHJP, AIU Archives, Italy, Milan, Zamorani committee, November 28, 1877. Comitato soccorso Pro Ebrei Russi, Milan suscribers, September 18, 1882. 77  Corriere Israelitico, June 31, (1892), 125. 78  Raffaello Barbiera, “Prefazione,” Una Nobile Vita, December 31, 1908, 13. 79  Massarani to Arturo Foa, October 29, 1893, Una Nobile Vita, 230–231. 80  Massarani, to Dante Lattes, July 8, 1904, Una Nobile Vita, 504. 81  Ibid. 82  Ibid.

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vision of society. In 1874, he refused to support a projected Jewish cemetery because “civil laws must be applied without distinction to all religious confessions. All must share their final rest in the same place, as they share their homes, their offices, their families.”83 Four years later he joined the masonic lodges in opposing the municipality’s plans to erect a Catholic altar in its cemetery because “It was always my belief that the essentially secular nature of the municipality should be applied to the institutions in its custody and therefore also to cemeteries … Freedom of choice must be respected for everyone, in conformity with their own beliefs and the rites with which they consecrate their own, or their family’s sepulchre.”84 However, cautious of his position as a liberal Jew, Massarani ended the letter warning that “the proposal would attract less criticism if proposed by someone born in the religious confession of the majority.”85 Paradoxically, however, when it came to his own parents, Massarani built a tomb for them on a private lot in one of their estates.86 This tomb was also to contain his ashes. Although he did not belong to the Milanese cremation society, Massarani was known as one of the Milanese poets who had written in favor of this practice.87 His translation from a Latin verse, “this flame … makes us pure,” was inscribed on the door of the Milan crematorium.88 In his will, he requested that his remains be “purified through incineration.”89 Intriguingly, however, he also requested a funeral “according to the ritual of [his] venerated parents” and provided for the “customary rituals in the synagogue to be performed one week and one year after the burial of [his] ashes.”90 By combining cremation with Jewish ritual in this way, he found his own balance between the secular and the religious, liberalism and Jewishness, tradition and modernity. As the local newspapers reported, “a large cortege of authorities, personalities, citizens,” and a battalion of infantry soldiers, passed through the city to the cemetery, “preceded by  Massarani to Davide Levi, March 5, 1874, Una Nobile Vita, 194–5.  Massarani to Presidents of Insubria, Ragione and Cisalpina, April 11, 1878, Una Nobile Vita, 159–184. 85  Ibid. 86   Massarani, “L’Avvocato Giacobbe Massarani,” in Barbera, ed., Illustri e cari estinti, 269–95. 87  Maccone, Storia documentata, 196. 88  “Inaugurazione del Crematojo,” Corriere della Sera, November 16, 1879, 2. 89  Disposizioni testamentarie di Tullo Massarani. 90  Ibid. 83 84

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the municipal band and flag representatives” of more than fifteen organizations he had been active with.91 After the speeches by representatives of the government, the senate, and the women’s professional school to which he had so generously bequeathed – “his body wrapped in the Taled [sic] (prayer shawl) which he wore at his Bar Miztva” – Jewish rituals were performed.92 Following the Rabbis’ speech, the body was cremated and Massarani’s ashes were buried in the private family tomb. As an “organizer of public memory … builder of a sort of civil pantheon,” who had written over seventy-five eulogies for famous and less well-known Italians, Massarani was aware of the symbolic and political value of funerals in the public sphere.93 This very conscious assertion of a particular – “religious” – identity by a high-profile Italian secular underlines the latitude accorded to Jews in the unique institutional context of Italian culture wars to find new ways of positioning themselves vis-à-vis faith and society, of living and dying as Italians.

Shades of Chiaroscuro In unified Italy, where secularism and liberalism were inextricably linked, options chosen by Italian Jews in life and death, in society, and on their body, challenge our assumptions about the way in which religion operated in liberal societies in general, and Liberal Italy in particular. Ester Capuzzo has recently argued that the Italian liberal state was “founded on a secular vision and belief in progress, [and] recognised to all its members an equality without diversity with no consideration for the specificity of minority groups, Jews among them … A society of equal and different was not possible.”94 As a corollary of this vision of the liberal state, Italian liberal Jews have been interpreted as being bearers of “identity without diversity,” a notion that this article has attempted to challenge.95 Like the “rooted cosmopolitan” patriots of the early Italian exile diaspora, “attached to their own patria and respectful of different political and cultural identities … reconciling their patriotism, cosmopolitanism and liberalism,” Italian secular Jews, often patriots and cosmopolitan themselves, found  “I funerali del senator Massarani,” Corriere della Sera, August 8, 1905.  “Necrologio di Tullo Massarani,“VI, 1905, 421. 93  Fugazza, “Massarani e la memoria del Risorgimeno,” in Bertolotti, Tullo Massarani. un patriota, 90–3. 94  Capuzzo, “Ebrei,” in Dizionario del liberalismo italiano, vol. 1, 403–8. 95  Schachter, The Jews of Italy, 1848–1915, 26. 91 92

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their own ways to negotiate, not eradicate their diversity.96 They indeed were secular, but secularism does not equate simply to an absence of religion. In death, as in life, these secular Italian Jews articulated different options for themselves which, for some, signified a rupture from any Jewish identification, but to others meant something different: either a political statement or a reflection of a belief in the value of science, or both. Various members of the Nathan family were buried next to each other with respect for their various choices for a Jewish or civil funeral, burial, or cremation. Loria’s faith in science combined with his secular messianism framed his philanthropy towards both Jewish and non-Jewish causes. Massarani requested cremation with Jewish rituals before and after the burial of his ashes. These examples allow us to understand the shifting boundaries of conventional divisions between religious and secular in Liberal Italy. As Massarani expressed by paraphrasing his skills as a painter: “Only empty men are or expect others to be like the unchanging zero … Only the chiaroscuro gives relief and life to feelings as to the rest.”97 The time has come to bring back shades of chiaroscuro to the lives of Jewish men and women in Liberal Italy. Massarani’s choices, like those made by Sara Nathan and Prospero Loria, were intensely personal. Taken together, however, their lives speak to the diverse ingredients that shaped liberal secularism in Italy: anti-­ clerical performance, a hygienic-scientific choice, masonic rituals, the fascination with alternative religions of the East, a commitment to women’s secular education and a space for female agency outside the traditional framework of religious structures, be they Catholic or Jewish. Their secularist commitments did not mean they were uninterested in the spiritual – all three clearly were, but their faith took “new” and “personal” forms, which often allowed them to express their Jewishness in some way. This was particularly challenging for Jewish women in Italy, which lacked a Reform movement and the space this allowed Jewish women elsewhere in Western Europe and the USA to express their spirituality and to engage in Jewish philanthropic activism.98 For Jewish women in Italy these  Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile, 106–7.  Massarani to De Gubernatis, November 8, 1875, BNCF, Fondo De Gubernatis, cass 84/10. 98  Meyer, “Women in the thought and practice of the European Jewish reform movement,” in Gender and Jewish History, 139–157. 96 97

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“internal” Jewish options were reduced. This, combined with their strong desire to help shape the society in which they lived and, in later generations, the absence of Jewish mass migration and the challenges it brought elsewhere, pushed Jewish women in Italy to be active in a nonJewish public sphere – or, as they understood it, secular civil society. Loria, Massarani, and Nathan felt themselves to be fully integrated in the society in which they lived, yet others within this society certainly perceived them as Jews, and prejudice tainted their acceptance even within secular liberal circles. In 1872 Sara Nathan’s role in Mazzini’s funeral was perceived as an usurpation of the nation’s body by one of his closest disciples, who commented that “Mazzini’s body was hoarded by the Semitic tribe of Manasseh.“99 Another, the radical former priest Asproni wrote in his diary: “even on the corpse of Mazzini the ghetto has put its hands.”100 As we mentioned, in the early 1870s, the opposition of some liberals to Jews in government rendered Jewish deputies, including Massarani, highly sensitive to their shaky position as freshly emancipated Jews and particularly cautious about issues related to the religion of the majority. Thirty years later, in 1902 the press reported a plan to delete the name Loria from the Umanitaria, “so that the name of a giudeo (Jew) would not prevent a Christian remembering the Umanitaria in his will.”101 In 1902, Loria’s Società Umanitaria was still perceived by well-known women active in secular liberal women’s organizations, as the “heart of Jewish strength” and an expression of “the unconquerable solidarity that unites this sect.”102 These sensitivities were not mainstream, did not prevent Jewish integration or reduce the impact of the institutions they created. They do show however the persistence of anti-Semitic tropes within the most radical liberal circles. Jewishness also shaped the philanthropic engagement of all three with Italian society in distinctive ways. Their nationalism was an essential dimension of their commitment to building a liberal society, especially for Nathan and Massarani, whereas Loria’s more universalistic and scientific preoccupations were framed by his freemasonry and involvement with Saint-Simonian networks and ideas. Both Nathan and Loria spent long  Quoted in Luzzatto, La mummia della Repubblica, 10.  Ibid. 101  “PM Loria,” Corriere della Sera, October 29, 1902. 102  Elisa Boschetti to Ersilia Majno, January 25, 1903, in Milan, Unione Femminile Archive, Archivio Famiglia Majno, Boschetti folder. 99

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years abroad: her marriage and his business interests reflected the persistence of established Jewish networks and practices spanning the Mediterranean and Europe. In London, Switzerland, and Egypt they encountered a new diaspora of exiles through which networks “ideas about freedom, liberty, revolutionary organization, and liberalism generally flowed.”103 Massarani had briefly experienced exile as a young patriot after 1848 and in later life, his continuous exchanges with exiles and artists in Paris and elsewhere, contributed to his profile as a cosmopolitan nationalist. These encounters with the “European-Mediterranean liberal international,” strongly influenced their future performances as philanthropists and activists in Italy.104 Intriguingly, both Loria and Massarani embraced explicitly Jewish causes in the international arena, like other Jewish liberals discussed in this volume. Loria’s universalist vision resonated particularly with the origins and rhetoric of the AIU.105 It was a crucial platform for transnational Jewish philanthropy in a secular key which allowed him and other Italian Jewish liberals, to express their secular and liberal values within a specifically Jewish organization.106 Their counterparts in France may have supported this organization in part because of its willingness to embrace a French mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission), but this hardly explains the support it attracted in Italian liberal circles. To us, the transnational engagement of Jewish liberals – whether as donors, signatories of petitions or other – sits uneasily with the more high-profile commitments of men like Massarani and Loria who, while engaging nationally in shaping secular civil society, expressed a different kind of secular identity through their support of an organization that was both particular and universal. This option, however, was not available for women, as they were excluded from the AIU, appearing only as donors when fulfilling the wills of male members of their family. In Liberal Italy women were also excluded from an active role in  local Jewish organizations. Whereas, as we mentioned, several Jewish Italian women had created Jewish women’s associations in eighteenth century Florence, Modena and elsewhere, by the second half of the nineteenth century, their role within the structures of 103  Gallant, “Writing Mediterranean Diasporas,” in Isabella and Zanou, eds., Mediterranean Diasporas, 209. 104  Ibid. 105  Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity. 106  Data on AIU branches in Italy, in Weill, “Les structures et les homes.” In Kaspi, ed., Histoire de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, 97.

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Jewish organizations drastically diminished, as echoed by the conservative attitude of the Jewish press.107 The rigidity of Jewish Italian organizations pushed them towards non-­ Jewish philanthropy.108 Here too Sara Nathan trod a path that others followed. In its initial phase, which coincided with the height of culture wars in Italy, Jewish women focused their philanthropy on the education of new citizens, as a means of applying their secular vision to the new civil society in the making. Loria and Massarani embraced a similar agenda when they supported institutions that were designed to train women away from the influence of the Church and make them independent as a crucial way to build a secular society.109 Particularly important was the Italian Jewish engagement with education of women and professional formation; we have seen this for our three philanthropists and it was to become one of the main focuses of the performance of Jewish women philanthropists and activists in Italy until WW1. Indeed, Jewish liberals  – women and men – played a vital role not only as donors but also as organizers, as supporters of coeducational secular education, and as importers of new models and ideas from elsewhere: in the 1870s, Adele Della Vida and Russian-born Elena Raffalovich founded the first coeducational secular kindergartens in Venice110; in the first decade of the twentieth century, US born Alice Hallgarten founded schools and textile laboratories for women in Umbria and provided the initial support for Montessori innovative pedagogic ideas both in Italy and the US, while Aurelia Josz founded the first school of agriculture for women in Niguarda, Milan in 1902, and adapted its programs after she visited schools in Switzerland and Belgium.111 Josz belonged to a younger cohort of women active in Milan within the secular liberal Unione Femminile (Female Union), which promoted “practical 107  On Jewish women associations in modern Italy, see Francesconi, “Jewish Women in Eighteenth-Century Modena,” in Sperling and Wray, eds., Across the Religious Divide, 191–206. On Florence see, Siegmund, The Medici State, 403–4. On the diminished role of Jewish women in Jewish institutions in Liberal Italy, see Miniati, Les “Émancipées,” 45–127. 108  Levi D’Ancona “Jewish women in non-Jewish philanthropy in Italy (1875–1938),” 9–33. 109  Polenghi, “Missione «naturale», istruzione «artificiale»,” in Ghizzoni and Polenghi, eds., L’altra metà della scuola, 283–318. 110  Filippini “Becoming Italian citizens,” in Calabi, ed., Venice, the Jews and Europe 1516–2016, 448–53. On Raffalovich, see Salah, “From Odessa to Florence.” 111  On Alice Hallgarten Franchetti (1874–1911), see bibliographical references in Maria Luciana Buseghin http://www.enciclopediadelledonne.it/biografie/alice-hallgartenfranchetti. On Aurelia Josz (1869–1944), see D’Annunzio, ed., Aurelia Josz. Accounts of her trips to observe school farms outside Italy, in Josz, La donna e lo spirito rurale, 25–9.

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feminism for the real progress of woman” and in which Italian Jewish women were disproportionally prominent as donors and activists.112 Other Jewish women in Florence and Rome – including Sara Nathan’s daughters and extended family – were among the leaders of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane, the Italian emanation of the International Council of Women, which promoted women’s philanthropic social activism.113 Others foreign and Italian Jewish women were pioneers in academia, the medical profession, peace activism, socialism, and fighting for suffrage.114 Although their Jewishness was rarely central to their activity, Jewish women’s impact in shaping a secular civil society in Liberal Italy was outstanding. Sara Nathan had been among the first to pioneer and expand fields of female agency already in the early 1870s, when progressive men like Massarani and Loria also focused on women’s education and work as crucial means to build a secular civil society. Throughout their lives and in the moment of death Nathan, Loria, Massarani, and others like them were consciously and continuously redefining the space and boundaries of the secular and religious as Jews and as liberals. As a woman, Sara Nathan was fighting a double exclusion. For all three, secularism was not anti-­religious: it was rather an inclusive concept that guaranteed the respect of all faiths, including their own. Through philanthropy and the fight for a secular death, they tried to forge a society that would accept them in their diversity, not without diversity. Their Jewishness was contingent rather than constitutive of their social activism but – crucially – not irrelevant. All three had played a part in shaping and making the emerging civil society that was a central component of the new Italy. For them, both philanthropy and the battle for a secular death represented quite personal statements about who they were and their relationship to this new Italy as secular Jews. At the same time these were performative and public practices  – philanthropy was out there in the open, a public statement that would leave a long-lasting legacy; funerals were also public statements, particularly for prominent figures like these whose death attracted public attention. They were, moreover, operating in a broader social and political context in which individual actions could assume wider 112  Cammeo, “L’attività sociale della donna,” in Atti del Primo Congresso di attività pratica femminile, 14. On the Unione, see Gaballo, Il nostro dovere. 113  See for example Atti del Congresso Internazionale femminile. CNDI. See also Gori, Crisalidi. Emancipazioniste liberali in età giolittiana. 114  Levi D’Ancona, “Baronesses and revolutionaries.”

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meaning – something of which all three were well aware. They were committed to the idea of the Italian nation and the society they were seeking to build was explicitly liberal, but this was more than just an integrative strategy. Rather, their secular death practices highlight the extent to which they had internalized liberal ideas about the individual in relation to society and the world, together with their profound commitment to the Italian nation.

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PART III

Rethinking East-West

CHAPTER 8

Unsettling the “Jewish Question” from the Margins of Europe: Spanish Liberalism and Sepharad Michal Rose Friedman

In 1810, Spanish liberals convened a sovereign Constitutional Assembly (Cortes) in the southern city of Cádiz, and over the course of the next two years they drafted what would become the first constitution in the history of Spain and a foundational document in the shaping of European Liberalism.1 In 1813, the Cortes abolished the Spanish Inquisition, yet I thank Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam for their insightful comments and Paul K. Eiss and Nitai Shinan for their feedback. 1  For discussion of the war of independence and Cádiz Cortes and the constitutional crisis from a peninsular perspective, see Artola, Los orígenes de la España contemporánea; Josep. La crisis del Antiguo régimen 1808–1833; and Junco, Mater Dolorosa: 119–49. For Cádiz in its broader European context see, Luna-Fabritius, “Defining the borders,” Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, División de Historia 78 (December, 2012), http:// repositorio-digital.cide.edu/handle/11651/984 and the chapters on Spain in Hook and

M. R. Friedman (*) Department of History, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_8

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this did not imply an end to exclusive Catholic confessionalism in Spain. Article 12 of the constitution affirmed that the Spanish nation was exclusively Catholic, vowing not to tolerate other confessions. Catholicism thus formed a core dimension of Spanish liberalism, ostensibly standing in tension with the Cádiz constitution’s bold embrace of liberal constitutionalism.2 While the Inquisition would be reinstated, the moment of Cádiz inspired political liberals to publish some of the first modern critical histories of the Spanish Inquisition.3 These widely publicized works brought renewed attention to Spanish Jews and the conversos as iconic victims of a political system that some Spanish liberals sought to overturn. Arguably, however, it was only the suppression and definitive abolition of the Inquisition in 1834 that ushered in the emergence of Sepharad as a topic central to liberal political discourse and as a modern subject of study in Spain.4 Taking the constitutional moment of Cádiz as a point of departure, this chapter will demonstrate how debates over Jews and religious tolerance functioned in a place known as the Catholic nation par excellence—one characterized by the absence of religious minorities in the modern era. I also emphasize the connections between Spanish liberal discussion of the “Jewish question” and similar debates about Jewish emancipation beyond the Pyrenees, as Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews from inside and outside Spain made crucial interventions in the elaboration of a Spanish “Jewish Question.” More generally, the intersection of Jewish and Spanish racialist ideas about Sephardi Jews undermines historiographical assumptions about the place of Jews in European debates about race, hybridity and nationhood. By insisting on the centrality of Sepharad, or “Jewish Spain,” to such deliberations from the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, this chapter demonstrates how thinking about an obscure Iglesias-Rogers, eds., Translations In Times of Disruption. For a transatlantic perspective see Eastman and Perea, eds., The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World. 2  For discussion of this tension and the Catholic dimension of Spanish liberalism see, Fernández Sebastián, “Toleration and Freedom of Expression in the Hispanic World,” 159–97 and Portillo Valdés, “De la Monarquía Católica a la Nación de los Católicos,” 17–35. 3  For example, Llorente, Histoire critique de l’Inquisition d’Espagne; Puigblanch, La Inquisición sin máscara. See Shinan, Ḳorbanot o ashemim, for further discussion of these texts. 4  See Friedman, Recovering Jewish Spain and Shinan, Korbanot o ashemim. Moreover, as Andrew Bush has suggested, perhaps only the abolition of the Inquisition could eliminate, or at least mitigate, the threat that study of the Jewish past was tantamount to Judaizing. See Bush, “Beginnings of Modern Jewish Studies in Spain”, in Flesler, Linhard and Pérez Melgosa eds. “Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era,” 20.

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case on the European periphery might illuminate the dynamics of better known examples of the so-called “Jewish Question.” Finally, by illustrating how the exceptional might be considered paradigmatic, the chapter highlights the widely unacknowledged centrality of Spain in our study of Jewish modernity, as well as in the construction of religious and liberal political geographies in modern Europe. Spain has been marginalized by the mainstream scholarship on liberalism, which depicts it at best as a late beneficiary of revolutionary doctrines and ideologies from Western Europe (north of the Pyrenees) and North America. Recently however, scholars such as Gabriel Paquette have attempted to correct this narrative, which was largely the product of work by Anglophone and Francophone historians who understood the Ibero-­ Atlantic revolutions “as the last in a decades-long sequence of revolutions imbued with a stable, coherent set of ideas that demolished the Old Regime in Western Europe and its ultramarine appendages.”5 Paquette suggests that such depictions “perpetuated and enlivened a long-standing stereotype of the feeble, backward and derivative character of Iberian and Ibero-Atlantic life.” The case of modern Spain fits equally awkwardly with approaches to the study of Jewish modernity that emphasize the different “paths of emancipation” taken in specific states as part of the broader modernization process in Europe. While recent scholarship has criticized the centrality of the modern nation-state in this narrative, work employing the lens of “empire” and the methods of transnational history has likewise tended to neglect Spain and its imperial possessions.6 Significantly, in the age of empire, a considerable number of Moroccan Jews, along with their Muslim compatriots, came under Spanish rule. One of the principal dilemmas that Spanish liberals confronted from the outset was how to reconcile Spain’s multi-confessional past with its foundational Catholic identity and a legacy of intolerance. This Spanish dilemma can, in fact, be located in the moment of 1492. On the one hand, this was a date to be celebrated, as it represented the unification of Spain under the banner of Catholicism and symbolized the birth of its vast overseas empire. On the other hand, 1492 came to represent a moment of original sin, tainted by the expulsion and the abuses of colonial rule. How 5  Paquette, “Introduction: Liberalism in the Early Nineteenth-Century World,” 1–13. See also Paquette, “The Study of Political Thought,” 437–48. 6  See for instance the path breaking study Colonialism and the Jews, Katz, Leff, and Mandel eds.

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could these conflicting perceptions of 1492 be reconciled to create a coherent, yet heroic national narrative? The expulsion of Spain’s Jews and Muslims came to be viewed ambivalently as an excision from the national body to which Spanish liberals would return to again and again with every ensuing national crisis. In “A Distorting Mirror: The Sixteenth Century in the Historical Imagination of the First Hispanic Liberals” (2015), Javier Fernández Sebastián explains how the first Spanish liberals, many of whom spent time in exile, developed a vision of Spain nourished by the stereotypes of the so-called “black legend,” which depicted a dark picture of the main events and processes that had transpired in the Spanish monarchy since the late fifteenth century.7 Hoping to make sense of a period of uncertainty and revolutionary crisis, they sought inspiration in the philosophies of history being developed in Northern Europe regarding the decisive role of Protestantism in the origins of modernity. This interpretative framework endorsed an evaluation of Catholicism as retrograde. Much of the political and intellectual historiography of the Iberian world would be conditioned by this paradigm, in which Spain appeared an anomaly in the Euro-­American context: a subordinate and peripheral region, portrayed as a kind of “interior Orient”—in other words an “aberration of Western civilization.”8 It was in this context that Spain’s Jewish past and the legacy of Sepharad came to play a central role for Spanish liberals in the elaboration of modern Spanish conceptions of patria. Time and again the Jewish past and Jewish individuals equipped with the legacy of Sepharad forced Spanish liberals to face this “distorting mirror,” by driving home the black legend and what Spanish authors widely came to refer to as the “Spanish problem.” By further extending Paquette and Fenández Sebastián’s recent examination of Spanish liberalism to the Jewish context, I reconsider the place of modern Spain in accepted paradigms of “margin” versus “center” in modern Jewish historiography and in particular in debates over Europe’s “Jewish question.” In so doing I will illuminate the intersection of Spanish and Jewish histories in the modern era as entangled histories of European “others.” How did perceptions of Jewish and Spanish exceptionalism converge in the Iberian context? How did Jews’ position between Orient and 7  Fernández Sebastián, “A Distorting Mirror,” 166–175. DOI: https://doi.org/10.108 0/01916599.2014.914309 8  Ibid.

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Occident influence their encounters and advocacy in Europe’s internal Orient? To what degree had they assimilated Western European representations of Spain? And how were these Jewish interventions in Spanish politics received and assimilated in Spain itself? I will contextualize these observations and questions by examining a series of moments which illustrate the engagement of Sepharad by Spanish liberals and the convergence of Jewish and Spanish liberal agendas.

Spanish Liberals and Jews Re-encounter Sepharad Interest and debate within Spain regarding the place of the Jews in Spain and Spanish history predated the nineteenth century. Earlier works presented accounts of Jews that were largely based on medieval and early modern mythology, rumor and stereotype, and steeped in Christian interpretive traditions.9 Even where the Jewish past appeared as a topic of historical or political debate, it served primarily as an occasional point of reference in works addressing wider issues, rather than as a topic in its own right.10 In the early nineteenth century this began to change. Spanish liberals who fled to France and England after the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814 were exposed to historical writings of the French Romantic tradition and German historicism, while French, English and German historians began to publish accounts presenting exoticized and Orientalized images of Spain and characterizing the country in terms of its presumed decadence and barbarism.11 By way of response, Spanish liberal historians attempted to construct an image of Spain which affirmed national unity and independence. They authored their own histories of Spain, building upon the mythological and chivalric accounts left by medieval historians and chroniclers, as well as upon the historiographical traditions of the

 See for instance, Martínez Marina, Antigüedades hispano-hebreas.  An example of such earlier debate appears as early as the seventeenth-century in reformist arbitrista literature exploring the reasons for Spain’s alleged economic decline, suggesting the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims may have factored as one of the causes for said decline. On the arbitristas see Nieto, “El pensamiento económico, político y social de los arbitristas,” 235–354 and Feros, Talking about Spain. For Enlightenment-era interest in the Jewish past, see Hauben, “The Enlightenment and Minorities,” 1–19 and Shinan, Kurbanot o Ashemim. 11  Andreu, El descubrimiento de España. 9

10

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Enlightenment.12 The nationalist mythology constructed in these histories also served to rally support for the liberal Spanish state by inculcating “patriotic virtues.”13 Thus modern Spanish historiography emerged from attempts to keep pace with wider European disciplinary innovations, as well as the desire to claim a unique, even foundational, place for Spain within the unfolding narrative of European or “Western” history.14 In this context, Spain’s medieval history assumed a pivotal role, for this period supposedly saw the birth of Spanish national identity, political institutions, national literature and language, art and music.15 Yet Spain’s medieval history—notably its history of religious intolerance—presented particular difficulties for nationalist historians who sought to assert Spain’s national unity and to reaffirm a liberal agenda.16 So these works embraced the Christian identity of Spain but condemned—or at least questioned— the religious intolerance of the Church and the Inquisition and, to a lesser extent, of the Catholic monarchs. At the same time, they emphasized the spirit of tolerance and cultural ingenuity promoted by individuals like Alfonso X (“the Wise”). Crucially, this history confronted Spanish liberals with the irrefutable existence of a multi-ethnic past, marked by a Muslim presence of over eight hundred years and a Jewish presence dating back to Roman times if not earlier, and with the convivencia (loosely translated as “coexistence”) of these two groups with Spanish Christians.47 Spanish Arabists and Hebraists played a fundamental role in engaging these tensions and in the cultural construction of Spanish nationalism by liberal-minded politicians and historians. From the mid-nineteenth century, Spain’s neo-colonial expansion into North Africa encouraged state support for the work of these scholars and the development of these disciplines. This included sponsoring and subsidizing the recovery of medieval Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts from Spanish libraries, and the recovery and preservation of Muslim and Jewish artistic and archeological monuments as symbols of Spain’s national patrimony.17 These developments 12  Manzano Moreno and Pérez Garzón, “A Difficult Nation?: History and Nationalism in Contemporary Spain”; Junco, Mater Dolorosa. 13  Boyd, Historia Patria, 70–4, 80–1. 14  Peiró Martín, Los Guardianes de la Historia. La Historiografía Académica de la Restauración; Junco, Mater Dolorosa; Boyd, Historia Patria. 15  See also Geary, The Myth of Nations. 16  See Boyd, Historia Patria. 17  See Gómez, Orientalismo y Nacionalismo Español; Friedman, Recovering Jewish Spain and Eric Calderwood,  Colonial al-Andalus Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture.

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moreover connected directly to the liberal Arabism that had emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, which opposed conservative views of the Muslim past rooted in ideas of Iberian Christian purity, by glorifying Muslim Spain and “convivencia.”18 In the broader context of European anti-Spanish discourse, Spain presented a unique lieu de memoire for Jews, connecting historical, sentimental and symbolic meaning around the mythologized legacy of Sepharad. Developments in Spain—above all its intermittent liberal reforms and revolutions—consequently attracted the attention of Jews engaged in the struggle for political emancipation elsewhere in Europe. The liberal anti-­ Catholic rhetoric and discourse deployed by French and German Jews at this time provided those Jews who laid claim to the legacy of Sepharad with ready ammunition.19 This set the stage for the encounter between the renowned nineteenth-century Spanish liberal and scholar José Amador de los Ríos (1816–1878) (henceforth Amador) and Ludwig Philippson (1811–1889), a prominent German-Jewish rabbi, scholar, journalist and political activist.20 Amador, who was closely affiliated with Spain’s Moderate Liberal faction, was a pioneer of modern Jewish Studies in Spain, while Philippson was at the forefront of Jewish attempts to achieve political emancipation internationally.21 In 1848 Amador published the first modern scholarly monograph on the history of the Jews of Spain, Estudios históricos, políticos y literarios sobre los judíos de España.22 In it, he celebrated Spain’s Jewish legacy and condemned the anti-Jewish violence of the Spanish middle ages, revisiting events like the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition and 18  The term “convivencia,” originally applied by a school of Spanish historians to the relations of Muslims, Christians and Jews in Medieval Spain, suggests mutual interpenetration and creative influence as well as mutual friction and rivalry. See Glick, “Convivencia: An introductory Note”, 1–8 and Nirenberg, Communities of Violence. See also, Ray, “Beyond Tolerance and Persecution,” 1–18. 19  Joskowicz, The Modernity of Others. 20  While most publications note Amador’s birth year as 1818, Jesús L. Serrano Reyes has recently convincingly demonstrated that Amador was born in 1816. See Serrano Reyes, “Sobre Fechas y Nombres,” 121–36. 21  Friedman, “Jewish History as ‘Historia Patria.’ 22  Amador de los Ríos, Estudios históricos, políticos y literarios sobre los judíos de España, and the new edition of the work with a preliminary study by Nitai Shinan, XV-CLIII. In 1847, Adolfo de Castro y Rossi published Historia de los Judíos en España desde los tiempos de su establecimiento hasta principios del siglo actual in Cádiz, but his study was less scholarly and Amador already began publishing his work as a series of essays in 1845.

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the expulsion of 1492 in an attempt to reconcile Spain’s Catholic identity with its Jewish past. Amador resolved this conundrum and the question of whether a Jew could also be a Spaniard, by endowing Spanish Jews with a redemptive role in the diaspora through their dissemination of “Spanish” language and culture. Estudios enjoyed a warm reception in Spain raising Amador’s political and scholarly profile. It attracted international attention, not least among Jews, and became a focal point for public debate. In 1854, two months after a Progressive Liberal coup which temporarily upset Moderate Liberal rule, Philippson presented a petition to the freshly assembled Spanish Parliament. Tendered in the name of German Jewry, this petition demanded that Spain institute freedom of religious confessionalism and repeal the expulsion decree of 1492. Like many other German Jews of his time, Philippson viewed Sepharad as an ideal model of Jewish acculturation into the non-Jewish environment. In his petition, he recalled Spain’s Jewish past with a view to emphasizing Spain’s debt to the Jews, as well as exemplary precedents of religious tolerance.23 But he made this point not with reference to the works of Jewish or foreign writers, but rather to the “entirely impartial” work of a modern Spanish author: none other than Amador’s Estudios. In fact, he drew heavily on this work and its account of the many contributions Jews made to the development of Spanish culture and society. He argued that the legacy of the tolerance which Jews had formerly experienced under Spanish Christian rule served as a clear precedent for the notion of freedom of religious confessionalism. Crucially, he also identified freedom of religious worship as a measure of “civilization,” calling upon Spain to establish her place among the ­“civilized” and “humane” European nations who had already instituted this freedom. Amador’s response to Philippson’s intervention—and more specifically to his appropriation of Spanish history—illuminates his deep ambivalence towards Sepharad and its presumed legacy of religious tolerance.24 Writing in a prominent liberal Spanish journal, Amador declared Philippson—“a 23  On the German-Jewish myth of “Sephardic supremacy” see Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” 47–66. For more recent discussion, see Shachpkow, Role Model and Countermodel—a translation of his 2011 German book, Vorbild und Gegenbild, and Efron, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic. For discussion of the myth of Sepharad as a politicized cultural metaphor in different national contexts, see Halevi-Wise ed., Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History. 24  For Amador’s personal experience of persecution due to liberal beliefs, see Friedman, Jewish History as ‘Historia Patria,’ and Shinan, estudio preliminar.

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man who does not even bear a Castilian surname,” and “does not even speak in the name of the descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492”—unfit for such an endeavor. Indeed, he suggested Philippson’s Jewishness prevented him from producing a balanced account of Spanish history. Philippson had engaged in the “mystification” of the Sephardic past, but Amador saw the history of the Jews in Spain as one marked by persecutions and religious and racial antagonism, which had placed “a bottomless abyss between Jews and Spaniards when Isabel and Ferdinand rose to the throne of Castile.”25 For Amador, this “abyss” made it impossible to “grant the Jews freedom of religious worship” even in the present. Would it be “wise conduct, to destroy, exclusively for the sake of appeasing the Rabbi from Magdeburg, the religious unity of the Spanish monarchy?” Was this a matter worthy of “agitating and incinerating a Catholic society par excellence, like the Spanish nation?” As for the place of the Jews within a Christian nation, Amador’s response to Philippson seemed to suggest that their full assimilation, in the past, present or future was untenable. For the Jews had been “ordained by Providence” to live as strangers dispersed among the nations until the end of days”; they consequently lived “outside of common law,” constituting a “separate race.” How then, Amador asked, was it “possible to reconcile their religious and material interests with those of the rest of the nations?”26 Philippson failed to achieve reform, but succeeded in generating considerable political debate. The newly formed Democratic Party embraced his petition and proposed the immediate establishment of freedom of religious confessionalism, generating reaction across the political spectrum. Supporters and detractors of the proposal expounded upon Spain’s Jewish medieval past in their presentations at the Cortes. The majority of both Progressive and Moderate Liberals viewed this moment as an occasion to condemn the intolerance of the Church, the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews, while stopping short of actually approving freedom of religious confessionalism.27 On the right, ultramontane and moderate Catholics defended medieval Spain’s treatment of the Jews and warned  “Consideraciones histórico-políticas,” January 1855, 205.  Ibid. At the end of Estudios, Amador applies the same interpretation to the riots against Jews in Central Europe in the wake of the revolutions of 1848. 27  These were not mass politics political parties in the modern sense, but parties of notables with a fluid organization based on a network of clientelism & caciquisimo (political bossism) which served to guarantee a desired electoral victory. The significance of “Moderate” here signaled the compromise between Absolutism and the Radical Liberals. 25 26

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the Spanish public of the imminent threat of Protestant and Jewish immigration if freedom of religious confessionalism were proclaimed. This was the first significant public discussion of Jewish rights in modern Spain. It moreover drew attention to the Sephardi diaspora at a time when Spain contemplated imperial expansion in northern Morocco. For the Spanish-­ Moroccan war of 1859–60 was to bring, Spaniards into direct contact with Judeo-Spanish speaking Sephardi Jews.28 The short-lived Liberal revolution of 1868 moreover prompted further Jewish appeals to the Spanish state, and even the relocation of a number of Jews from southern France to northern Spain.29 Publication in 1877 of the novel “Gloria” by Benito Pérez Galdós, Spain’s most celebrated nineteenth-century novelist and a politically committed liberal, underlines the continued resonance of these concerns with the wider Spanish public. This novel appeared shortly after Amador de los Ríos published his expanded history of the Jews in 1875, delving even more deeply into the question of Jews and freedom of religious confessionalism in Spain.30 In the novel, the protagonist David Morton, a Sephardi Jew from England, falls in love with Gloria Lantigua, a traditional Catholic Spaniard, after being shipwrecked in Spain. The novel combines a fervent critique of religious fanaticism, with many of the questions Amador had raised in his recovery of the Jewish past. Could the Sephardim be considered Spanish? Were they loyal or disloyal to the Spanish patria? Did the religious conversion of the Jews present a viable conduit to Spanishness? Was religious fanaticism a Christian trait or did it also extend to Jews? In the tragic ending of this interfaith love story, Galdós seems to suggest that while Sephardi Jews might indeed be Spanish, they were as fanatical as Christians in their adherence to their faith—a characteristic that may have moreover been partly responsible for the tragic ending of their historical presence in Spain. In the decades that followed, Sepharad came to figure ever more centrally in the construction of the Spanish nation-state under the Restoration regime (1875–1923) constituted by its architect and founder of the 28  The period after the African War (1859–1860), also marked the beginning of notable Jewish resettlement in Spain. On resettlement of Ottoman Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, see Abrevaya Stein, Extraterritorial Dreams. 29  These appeals and discussions in the Cortes, as well as the resettlement of a number of Sephardi families from Bayonne in Spain, are discussed by Manrique Escudero, Los judíos ante los cambios políticos en España en 1868. 30  Pérez Galdós, Gloria.

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Conservative Party, national historian Antonio Cánovas del Castillo.31 This is surprising since the official history produced under this regime presented a teleological narrative of a united Catholic Spain.32 Moreover, the constitution of 1876 declared Catholicism the state religion, even as it protected the individual rights of 1869, including toleration of private non-Catholic religious practices. The Conservatives thus embraced the equation of national identity with Catholic unity previously accepted by Moderate Party advocates, while limiting suffrage and imposing rigid controls on speech, press, education, assembly and oppositional parties. Yet as Spain reoriented its neo-colonial designs towards North Africa in a context of growing Jewish contact with Spain, Spanish liberals began to assimilate Jewish claims and deploy them in their efforts to promote national regeneration. Specifically, they understood Spain’s exceptional status as a historically pluralistic polity as a strength within the wider European setting. Moreover, Spain provided a context in which Jews could further harness and engage Orientalist and Occidentalist renderings of Spanish and Jewish exceptionalism. The result was the gradual merging of Spanish and Jewish tropes of Sephardi superiority.33 In the construction of Spanish nationhood and the production of official history, the Royal Academy of History (RAH) occupied a central position. Spanish members of the RAH engaged vigorously in Jewish studies and developed an impressive network of communication with Jewish scholars. Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews wrote repeatedly to Spanish Hebraists and other scholarly members of the RAH arguing that their researching of the history of Sepharad was an obligation both towards Spain and the Jewish people. Occasionally Jews appeared in person to make these claims. In 1888, the British-Australian-Jewish folklorist and publicist Joseph Jacobs was elected a corresponding member of the RAH. When he delivered his formal induction lecture at the Academy in 31  Cánovas had been part of the Liberal Union Party and the new party he formed in 1874 what was known as the Liberal-Conservative, or more commonly, Conservative Party. What fused liberal constitutionalism (Cánovas redacted the constitution of 1876) with more conservative ideas and the monarchy acted as an arbiter. It consisted mainly of former Moderate Liberals and Liberal Unionists who were also monarchists. Cánovas also devised was it known as the “pacific turn” designed to alternate power between the Conservative and Liberal parties. 32  For further discussion of the production of official history under the restoration regime and the role of Sepharad in this endeavor see Friedman, Recovering ‘Jewish Spain’. 33  See Friedman, “Reconquering ‘Sehparad’,” 35–60.

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Madrid, Jacobs demonstrated the role of Jewish scholars and scholarship on Sepharad both as a conduit for Jewish ideas and as a form of Jewish political advocacy in Spain. His lecture stressed both the exceptionality of Jews and Jewish history and the centrality of Jewish history to universal history. Contending, that Sephardi Jews were “after all not enemies but merely Spaniards of different religious belief,” Jacobs seemed to argue that Sephardi Jews and Spaniards shared a common history and identity.34 He urged the Academy to encourage work on the history of the Jews of Spain, for instance by awarding prizes for monographs on this topic. For Jacobs, the history of the Jews of Spain was “the richest and of superior interest” to all of Jewish history, a history that “can only be studied in the Iberian Peninsula.” “We European Jews have our hopes pinned on you,” he declared “learned thinkers and writers of Spain … among many there exists a fervent hope that in the not too distant future there would be many Spaniards, whom one could consider with equal legitimacy as Jews, who would become the guardians and scholars of Hispano-Jewish history.” In this way, Spain and Spanish scholars could take their place “alongside the rest of Europe in the scientific research of the History of Israel.”35 Jacobs’ speech was published in the Academy’s Bulletin with an introduction by the Orientalist Francisco Fernández y González. Alongside the President of the Academy, a Jesuit priest and Hebraist named Fidel Fita, Fernández y Gonzalez acted as Jacobs’ principal Spanish interlocutor. He was known as a progressive liberal influenced by Krausist philosophy and his reputation rested on claims regarding the importance of the “Semitic” influence on the formation of Spanish culture. Specifically, González argued that this racial and cultural intermingling was a positive feature of the Spanish past, leaving its imprint on Spain’s “great history, on its customs, on its language and even on its bloodline.” Fernández y González’s conceptions of Iberian hybridity therefore served as a counter-narrative to prevalent contemporary ideas of Iberian purity and perhaps helped shape subsequent, better-known, discussions of “convivencia.” Importantly, he was an Arabist who turned to Hebraism and the Jewish past as a means to 34  The speech titled “Jewish History and its Methods,” was translated and published in the Real Academia de la Historia’s Boletín de Real Academia de la Historia and also appeared as the last chapter of Jacobs’ book Jewish Ideals (1896). See also, Friedman, Recovering ‘Jewish Spain’. 35  Ibid.

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assert Spain’s antiquity among “the nations of Europe” by reference to its Jewish origins. In his work, González referred to the exiled Jews as “Jews of the Spanish homeland”, describing the scholarship they produced as “Spanish” in nature. For Fernández y González, cooperating with the Academy’s corresponding members based in “all civilized countries” was fundamental to the mission of uncovering Spain’s national past.36 That most of the scholars in question were Jewish suggests a connection in his mind between the notion of “Jewishness” and “civilization.” In a sense, this vision of scholarly cooperation between Jews and Spaniards in unearthing and recovering Spanish sources that validated Spain’s historia patria evoked the interreligious scholarly collaborations of medieval Iberia, while reaffirming the place of Jews in a modern Spanish nation. To conclude the story of this encounter: in Spain, becoming more “Jewish” and demonstrating the nation’s Jewish origins could mean becoming more European, notwithstanding the emphasis placed on Spanish difference. This stands in sharp contrast with some other European national contexts, where Jews elaborated narratives insisting on their Europeanness.37 These trends reemerged with vigor in the philosephardic campaigns of the early twentieth century that followed the definitive loss of Spain’s overseas empire in 1898. Known in Spanish historiography as “the disaster,” Spain’s final loss of her overseas empire in 1898 represented an existential crisis for intellectuals and politicians who now sought to restore Spanish influence through projects of national “regeneration” and neocolonialism.38 The anxieties generated by Spain’s perceived decline also  Ibid.  See for instance Bitzan, “Leopold Zunz and the Meanings of Wissenschaft,” 233–54. 38  See Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire 1898–1923. As in Spain’s earlier involvement in North Africa, the Spanish presented themselves as liberators to the Sephardi Jews whom they encountered, proclaiming to be liberating them from the yoke of their Muslim oppressors; a colonial strategy reminiscent of that employed by the French in North Africa such as discussed by scholars such as Ethan Katz, Joshua Schreier, Emily Gottreich and Susan Miller among others. On philosephardism in North Africa see, Uriel Macías Kapón, “Los cronistas de la guerra de África y el primer reencuentro con los sefardíes,” in Los judíos en la España contemporánea: historia y visiones, 1898–1998, Uriel Macías, Yolanda Moreno Koch y Ricardo Izquierdo Benito eds., 45–60; Rohr, “Spaniards of the Jewish Type,” 61–75; Daniel J Schroeter, “Philo-Sephardism, Anti-Semitism and Arab Nationalism: Muslims and Jews in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco during the Period of the Third Reich,” in Nazism, the Holocaust and the Middle East: Arab and Turkish Responses, ed. Frank Nicosia and Boĝaç Ergene, 179–215; and Elisaeth Bollarinos Allard, Enemies or brothers? Defining Spanish identity in relation to Muslim and Jewish cultures in colonial Morocco. 36 37

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contributed to the rise of racialist thinking. As Joshua Goode has argued, many Spanish racial theorists forged an identity centered on Spain’s history of inter-ethnic contact, claiming the “racial strength” of Spain was rooted in the ability of the “Spanish race” to fuse the different groups that coexisted on the Iberian Peninsula.39

Spanish Liberals Look towards Sepharad in the Wake of Catastrophe It was against this backdrop, and alongside the emergence of the interwoven nationalist and transnationalist projects of Hispanism (Hispanidad— the notion of a brotherhood among all Hispanic peoples)—and Sephardism (Sefardismo), that liberal politicians and scholars showed an increased interest in drawing upon the Jewish past to support such theories. In his travel account, Plumazos de un viajero, Ángel Pulido Fernández, a political liberal considered the pioneer of Spanish political philosephardism, recounts a chance encounter with Sephardi Jews. Yet this encounter only became significant to him after 1898, when he initiated his campaign to reclaim Sephardi Jews and heritage for a Spanish national agenda. Pulido, began his career as an anthropologist but later turned to the social application of scientific ideas. He was a close ally of Emilio Castelar (President of the 1st Spanish Republic between 1873 and 1874), who also became interested in Sephardi Jews.40 Pulido developed ideas relating to race and racial fusion throughout his political career, especially after he became a permanent member of the Spanish Senate, which is precisely when he began his early twentieth-century philosephardist campaigns.41 On November 13, 1908 after his return from a trip to Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade and Istanbul during which he had more extensive encounters with Sephardi Jews, Pulido delivered an impassioned speech in the Senate urging Spain to (re)embrace Sephardi Jews as a way to promote its national interests. Both Pulido and his son Ángel, who had encountered Sephardi  See Goode, Impurity of Blood.  For discussion of Castelar’s views of the Jews and how they shifted in the context of the Spanish ‘rediscovery’ of Sephardi Jews in North Africa and the battle over libertad de cultos see Shinan, “Emilio Castelar y los judíos: una reevaluación,” 101–18. 41  See Goode, Impurity of Blood, 182–6 for discussion of Ángel Pulido’s philosephardism and analysis of its place of in the history and development of racialist thought in Spain, and Rohr, “Spaniards of the Jewish Type.” For Pulido’s own writing on the topic see Los israelitas españoles y el idioma castellano, and Españoles sin patria y la raza sefardí. 39 40

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Jews when studying in Vienna, published articles about them and corresponded energetically with Sephardi leaders and intellectuals. In 1904, Pulido published a brief account of these efforts—in the hope of encouraging influential Spanish commercial, cultural and scholarly sectors to take concrete action.42 While Pulido was widely hailed as the “liberator” of Sephardi Jews, some including Madrileño author Cansinos Assens, were skeptical of his motives and the way he trafficked in antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish gold; indeed, philosemitism and antisemitism in Spain were often two sides of the same coin.43 Pulido’s philosephardic campaigns moreover encountered pushback from the more traditional sectors of Spanish society, as these elements voiced ideas that conflated medieval Catholic anti-Judaism with modern ideas concerning the dangers of racial mixing, stressing Iberian-Catholic purity and disseminating antisemitic ideas from across the Pyrenees. For instance, the work of the antisemitic French publicist Adolph Drumont was translated into Spanish, fostering the publication of similar Spanish tracts that blamed Jews—and the Rothschilds—for Spain’s decline, and called for the restoration of the Inquisition.44 Yet other international events, like the Algeciras Conference of 1906 which brought 25,000 Jews in Northern Morocco under Spanish rule, were to foster the development of political philosephardism. The most striking manifestation of this phenomenon was the appointment in 1915 of, Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877–1951), a Sephardi scholar born in Jerusalem, to a Special Numerary Chair of “Rabbinical Hebrew Language and Literature” at the University of Madrid by a royal decree issued by Spanish King, Alfonso XIII.45 The appointment is moreover noteworthy in that Yahuda was the first Jewish scholar to hold a 42  See Pulido, Los Israelitas españoles y el idioma castellano, and the reprinted edition, with an introduction by Garzón. Initially, the philosephardic movement focused on the Jews in the Spanish protectorate in Morocco and only later did it expand its operations to the eastern Sephardi diaspora in the Balkans, Greece and Turkey. 43  See Friedman, Reconquering Sepharad for discussion of the connections between philosephardism and antisemitism. 44  For example, Casabó y Pagés, La España Judía (1891). 45  For the Royal Order see, Gaceta de Madrid 4:341 (7 Dec. 1915): 625. The correspondence between Spanish Arabist Miguel Asin Palacios and Jewish Arabist (and one of the founders of Islamic Studies) Ignaz Goldziher reveals their involvement in his appointment. See Marín, de la Puente, Rodríguez Mediano, Pérez Alcalde, Los espistolarios de Julián Ribera Tarragó y Miguel Asín Palacios. For further discussion of Yahuda see the special forum on Yahuda in The Jewish Quarterly Review 109.3 (Summer 2019), Michal Rose Friedman and Allyson Gonzalez eds. and for Yahuda in Spain the essays in the issue by Friedman and Gonzalez.

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Chair dedicated exclusively to Jewish Studies at a Western secular university in the modern era; moreover during a time when Jews were largely barred from entering the ranks of professorship in Western Europe.46 The appointment attracted protest, but Yahuda was to assume a very visible role in Spanish public life and win the support of the liberal establishment, even as he advocated for Jewish causes, including Zionism.47 Yahuda’s appointment owed much to the RAH and its president Fidel Fita, who saluted Yahuda’s work on “Spain’s rabbinic culture, before the expulsion of a race that had lived alongside us for many centuries, and had played an active part in all of the great historical developments of their onetime Kingdoms.”48 For the RAH, Yahuda’s appointment was “inestimably important to the national interest,” a contribution to the “regeneration of our general History, in all of its areas . . . .”49 Yahuda, meanwhile, understood his appointment not just as an opportunity to press Jewish causes in Spain, but also as a spur to becoming a passionate advocate for Spain as a welcoming, tolerant country that had rid itself of the spirit of the Inquisition, Torquemada and the Expulsion. This message resonated with wider efforts at “national regeneration” among politicians and intellectuals who spoke of the emergence of a “new Spain.” Yahuda would later recall that the Spanish government and King Alfonso had “devised a manifest policy of sympathy with the Jews” because the “Jewish world was ignorant of modern Spain, still apprehensive of the country of the Inquisition” and yet Sephardi Jews were playing an important part in the Spanish expansion into Northern Morocco, “economically as well as politically.” “Liberals and intellectuals were anxious to mark their emancipation from the bad traditions of the past and to demonstrate their disapproval for the acts of the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews ….” in an attempt to win over the Jews of newly conquered Spanish Morocco. They therefore deemed it “very useful … to invite a scholar of Sephardic

46  It is commonly stated that the Miller Chair of Jewish History, Literature and Institutions established at Columbia University in 1930 and first held by Salo W. Baron was the first chair of Jewish history in a secular Western University. See for instance, Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 81, and Gonzalez and Friedman, JQR 109.3. 47   See Yahuda, Abraham Shalom, Dr. Weizmann’s Errors on Trial, and Friedman, “Orientalism between Empires: Abraham Shalom Yahuda at the Intersection of Sepharad, Zionism, and Imperialism.” 48  “Professor Yahuda Vindicated,” The Reform Advocate 59 (5 Jun. 1920): 413–15. 49  Ibid., and Gaceta de Madrid 4:341 (7 Dec. 1915): 625–8.

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extraction to deliver a series of lectures on Jewish history and literature”50 and to undertake a “movement in favor of establishing close relations with these ‘lost sons of Spain.’”51 In the event, Yahuda resigned abruptly from his position in Madrid in 1920, allegedly following a conspiracy against him in the faculty with antisemitic undertones.52 Yahuda was a British citizen, and the episode became a cause célèbre thanks in part to an official intervention by the British ambassador. As a consequence, the affair was debated in the Senate prompting the Dean, Professor Torno, to ask members of the faculty to reconsider their decision to refuse Yahuda his requested leave, in the hope of persuading Yahuda to remain in Spain.53 Yet the outcome of a second vote proved unsatisfactory. Torno then appealed to the Senate, of which he was a member, urging it to consider the broader implications of the case: this cause is of great interest for the good renown and the prestige of the new Spain, so different from the old. What can be finer than to enlarge our spiritual horizon in a period which has witnessed the narrowing of the material limits of the territories subject to our sovereignty? We must think of that great Spain which embraces the Sephardi Jews of the three Continents of Europe, Near Asia, and North Africa, and calls to intellectual reconcilement and fraternal affection the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of those countries beyond the Atlantic which once had been Spanish.54 The Minister of Public Instruction, Señor Rivas, agreed that: “Professor Yahuda … confers a boon to Spain, showing that we are maligned abroad when foreigners speak of our intolerance, and that a British subject may teach at the Spanish Central University without having to give up his nationality, that a Sephardi may live and work in full confraternity with

 A.S. Yahuda, Interview for the Jewish Chronicle, May 19th, 1919.  A. S. Yahuda, “King Alfonso XIII and the Jews”; “Spanish Zionism,” The A.S. Yahuda Archive, The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. ARC. Ms. Var. Yah 38 073754; Gaceta de Madrid 4:341 (7 Dec. 1915): 625–8; and BRAH 65:5 (1 Oct. 1914): 415–19. See also Friedman, Orientalism between Empires. 52  The reasons for Yahuda’s resignation from his position are more complex than space allows me to discuss here. For some further discussion see García-Jalón de la Lama, Don Abraham Yahuda y la Universidad Central de Madrid; Gonzalez, “Abraham S.  Yahuda (1877–1951) and the Politics of Modern Jewish Scholarship”; Friedman, Recovering Jewish Spain. 53  The request insisted on the importance of Yahuda sharing his new research on the Pentateuch with British scholars. 54  Ibid. 50 51

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us.” He indicated that he would ask Yahuda to withdraw his resignation.55 Why Yahuda refused to stay in Madrid remains unclear. What is clear, however, was that his retention was deemed a matter of national interest for Spain because the Jewish past remained entwined with the notion of Spanish greatness at a time when throughout much of Europe, Jews experienced the hardening of ethno-nationalism and racial antisemitism. By this time, Spanish interest in Sepharad had ceased to be a purely a liberal affair. Political philosephardism was enshrined in law under the Miguel Primo de Rivera dictatorship on December 20, 1924, when a royal decree was promulgated granting full citizenship to individuals of Spanish origin.56 Prompted in part by the abolition of the system of capitulations in the aftermath of WWI, the decree extended to Moroccan Jews. This step was more symbolic than practical because the muddled naturalization process was not designed to promote Sephardi immigration to Spain. Yet during the early years of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1936) various government agencies worked with some of Spain’s most prominent intellectuals to elaborate Pulido’s mission civilisatrice among Sephardi communities. Although religious freedom and anticlericalism became hallmarks of the 2nd Spanish Republic, questions of religious tolerance continued to be filtered through the “Jewish Question.” In March 1935, at a point when the Spanish Republic was struggling for its survival, the national and local government of the city of Cordoba, mounted a commemoration of the 800th anniversary of the birth of Cordoban native, rabbinic scholar and Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, 1135–1204). Fascism and the resurgence of the Right was now a palpable threat to the Republic. The Center and Right Republicans and Radicals desperately hoped to reverse this trend to preserve the Republic from disintegration, by restoring or re-envisioning some of its initial liberal and enlightened projects.57 In this context, the government found the idea of embracing Maimonides—who symbolized notions of tolerance, progress and reason in a so-called “golden age” in Spain’s past—quite attractive. The centennial presented an opportunity to reject publicly a fascism all too  Ibid.  In 1923, amidst general discontent over recent ill-fated campaigns in Morocco, the Restoration government came to an end by a military coup led general by Miguel Primo de Rivera (1870–1930) and backed by Alfonso XIII. Primo Rivera was named Prime Minister by the king and established a dictatorship which lasted through 1930. 57  On this final stage of the Second Republic see Pío, El derrumbe de la Segunda República. 55 56

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closely connected with the image of Spanish intolerance that was inextricably linked not just to Spain’s past, but also to contemporary perceptions of Spain’s backwardness. In the event, the symbolism of this event inspired not just the National Republican government, but also Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews living in Spain, the Sephardic Diaspora and elsewhere in Europe to participate in the planning of the commemoration.58 Rather disparate visions of the patria intermingled over the course of this event, as Spaniards and Jews forged a shared vision of Spain, one that coincided, in some ways, with the patria envisioned and publicized by government officials in a time of crisis and shortly before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The victory of General Francisco Franco and the ascendance of National Catholicism in 1936, quashed both the utopian vision of a tolerant Spain promoted at the Maimonides commemoration a year earlier and the unprecedented liberties ushered in by the 2nd Republic, including freedom of religious confessionalism. Franco rendered his victory and regime as a national crusade designed to create a vision of Spanish history as a linear continuum of Spain’s Catholic unity  ostensibly achieved by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492. Yet even as he promoted his ideology of National Catholicism, Franco was confronted with the hybridity of Spain’s medieval past. In practice, he oscillated between antisemitism and a recognition of Spain’s multicultural history, and the specifically Jewish contributions to Spanish culture.59 In evaluating the place of Spain in any broader consideration of the “Jewish Question,” what renders Spain different, yet an illustrative case, is the way the Jewish past, or “Sepharad” remained so closely linked to 58  See my discussion of the commemoration in Friedman, Recovering ‘Jewish Spain’. News and discussion of the event also extended to North America and Palestine. For North American discussion see also, Friedman, Celebrating Maimonides’ 800th Birthday in Córdoba: http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/cajs/fellows15/cajs2015.html, accessed August 1, 2018. 59  Franco’s vision of the Hispanic “race” is most famously depicted in his screenplay “Raza” written under a pseudonym. On the antisemitism of Franco and his regime see Rohr, The Spanish Right and the Jews, as well as Ojeda Mata’s discussion of the expulsion of Barcelona’s Ottoman Jews in Identidades Ambivalentes. On the other hand, the Franco regime established the Arias Montanto Institute of Sephardi and Hebrew Studies as part of the National Research Council and maintained cordial relations with Madrid’s Jewish community (see Friedman, Recovering Jewish Spain). As recent studies have suggested, it may be argued that racial classification under Franco was in the main reserved for individuals of the political left and their offspring.

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Spanish conceptions of nation, self and other. Spain’s Jewishness and history of religious pluralism appeared unique or exceptional within a European setting and Spanish liberals embraced this difference, including the notion of Spanishness rooted in racial hybridity. Sepharad and contemporary Sephardi Jews could therefore appear to be a vital appendage to the Spanish body politic. This view was greatly enhanced by Spanish-Jewish encounters in the modern era connected—yet not limited to—Spain’s neo-imperial designs. These encounters often occasioned Jewish mediation aimed at bringing Spain’s Jewish past and the question of religious tolerance to the fore of Spanish national politics. When moreover examined alongside other modern-era European “imperial nation-states” that ruled over significant Jewish populations in their colonies, certain Spanish dynamics such as attempts to manipulate Muslim-Jewish relations, the administration of linguistic and ethnographic surveys, as well as questions of Jewish citizenship, appear rather familiar.60 These commonalities render the otherwise “exceptional” Spanish case emblematic in ways that have long been overlooked. Just as scholars have suspended the frontier between metropole and colony in their examination of the Jewish Question elsewhere, in blurring the line between perceived margin and center and traversing the Pyrenean frontier, perhaps modern Spain may elucidate important variations on a common theme. Yet Sepharad and its legacy also presented certain tensions for Spanish liberals: Even as they advocated for a more democratic and tolerant Spain in order to counter widely held notions of Spanish fanaticism and backwardness—not to mention more reactionary Spanish visions of patria— many Spanish liberals were unable to dismiss the nation’s foundational Catholic identity, expressed in the liberal constitution of Cádiz. This ambivalence often led to an oscillation between philosemitism and antisemitism, even regarding Sephardi Jews whose Spanishness was considered sounder, due to their presumed mixing with Spaniards. In short, Spain’s Jewish Question remained unresolved. Ultimately neither liberals nor traditionalists could reconcile their understanding of their nation’s foundational religious identity as Catholic with its pluricultural history. 60  The reference here to the “imperial nation-state” is to Gary Wilder’s formulation. For French colonial employment of Jews in linguistic and ethnographic surveys see for example, Kosansky, “When Jews Speak Arabic,” 5–39, and for questions of France’s triangular relationship with its Jewish and Muslim populations in metropole and colony, Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood.

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Questions of Jewish belonging in Spain thus echoed those from across the Pyrenees, even as the Jewish Question in Spain largely eschewed European ideologies of secularism, or the purely racialist antisemitism that precluded the possibility of Jewish national belonging. For Sepharad and its utopic appeal as an emblem of liberty and opportunity remained integral to Spain’s identity and to future efforts to reclaim the patria.

Bibliography Abrevaya Stein, Sarah. 2017. Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Álvarez Junco, José. 2001. Mater Dolorosa: la idea de España en el siglo XIX, 119–149. Madrid: Taurus. Andreu, Xavier. 2016. El descubrimiento de España: Mito romántico e identidad nacional. Madrid: Taurus. Artola, Miguel. 1959. Los orígenes de la España contemporánea. 2 vols. Madrid: IEP. Balfour, Sebastian. 1997. The End of the Spanish Empire, 1898–1923. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bollarinos Allard, Elisabeth. 2020. Enemies or Brothers? Defining Spanish Identity in Relation to Muslim and Jewish Cultures in Colonial Morocco. Suffolk: Tamesis. Forthcoming. Bush, Andrew. 2013. Amador de los Ríos and the Beginnings of Modern Jewish Studies in Spain. In Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era, ed. Daniela Flesler, Tabea Alexa Linhard, and Adrián Pérez Melgosa. Routledge (republished from Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12:1, 13–33, 2011). See: https://www.taylor francis.com/books/e/9781315873046/chapters/10.4324/9781315873046-7. And for the original journal article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14636204.2011.556875?t ab=permissions&scroll=top Calderwood, Eric. 2018. Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Camacho, J.M., and R.  Castejón. 1935. Crónica del VIII Centenario de Maimónides. Boletín de la Academia de Ciencias, Bellas Letras y Nobles Artes de Córdoba 14 (46): 148. Eastman, Scott. 2015. Introduction: The Sacred Mantle of the Constitution of 1812. In The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World: The Impact of the Cádiz Constitution of 1812, Scott Eastman & Natalia Sobrevilla Perea (Eds). Birmingham: The University of Alabama Press. Efron, John M. 2015. German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Fernández Sebastián, Javier. 2011. Toleration and Freedom of Expression in the Hispanic World Between Enlightenment and Liberalism. Past and Present 11: 159–197. ———. 2014. A Distorting Mirror: The Sixteenth Century in the Historical Imagination of the First Hispanic Liberals. History of European Ideas 41 (2): 166–175. Feros, Antonio. 2017. Talking about Spain: The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Flesler, Daniela. 2013. In Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era, ed. Tabea Linhard and Adrián Pérez Melgosa. London: Routledge. Fontana, Josep. 1979. La crisis del Antiguo régimen 1808–1833. Barcelona: Crítica. Friedman, Michal. 2011a. Jewish History as ‘Historia Patria’: José Amador de los Ríos and the History of the Jews of Spain. Jewish Social Studies 18 (1): 88–126. ———. 2011b. Reconquering Sepharad: Ernesto Giménez Cabllero’s Sephardist Crusade. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12 (1): 35–60. (reprinted in Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era, Routledge 2013). Friedman, Michal Rose. 2012. Recovering ‘Jewish Spain’: Historiography, Politics and Institutionalization of the Jewish Past in Spain. New  York: Columbia University PhD Dissertation. ———. 2019. Orientalism Between Empires: Abraham Shalom Yahuda at the Intersection of Sepharad, Zionism, and Imperialism. Jewish Quarterly Review 109 (3): 435–451. García-Jalón de la Lama. 2006. Don Abraham Yahuda y la Universidad Central de Madrid (1915–1923). Salamanca: Universidad Pontifica de Salamanca. Geary, Patrick J. 2003. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Glick, Thomas. 1992. Convivencia: An introductory Note. In Convivencia: Jews, Muslims and Christians in Medieval Spain, ed. Vivian B. Mann, Thomas Glick, and Jerilynn Dodds, 1–8. New York: Jewish Publication Society. Gonzalez, Allyson. 2019. Abraham S.  Yahuda (1877–1951) and the Politics of Modern Jewish Scholarship. Jewish Quarterly Review 109 (3): 406–433. Goode, Joshua. 2009. Impurity of Blood: Defining Race in Spain, 1870–1930. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Gutiérrez Nieto, Juan Ignacio. 1986. El pensamiento económico, político y social de los arbitristas. In Historia de España Menéndez Pidal, El siglo del Quijote (1580–1680): Religión, filosofía, ciencia, 235–354. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Halevi-Wise, Yael, ed. 2012. Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Hauben, Paul J. 1979. The Enlightenment and Minorities: Two Spanish Discussions. The Catholic Historical Review 65 (1): 1–19. Hook, David, and Graciela Iglesias-Rogers, eds. 2017. Translations In Times of Disruption: An interdisciplinary Study in Transnational Contexts. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Jacobs, Joseph. 1896. Jewish Ideals and Other Essays. London: D. Nutt. Joskowicz, Ari. 2013. The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Katz, Ethan. 2015. The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Katz, Ethan B., Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel, eds. 2017. Colonialism and the Jews. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kosansky, Oren. 2016. When Jews Speak Arabic: Dialectology and Difference in Colonial Morocco. Comparative Studies in Society and History 58 (1): 5–3. Llorente, José Antonio. 1817. Histoire critique de l’Inquisition d’Espagne. Paris: Treuttel et Wurtz. Luna-Fabritius, Adriana. 2015. “Cádiz’s Liberalism in European Context.” La democrazia in Europa: due secoli di dibattito politico: studi in memoria di Salvo Mastellone. Rivista di Storia delle Idee Politiche e Sociali Il Pensiero Politico 1–2: 58–70. Macías Kapón, Uriel. 2000. Los cronistas de la guerra de África y el primer reencuentro con los sefardíes. In Los judíos en la España contemporánea: historia y visiones, 1898–1998, ed. Uriel Macías, Yolanda Moreno Koch, and Ricardo Izquierdo Benito, 45–60. Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla la Mancha. Manrique Escudero, Monica. 2016. Los judíos ante los cambios políticos en España en 1868. Madrid: Hebraica Ediciones. Manzano Moreno, Eduardo, and Juan Sisinio Pérez Garzón. 2002. A Difficult Nation?: History and Nationalism in Contemporary Spain. History and Memory 14 (1–2 Special Issue: Images of a Contested Past): 259–284. Marín, Manuela, Cristina de la Puente, Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, and Juan Ignacio Pérez Alcalde, eds. 2009. Los epistolarios de Julián Ribera Tarragó y Miguel Asín Palacios. Madrid: CSIC. Mitchell, Harvey. 2014. Voltaire’s Jews and Modern Jewish Identity: Rethinking the Enlightenment. London: Routledge. Nirenberg, David. 1996. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ojeda Mata, Maite. 2013. Identidades ambivalentes: Sefardíes en la España contemporánea. Madrid: Sefarad Editores. Paquette, Gabriel. 2008. Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its Empire 1759–1808. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2013. The Study of Political Thought in the Ibero-Atlantic World during the Age of Revolutions. Modern Intellectual History 10: 437–448. ———. 2015. Introduction: Liberalism in the Early Nineteenth-century Iberian World. History of European Ideas 41 (2): 1–13. Peiró Martín, Ignacio. 2006. Los Guardianes de la Historia. La Historiografía Académica de la Restauración. 2nd ed. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico/Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.

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Puigblanch, Antonio (Natanael Jomtob). 1811. La Inquisición sin máscara, o, disertación en que se prueban hasta la evidencia los vicios de este tribunal, y la necesidad de que se suprima. Cádiz: En la imprenta de Josef Niel. Pulido, Ángel. 1992. Los Israelitas españoles y el idioma castellano (1904). Barcelona: Riopiedras Ediciones. Ray, Jonathan. 2005. Beyond Tolerance and Persecution: Reassessing our Approach to Medieval Convivencia. Jewish Social Studies 11 (2): 1–18. Riviére Gómez, Aurora. 2000.  Orientalismo y Nacionalismo Español: estudios árabes y hebreos en la Universidad de Madrid (1843–1868). Madrid: Editorial Dykinson S.L. Rohr, Isabelle. 2007. The Spanish Right and the Jews, 1898–1945. Antisemitism and Opportunism. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press. ———. 2011. Spaniards of the Jewish Type: Philosephardism in the Service of Imperialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spanish Morocco. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12 (1): 61–75. (republished in Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era, Routledge 2013). Schorsch, Ismar. 1989. The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy in Nineteenth-Century Germany. The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 34 (1): 47–66. Schroeter, Daniel J. 2018. Philo-Sephardism, Anti-Semitism and Arab Nationalism: Muslims and Jews in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco during the Period of the Third Reich. In Nazism, the Holocaust and the Middle East: Arab and Turkish Responses, ed. Frank Nicosia, and Boĝaç Ergene, 179–215. New York: Berghahn Books. Shachpkow, Carsten. 2011. Vorbild und Gegenbild: Das iberische Judentum in der deutsch-judischen Erinnerungskultur 1779–1939. Köln: Böhlau. ———. 2015. Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation. Lanham: Lexington Books. Shinan, Nitai. 2011. Korbanot o ashemim: Toldot ha-Yehudim bi-reʼi ha-hisṭoryografyah ha- Sefaradit ba-shanim 1759–1898. Jerusalem: Mekhon Ben-Tsevi le-ḥeḳer ḳehilot Yiśraʼel ba-Mizraḥ. ———. 2016. Emilio Castelar y los judíos: una reevaluación. Miscellanea de Estudio Árabes y Judíos 65: 101–118. Yahuda, Abraham Shalom. 1919. Jewish Learning and Life in Spain: Interview for the Jewish Chronicle with Dr. A.S. Yahuda. London: W. Brittain. ———. 1941. King Alfonso XIII and the Jews and his Action in Saving Palestine Jewry from Wholesale Evacuation. New York: The Jewish Forum. ———. 1951b. Ha-hagana al ha-Yashuv be-Milhemet ha-Olam ha-Rishona: Zihronot me-Yaemei Shehuti be-Sefarad. In Jewish Life and Literature: A Collection of Pamphlets. Jerusalem: Hotsaʼat ha-meḥaber. ———. 1952. Dr. Weizmann’s Errors on Trial: A Refutation of his Statements in “Trial and Error” Concerning my Activity for Zionism During my Professorship at Madrid University. New York: E.R. Yahuda.

CHAPTER 9

A Model Millet? Ottoman Jewish Citizenship at the End of Empire Julia Phillips Cohen

The nineteenth century was, in the words of historian Holly Case, an “age of questions.”1 Such questions abounded: the Eastern Question, Jewish Question, Social Question, and Woman Question were only among a handful of the most prominent. Together, Case argues, the emergence of such “questions” signals a new mode of historical thinking about political problems and possibilities across Europe and beyond. However different the answers they offered—by way of education or legislation, visions of social engineering or the redrawing of political borders—those who came to think in terms of such questions were all convinced that a particular group, area, or issue constituted a problem to be solved using the tools of the modern age. Already the object of European politicians and thinkers’ discussions of the “Eastern Question” at the start of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire soon developed its own set of “questions” as the century wore on. 1

 Case, The Age of Questions.

J. P. Cohen (*) Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_9

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Responding to the intense interference of foreign states in the empire’s affairs and to the birth of new secessionist movements, among other developments, Ottoman statesmen and public figures contemplated and debated the future place of particular regions or people within the empire. Perhaps best known among them was the so-called Armenian Question, which rose to prominence during the negotiations following the 1877–1878 Russo-Ottoman War, as growing numbers of observers concluded that the situation of Armenians in the eastern provinces of Anatolia was becoming increasingly untenable.2 While Ottoman and Great Power statesmen officially agreed to reforms designed to offer Armenians greater social, economic, and political security across the empire, increasing repression and violence continued alongside such formal concessions. By the period of the First World War, Ottoman policies began to rely on increasingly sinister “answers” to the empire’s Armenian “Question,” a development that ultimately culminated in the Armenian genocide of 1915.3 What of the empire’s Jews? Elsewhere, across Europe, Jews found themselves time and again at the heart of debates over the body politic. Across the continent, special assemblies and committees convened to inquire about Jews’ fitness for citizenship or to effect a “complete transformation of Jewish life.”4 Petitions circulated calling for Jews to be stripped of their rights, national scandals put Jews at the center of divisive debates about the future of the country, and writing or speaking about Jewish matters increasingly launched authors, politicians, and political movements into prominence. It would not be an exaggeration to say that  Some, such as a member of the Armenian National Assembly in Istanbul named Nazaret Shahbazian, were inclined to refer to this as the “Armenian Problem,” as he did during a August 4 [old style], 1878 session. Others referred to the “Armenian Question,” as was the case of Nubar Pasha, prime minister of Egypt, who submitted a petition to the delegates of the Great Powers gathered in Berlin with the title “Mémoire sur la question arménienne.” For each of these references, respectively, see: Atenagrutiwnk’ azgayin zhoghovoy, 86 and “Documents Arméniens,” La Haïasdan 3–4, 5–6. My thanks to Armen Manuk-Khaloyan for references to Armenian-language uses of the term, and for our interesting exchanges on this topic more broadly. 3  Already by the mid-1890s, in the midst of widespread massacres of Armenians across eastern Anatolia and the Ottoman capital, certain observers claimed that Sultan Abdülhamid II himself had suggested “that the Armenian question must be settled not by reform but by blood.” Deringil, “‘The Armenian Question is Finally Closed,” 369. Emphasis mine. Literature on both the massacres of the 1890s and the Armenian genocide is now extensive. For a recent survey, see: Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else.” 4  For Russia’s Jewish Committee, established in 1840, see: Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, 83. 2

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the question of whether, where, and how Jews belonged to various polities followed them almost everywhere they lived across the continent during this period. In some cases, “Jewish Questions” even spread to countries with few or no Jews at all.5 It is thus remarkable that—precisely during a period in which questions of all sorts proliferated and in which Jewish Questions multiplied across a diverse set of landscapes—the nineteenth-­ century Ottoman Empire did not experience a Jewish Question.6 To suggest as much is not to say that the place of Jews in the broader imperial landscape was unproblematic. Far from it. Careful study of Ottoman Jewish history disabuses us of this notion, long prevalent among boosters of the Ottoman and, later, modern Turkish states. Instead, the historical record shows that Jews across the empire experienced anti-­ Jewish violence and prejudice at regular intervals, not just among their Ottoman Christian neighbors—as much of the literature has suggested— but also at the hands of Muslims of various ranks and backgrounds. Portrayals of the Ottoman Empire as a singular paradise for Jews hinged partly on the enduring myth of the Ottomans’ heroic reception of Iberian Jews in the late fifteenth century when no one else would have them. Such portrayals were the product of Ottoman Jews’ evolving relations with their various neighbors and rulers, not a description of them. Ultimately, the problems Ottoman Jews faced at the outset of their empire’s reform era were different from those experienced by Jews elsewhere. If Jews mattered well beyond their numbers in places where Jewish Questions developed, in the Ottoman case, Jews appear to have mattered little—at least not enough to spur significant debates or notably alter state policies. For better or worse, Ottoman Jews had no special government committees, regulations, petitions, publications, or political parties dedicated to dealing with their status or fate: the principal challenge they faced at the dawn of the modern era was, instead, an invisibility problem. As imperial intellectuals and officials strove to shore up the state’s power both at home and abroad, the question of how to deal with the empire’s Jews would rarely have been foremost among the issues keeping them awake at  See, for example, Michal Rose Friedman’s essay in this volume.  It bears noting that Jews can be said to have pondered their own version of an “Eastern Jewish Question” during this period. Yet this was largely the product of European Jews’ preoccupation with “uplifting” and “civilizing” their coreligionists in Islamic lands, not a broader preoccupation of Ottoman state or society. On this other kind of “Jewish Question” in the empire, see Rodrigue, “The Emergence of the ‘Jewish Eastern Question,’” in his French Jews, Turkish Jews, 1–24 as well as Yaron Tsur’s contribution to this volume. 5 6

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night. More often, concerns about the fate of Ottoman Jews arose as a footnote to a broader “Non-Muslim Question” that pivoted around fears of foreign intervention and the fate of the country’s Christian populations in particular.7 Ottoman and European Jews alike soon began to grumble about this situation. By the mid-nineteenth century, as the reforming agenda of the imperial administration came into focus, various Jewish authors across the empire publicly bemoaned the absence of Ottoman Jews from political discussions and positions of power alike. As one observer writing in a Ladino periodical of Salonica in 1876 put it: Jews “count for nothing in the Ottoman Empire.”8 There was little denying that, as he wrote, the vast majority of Ottoman Jews lived in poverty, and without the level of access to the court or lucrative industries members of their community had enjoyed in previous eras. A relatively small community, Jews were also poorly represented—and at times essentially absent—from positions of government during this period. Some two decades earlier, Jewish ­observers had been dismayed to learn that the original draft of the 1856 Ottoman Reform Decree had only explicitly mentioned granting equality to the empire’s Christians, not its Jews. Nor did the official version that eventually proclaimed the equality of all Ottomans regardless of religion fully resolve this tension. Even in its final form, the document that legally “emancipated” the Jews of the empire did not mention them directly. Instead, it referred simply to the new equality of Christians “and other non-Muslims.”9 None of this appears to have been the result of a concerted campaign to deprive Jews of rights along the lines that developed elsewhere in this period. The authors of the 1856 Ottoman Reform Decree—heavily influenced by a group of Great Power statesmen who had made it their mission 7  See, for example, Cohen and Stein, eds., “Ottoman and British Officials Spar over Protection of the Jews [ca. 1840],” 115–18, which cites concerns about how acceding to a British proposal to protect the empire’s Jews might encourage Russian claims on the empire’s Orthodox Christians as well as French and Austrian claims over the empire’s Catholics. Even in Palestine, the interference and presence of foreign Christians was arguably of equal, if not greater, important to imperial authorities at the mid-century than was that of the settlement of foreign Jews: before the rise of Zionism later in the century, Ottoman authorities principally considered non-Ottoman Jews in the region as the potential pawns of the Great Powers. Friedman, “The System of Capitulations and its Effects on Turco-Jewish Relations in Palestine, 1856–1897,” in Kushner, ed., Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period, 280–93. 8  “Saloniko,” La Epoka, October 2, 1876, 1. 9  Ziya Karal, Tarihi, vol. 5, Nizam-ı Cedit ve Tanzimat Devirleri, 266–72.

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to provide the empire’s Christians in particular with new rights and protections—may well have considered the categories of “Christian” and “non-Muslim” interchangeable.10 Yet the fact that Ottoman bureaucrats later found it plausible to suggest that they had always intended to include Jews into categories that did not explicitly mention them—first into the rather unlikely category of “Christian,” and then within the broader umbrella of “Christians and other non-Muslims”—is a telling example of the ways in which Ottoman Jews remained an afterthought of imperial politics at the mid-century. Throughout the following decades, different observers complained that Jews continued to be left out of the various representative bodies the state was forming with the explicit intent of creating integrated institutions. Jews’ absence from important political developments was also felt in other arenas, such as when the Ottoman authorities showcased an integrated volunteer unit formed in 1876  in the midst of the empire’s war with Serbia and Montenegro. Although the imperial government promoted the unit to “to dramatize” the new unity of all Ottomans, it was in fact made up only of Muslims and Christians. Its special flag bore the star and crescent of the empire on one side and a cross on the other, thus crystallizing Jews’ absence from the new formation in symbolic form as well.11 These regular omissions, which continued for a number of decades, dovetail with the observations of contemporary commentators who suggested that Jews simply didn’t matter enough to drive either policy or empire-­ wide debates during the height of the Ottoman Reform Era. Although Ottoman Jews and their self-proclaimed allies lamented Jews’ invisibility vis-à-vis the state for decades, most were convinced that the onus for rectifying the situation fell largely upon Ottoman Jews themselves. As one author writing for an Istanbul-based Ladino newspaper put it in 1876, his community was some “twenty to thirty years behind” the other non-Muslim communities of the country.12 Others agreed, such as the Jewish journalist from Izmir who suggested that his coreligionists needed to educate themselves in the language of their country, as did the members of other millets, in order to “arrive at the level of [their] Christian 10  A similar pattern has been documented in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, when the term zimmi (Ar. dhimmi)—once used to refer to Jews and Christians alike—came to designate Christians alone. Ben-Naeh, Jews in the Realms of the Sultan, 102. 11  “Fatos diversos,” La Epoka, 31 July 1876, 3. 12  “Las reformas en Turkia y nuestra komunita,” El Tiempo, 3 September 1876, 1–2.

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compatriots” and gain a more significant role in state affairs.13 It was in this context that Ottoman Jews began their experience of imperial citizenship convinced of their mandate to catch up to members of other recently emancipated groups—particularly Armenian and Greek Orthodox Ottomans—and to earn themselves the title of “loyal community” (millet­i sadıka), a status that members of the Orthodox Christian and Armenian communities of the empire had enjoyed before them.14 By the close of the nineteenth century, Ottoman Jews had managed to do just that—having gained the attention and praise of Ottoman officials, who began to suggest that other Ottomans and the empire’s various non-Muslim communities in particular—would do well to emulate Ottoman Jews. Within just four decades, the tables had been turned. Ottoman Jews achieved visibility, while the light that shone on them soon began to cast a long shadow on other communities. This dramatic transformation—on the surface a success story—was not without its own challenges. Ottoman Jews’ awareness of their relative insignificance during the early decades of the Ottoman reform project propelled them toward two broader but contradictory strategies for inclusion within the imperial body politic during the late Ottoman era. The first of these was their support for the newly emerging project of civic Ottomanism, a liberal approach to citizenship which appealed to imperial subjects to forge horizontal ties with their neighbors and to work for the greater good of the Ottoman collective. Throwing their weight behind this project helped Ottoman Jews demonstrate their active investment in broader imperial initiatives and, thus, counter their erasure from the political arena. But coterminous with this approach was another strategy they employed with an eye to catapulting themselves into the spotlight: this was their attempt to earn the image of the empire’s most loyal millet and,  “El progreso de los judios en Turkia,” La Esperansa, 6 January 1876, 1–2.  From the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman state entrusted various administrative positions to a group of Orthodox Christians known as Phanariots, who served the Ottoman state both as dragomans and governors of the empire’s Danubian principalities. Philliou, Biography of an Empire. This arrangement swiftly fell apart following the outbreak of the Greek Revolution in 1821, after which time Armenian Ottomans increasingly rose to positions of prominence in the empire, gaining the moniker of the “loyal millet” once suspicions of Orthodox Christians’ nationalist aspirations had been ignited. On Armenians as the empire’s “loyal community” (millet-i sadıka) throughout much of the nineteenth century, until their own relations with the Ottoman state deteriorated during the final decades of the nineteenth century, see: Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom, 96; Suny and Göçek, eds., A Question of Genocide, 25. 13 14

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in the process, not only to catch up with but also outpace other non-­ Muslim communities in their shows of patriotism. Needless to say, these two approaches existed in tension with one another: civic Ottomanism was predicated on a vision of intercommunal cooperation in which members of each community were to be considered equally Ottoman whereas Jews’ attempts to become a—or later the—model millet of the empire were based instead on a competitive model grounded in a corporate and hierarchical understanding of Ottoman society. Each entailed its own solidarities and exclusionary impulses, however. Despite its all-inclusive vision of Ottoman society and focus on cooperation and toleration, the civic Ottomanist approach was in practice largely driven by class alliances and exclusions, as was so often true of liberal projects during this period. The competitive model, in turn, reinforced and sometimes even hardened the boundaries between different Ottoman communities. These two countervailing approaches and the problems they engendered offer valuable lessons, not only about Ottoman Jewish history, but also about the complex dynamics that take shape as particular groups pursue solidarities across communal boundaries while also claiming model status.

Cooperative Citizenship There were many forces that pushed Ottoman Jews to lend their support to civic Ottomanism, a project that promoted new expressions of patriotic allegiance to the state, the pursuit of harmonious relations between Ottomans of different religions and a commitment to serving the collective ‘good’ of Ottoman society as a whole. Various reformist initiatives begun at the mid-century, including those of the Ottoman state and those of the Franco-Jewish Alliance Israélite Universelle, called for Jews to move beyond the confines of their community and to prove themselves worthy of their newfound equality by becoming exemplary citizens of their country. As I have argued elsewhere, numerous lay and religious Jewish leaders from the empire responded by appealing to their coreligionists to become Ottoman patriots, and to lend their time, money, and bodies to the Ottoman cause during times of war and peace alike.15 Much of this effort centered around strengthening and showcasing individual Jews’ allegiance to their state and included encouraging Jewish men, women, and children to join patriotic associations—local branches of the newly-founded Red  Cohen, Becoming Ottomans.

15

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Crescent Society, for example—or to create new ones of their own. It was also during this period that Jewish leaders across the empire began to call on Ottoman Jewish men to volunteer for the Ottoman army—a call taken up by young Jewish men in Istanbul, Salonica, Izmir, and beyond during each of the wars the empire fought during the half century between the introduction of voluntary non-Muslim service in the 1850s and the appearance of mandatory conscription in 1909. Beyond offering these gestures of identification with their state, Jewish reformers also began to focus their energy on forging new horizontal ties with their neighbors. It was in this context that members of the different Ottoman religious communities expressed their sense of solidarity by donating to each other’s charitable causes and showing up at the balls hosted in honor of different communal initiatives. Earthquakes, fires, and refugee flows into the empire similarly prompted donations from Ottoman women and men of various backgrounds, while business partnerships across communal and religious lines fostered new intercommunal alliances and philanthropic efforts. Other attempts to create new, semi-neutral spaces also appeared during the second half of the nineteenth century. It was in this context that Ottoman Jews joined Ottoman Muslims and Christians to meet as ‘brothers’ in freemason lodges, in newly founded intercommunal clubs and charitable societies and, in later decades, in the clandestine revolutionary circles that eventually unseated the autocratic sultan Abdülhamid II following the Young Turk revolution of 1908.16 These initiatives were infused with bourgeois notions of sociability and civility. Sharing social spaces such as libraries, clubs, and dance halls with Ottomans of other faiths was considered a great act of progress, “tolerance,” and imperial brotherhood—or, depending on the context, sisterhood. Without erasing people’s communal affiliations—which was essentially impossible in the Ottoman context—civic Ottomanism had both the goal and the effect of uniting men and women across religious lines by bringing them together, instead, along the lines of class, city, neighborhood, and political ideology, in addition to their shared membership in the newly imagined Ottoman collective. Although the proponents of such visions acknowledged that intercommunal tensions and violence continued to shape relations between 16  For a fascinating account of the clandestine revolutionary activities of Ottomans of various background, see “Young Turks’: Muslim, Jewish, and Christian ‘Brothers’ Shape a Revolutionary Movement [ca. 1900s],” in Cohen and Stein, eds., Sephardi Lives, 207–210.

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different religious groups in the empire, they consistently attributed such conflicts to the failings of those who had not yet come to understand their duties as citizens or to appreciate their common interests. Moments of tension and violence nonetheless continued to disturb reform-minded Ottomans of all backgrounds who sought to unite across religious lines throughout the late Ottoman era. The Easter season proved a particularly tense time for Jews across the empire, as it often fueled ritual murder accusations against them and led to attacks on Jewish lives and property. Such blood libel accusations most commonly pitted Orthodox Christians against Jews—although Catholic, Armenian, and Muslim Ottomans also targeted Jews based on suspicions of their engagement in ritual murders at different points. What is more, while instances of ritual murder accusations are known to have occurred in the empire during the early modern era, they appear to have rapidly accelerated over the course of the nineteenth century.17 Some have attributed the spike in blood libel cases during this era at least in part to growing economic tensions between Jews and members of other Ottoman communities, as Ottoman Jews began to achieve new prominence in local and global commercial ventures by the final decades of the nineteenth century.18 Yet Ottoman Jews were not just passive observers of these trends or the violence and tensions they experienced during this period.19 Jews were known to get rowdy during Purim, for example, and on at least one occasion, attacked members of local police units brought in to keep the peace during the Jewish holiday.20 Reports from cities across the empire also record cases of Jews who actively participated in conflicts with members of other religious communities. At times this manifested itself in the preference they gave to their own coreligionists in business dealings—a pattern that by the final decades of Ottoman rule in the region evolved into open boycotts held by members of different religious communities in the empire. In other instances, intercommunal conflicts turned violent. In the face of intercommunal strife between members of their own community and others, Ottoman Jewish lay and religious leaders lamented 17  Barnai, “Blood Libels in the Ottoman Empire of the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries,” in Almog, ed., Antisemitism Through the Ages, 189–94. 18  Dumont, “Jewish Communities in Turkey during the Last Decades of the Nineteenth Century,” in Braude and Lewis, eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, vol. 1, 223. 19  Nor were Jews exclusively on the receiving end of blood libels. In 1792 Jews in Basra accused local Armenians of ritual murder. On this, see Yaron Tsur’s chapter in this volume. 20  “Hidushim ajenos,” Jurnal Israelit, 3 Nisan 5621 (14 March 1861), 4.

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that the work they had undertaken to unite members of the different Ottoman millets for decades continued to be “undone” by their less enlightened coreligionists. Take, for example, a case that occurred in the imperial capital of Istanbul in 1861, after a group of drunk Jewish men attacked a Greek Orthodox priest on the streets, violently pulling at his beard until—according to reports—only half of it remained.21 After the assault, the priest swiftly made his way to the patriarchate, which prompted the patriarch to contact the Ottoman chief rabbi. The Jewish men in question were apprehended and placed in prison. But the matter did not end there. The Ladino press of the capital picked up the story, which it reported with indignation. “For our sins,” it read, “these Jews are poor and have no food to eat.” They couldn’t support their families, the report continued, before suggesting that their ignorance had led to their utter disregard for the well-being of their neighbors. Nor had they considered the consequences of their actions for members of their own community, the report suggested. The Jewish journalist who penned these words registered his concern that Jews living in areas heavily populated by Christians would now face retaliation for their coreligionists’ actions. He was particularly worried about the Jews of Greece, he wrote, and feared that some might even lose their lives in the fallout. His fears were soon confirmed, as the assault sparked new tensions between Jews and their Greek Orthodox neighbors, not in Greece, as he had predicted, but on the streets of the Ottoman capital, where new battles ensued. Indeed, just a week after he issued his warning, the Ladino journal for which he wrote reported that gangs of “lower-class” Christians were now targeting Jews across Istanbul. In the city’s districts of Beyoğlu and Tatavla, it noted, ambulant Jewish vendors were being harassed, attacked, and stoned—some so badly that they had to be carried home by porters.22 As such examples illustrate, those Ottomans who endorsed an all-­ inclusive vision of imperial belonging did so not only through the intercommunal alliances they pursued but also through their willingness to indict those members of their own community who did share their vision. This approach involved both decrying and policing their fellow Jews while also distancing themselves from such individuals, often by referring to them as poor and benighted in turns. Thus the Jewish journalist of Istanbul who reported on the attack of a Greek Orthodox  “Novetas de Kushta,” Jurnal Israelit, 29 Tishri 5621 (3 October 1861), 3.  “Novetas de Kushta,” Jurnal Israelit, 6 Heshvan 5622 (10 October 1861), 2.

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priest by his coreligionists in Istanbul in 1861 wrote that he and other members of the Jewish lay council of the imperial capital had concluded that “from that point on they would no longer have any mercy for either the poor or the sick” among them when such individuals dishonored anyone, whether a Jew or a member of any other group.23 Such people moved society backwards, rather than forwards, he concluded. Yet the thinkers, politicians, and communal leaders who endorsed civic Ottomanism remained convinced that enlightenment and civic-­mindedness would continue to drive the inevitable march of progress. Their responses to ongoing examples of intercommunal conflicts reflect their conviction that they could move society forward by educating their fellow citizens in civility and imperial patriotism. It was thus that representatives of the Greek Orthodox and Jewish press of Salonica issued their own scathing statements and called on their religious leaders to categorically condemn the behavior of members of their own community who were known to participate in weekly rock fights on their city’s streets. According to contemporary reports, such spectacles often involved dozens or even hundreds of young Greek Orthodox and Jewish “ruffians” who had gotten in the habit of gathering each Saturday and arranging themselves “in the order of battle” before throwing stones at each other. In the words of one observer, these rocks would rain down “with such fury that they [would] leave the site of battle and injure innocent passers-by on the boulevard.”24 The perpetrators of these rock fights had not yet come of age, however, and the journalists who reported on them were careful to insist that they hailed from poor families with little education. In so doing, they suggested that the unfortunate pattern might still be “corrected.” Yet, in fact, these stone fights continued for many years, confounding the city’s lay and religious leaders throughout the final decades of Ottoman rule in that city. In the end, they turned to the Ottoman authorities for help, asking that they arrest the guilty parties, or their parents, in the case that the children involved were considered underage. On this and countless other occasions throughout the late Ottoman era, the lay and religious leaders of the different Ottoman millets joined together to censure—and often also to punish—those among their coreligionists who incited tensions or perpetrated violence against others. The chief rabbi and the Armenian and Greek Orthodox patriarchs paid each  “Novetas de Kushta,” Jurnal Israelit, 29 Tishri 5621 (3 October 1861), 3.  “Echos de la ville,” Le Journal de Salonique, 11 February 1897, 1.

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other regular visits and also regularly condemned the behavior of members of their flock who sought to target or attack those of a different religion. Christian communal leaders denounced blood libel accusations lodged against their Jewish fellow citizens, while the chief rabbi swiftly responded when members of his own community were implicated in acts of violence. Influential members from each of these groups similarly praised each other for their ‘enlightened’ policies, as did Jewish leaders after the Greek Orthodox patriarch declined the conversion request of a young Jewish girl, referring her case instead to both the Jewish and imperial authorities.25 In other contexts, members of the different Ottoman millets sought to create new, shared civic institutions such as libraries, social and political clubs, and philanthropic initiatives that bridged religious divides. Their message was one of cooperation and a shared sense of civic belonging.

Competitive Citizenship The idea that Ottoman Jews were in competition with members of other Ottoman communities also continued to structure their discussions about their place in Ottoman society throughout this period. Starting already at the mid-century, as different Jewish authors bemoaned their absence in positions of state, they admonished their readers to consider that every other “nation”—that is to say, every other non-Muslim community, or millet—had well placed members in various ranks of government. Initially, such comparisons functioned principally as a form of self-critique. Ottoman Jewish leaders called on their coreligionists to look to the progress their Christian compatriots had already made—by introducing new, secular models of education, by learning the language of the state, and by finding employment in government posts—all in the hopes that Ottoman Jews would soon follow suit. Other suggestions that imperial citizenship might function on a competitive rather than wholly cooperative model were arguably more insidious. Take, for example, the words of a prominent Ottoman Jewish journalist of Istanbul from 1877, just a few months after the country had become embroiled in a major war with Russia. “The Ottoman government has always been good to our nation,” he proclaimed, trying to rouse his readers to patriotic action. Indeed, he continued, “[i]t has always  “Hidushim de Kosta,” Jurnal Israelit, 14 Tevet 5621 (27 December 1860), 3.

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allowed us to enjoy our freedom and all the rights of citizens, even more than the other peoples who have found shelter in this vast empire.”26 The author’s anachronistic treatment of the concept of citizenship aside, what is striking here is his claim that the Ottoman authorities had somehow granted their Jewish subjects privileges they had not afforded to others over the centuries. His position was not an anomaly. With increasing frequency, Ottoman Jewish authors and activists began to suggest that, unlike other imperial citizens, they owed their state a “double debt.” According to this interpretation, Jews were beholden to their government not only for granting them equality—a status enjoyed by members of all groups in the empire after 1856—but also for having offered their ancestors refuge from persecution many centuries before. Switching the focus from prominence to loyalty, this narrative served as an important counterweight to Jews’ continued invisibility in Ottoman political circles throughout much of the nineteenth century. It also advanced a competitive interpretation of imperial belonging in which each community’s allegiance was to be ranked. A new patriotic holiday that Ottoman Jews dreamt up in 1892 highlights the tensions inherent in this approach. “The 400th anniversary of the arrival of Spanish Jews in Ottoman lands,” as it was called, was eventually celebrated on Passover in April 1892 with great pomp in synagogues across the empire.27 Its many proponents saw the creation of this invented holiday as the ultimate proof of their community’s imperial patriotism. They never directly acknowledged that the myth upon which their celebration was founded was not one all Ottomans shared. Yet the underlying story of Jewish rescue at the hands of past sultans and the image of the empire as a place of sanctuary were not likely to have been entirely comfortable for the Jews’ Greek Orthodox or Armenian compatriots, for example—however deeply committed they were to the cause of their empire. Being part of communities that identified as indigenous to the lands in which they resided meant that their version of a narrative of first contact with the Ottomans was necessarily one of conquest rather than refuge. Focusing on the trope of 1492 was thus not a likely path to fostering a sense of shared imperial belonging among members of the different Ottoman millets.28  “La lingua del pais,” El Nasyonal, August 31, 1877, 3, emphasis mine.  For more on the invention of this holiday, see Cohen, Becoming Ottomans, Chapter 2. 28  This focus on 1492 also tended to efface the history of the native Jewish communities of the empire, such as Greek-speaking Romaniot Jews of Ottoman Southeastern Europe or the Arabic-speaking communities of the Ottoman Middle East and North Africa. 26 27

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It was, however, an obvious way to single Jews out for positive attention by state officials and Ottoman Muslims, particularly during the final years of the nineteenth century. During this period, Ottoman Jews began to find new opportunities open to them in government positions and public life, precisely at a time when relations between the Ottoman state and many of its Armenian citizens became strained to a breaking point during the mid-1890s, which saw widespread massacres of Armenians across eastern Anatolia and the Ottoman capital. Tensions also grew between imperial authorities and their Greek Orthodox citizens in this period, as the conflict over Crete turned into a full-scale war between the Greek Kingdom and the empire in the spring of 1897. As historian Carter Findley has noted, the position of Armenian and Greek Orthodox officials in the Ottoman state bureaucracy began to decline during this period—slowly throughout the decade, in the case of the Armenian civil servants, and precipitously, after the 1897 war with Greece, in the case of Greek Orthodox state employees.29 It was during these years in particular that Jews encountered a new flexibility in Ottoman public and patriotic spheres, as other groups found their opportunities narrowing. By this time, Ottoman Muslim and Jewish individuals alike had come to speak about Jews as different observers had spoken of other groups earlier in the century—as the most loyal millet. More important still, this category came to overlap with another—that of the model millet, a group that Ottoman intellectuals and politicians could conjure in order to think through issues of Ottoman modernity, tolerance, and imperial citizenship. In a dramatic reversal, Ottoman Jews now came to matter well beyond their numbers. Yet depictions of Jews as a new model community were not only aspirational; they also had disturbing implications. The very concept of model status makes sense only in relation to others who do not measure up, after all. In this sense, it serves as an indictment of the different groups it excludes. Ultimately, the process of becoming a model millet was fraught with contradictions: as Ottoman Jews attempted to teach other Ottoman Jews how to become imperial citizens, they instilled in them the values of love of homeland, serving the greater good, and fraternity among Ottomans of all faiths. Yet, as they sought to prove to the authorities and to the Muslims of the empire that they were a model community with a special relationship  Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom, 319.

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to the state, they often competed with members of other groups for the attention of their government. Gaining visibility brought new complications. On the one hand, moving into the spotlight meant more scrutiny and thus, more pressure to live up to the new expectations of imperial citizenship. On the other hand, succeeding in earning the praise of imperial officials could also put new strains on Ottoman Jews’ relations with others in the empire and beyond, or have negative repercussions for their coreligionists abroad. Over-identification with the state held the prospect of worsening Jews’ already fraught relations with their Christian neighbors and undermining the civic-Ottomanist work their communal leaders had undertaken for decades. At the same time, evidence of alliances with groups deemed suspect by the Ottoman government carried the risk of alienating Jews from the authorities or from the city’s Muslim population, thus jeopardizing their attempts to remain in the good graces of imperial officialdom. These two approaches—the competitive model of imperial citizenship and the cooperative one—coexisted throughout the late Ottoman era in a host of ways. Often the very same individuals endorsed both positions. Ottoman Jews may not have experienced a Jewish Question within their empire during the nineteenth-century “era of questions” but they were, without question, engaged in a taxing balancing act throughout. Neither approach was innocuous. However much it promoted positive exchanges across communal boundaries, the cooperative model was complicated in its own right. Despite the space it created for inter-confessional collaboration and sociability, its largely upper and middle-class proponents often hardened or even exacerbated existing social cleavages within their own communities, or within Ottoman society as a whole. Ottoman Jews’ willingness to engage with the competitive model of belonging, meanwhile, complicated their lives in a number of other respects, including exacerbating tensions between Jews and members of other Ottoman communities. Indeed, different observers pointed to a souring of relations on various occasions, ranging from the 1861 scuffle on the streets of Istanbul sparked by some Jews’ assault on a Greek Orthodox priest’s beard to the after-effects of much more politicized and violent moments, such as the Armenian massacres in that city three and a half decades later, or the Greco-Ottoman War that followed the next year. Pursuing a competitive approach to imperial citizenship ran the risk of alienating or endangering a host of international actors in the process as well, including foreign representatives and journalists, who at times

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suggested that Ottoman Jews had landed on the wrong side of a conflict, particularly in cases in which Ottoman Christians were the target of violent or hateful attacks. In such cases, Ottoman Jewish leaders and authors regularly sought to defend their community’s reputation and to blunt any possible repercussions that claims of their potential impropriety might have on their coreligionists elsewhere. As we have seen, already in the 1860s the editor of a Ladino newspaper of Istanbul publicly worried that his coreligionists’ abuse of a local priest might have dire consequences for the Jews of nearby Greece, where he feared some might even lose their lives as a result. Such patterns continued throughout the decades that followed. Equally troubling, the competitive approach to imperial belonging had the potential to highlight Jews’ exchangeability in the imperial schema. After all, Armenian Ottomans, and Ottoman Greek Orthodox subjects before them, had once held the title of loyal millet. Living in the shadow of a variety of Ottoman “questions” thus signaled the precariousness of Jews’ own position within society.30 As one Ottoman Jewish observer reflected in the wake of massacres of Armenians in Istanbul in 1896, “Who was to say the Jews weren’t next?”31 He was not the last to draw such comparisons. A decade and a half later, as debates about Zionism moved out into the open following the 1908 constitutional revolution, an Armenian deputy in the Ottoman parliament by the name of Vartkes Serengulian offered similar cautions to his fellow deputies. If they persisted in conflating Ottoman Jews with Zionists—and Zionism with disloyalty—he warned, the Jews might suffer a fate similar to the empire’s Armenians. “I am afraid that what has happened to me will happen to the Jews,” he concluded.32

30  Indeed, the absence of a “Jewish Question” in the country was no guarantee that one might not arise in the future. Sultan Abdülhamid II is said to have remarked on more than one occasion that he wanted to prevent Jews from settling in Palestine so as to avoid creating a Jewish Problem—or, as he put it at one point, a “Second Bulgarian Question” in the empire. Friedman, “The System of Capitulations,” 284, 286; Deringil, “Jewish Immigration to the Ottoman Empire,” in Rozen, The Last Ottoman Century, Vol. 2, 145. 31  For more on this author’s ruminations, see: Cohen, Becoming Ottomans, 74–75. 32  Cohen and Stein, eds., Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 225.

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Convergences Such open and sustained discussions about Ottoman Jews’ loyalty were new. This development has led at least one scholar to suggest that the moment following the 1908 revolution spurred, for the first time, a “Jewish Question” in the empire.33 Ottoman Jews who were willing to dissociate themselves from Zionism or even to defend it as a pro-Ottoman movement continued to find receptive audiences among government officials and self-appointed imperial representatives even after this point. But there is no denying that something had changed. Jews now came to be associated with a new ruling party (the Committee for Union and Progress, or CUP), which had been brought to power by clandestine revolutionary activity. Globally circulating theories about Jews’ secret machinations and plans to control the world, already plentiful by this time, captured the imaginations of a growing number of interpreters of the Young Turks’ rise to power—this despite the fact that only a small handful of Jewish individuals held positions of any prominence within the CUP. Conspiracy theories about Jews’ imagined role in the recent revolution dovetailed with new debates about the “Palestine Question” and whether or not Jews who embraced Zionism might be going the way of other communities, whose members had become suspect in the eyes of the state as a potential fifth column in pursuit of separatist national movements.34 Together, these two developments—the new preoccupation with Jews’ purported role as puppet masters behind the revolution and new regime, on the one hand, and the explosion of debates about Zionism, on the other—created the first stirrings of a Jewish Question in the empire in the years leading up to World War One. At the center of both developments were new questions not just about Jews’ loyalty but also about their purported power. Whereas Ottoman Jews had entered the nineteenth century largely impoverished, inconsequential, and invisible within the larger Ottoman political landscape, by the second decade of the twentieth century, a growing number of interpreters depicted them as members of a larger, sinister collective with means both financially and politically powerful enough to undermine Ottoman 33  Fishman, “Understanding the 1911 Ottoman Parliament Debate on Zionism,” in BenBassat and Ginio, eds., Late Ottoman Palestine. 34  See also Türesay, “Antisionisme et antisémitisme dans la presse ottomane d’Istanbul à l’époque Jeune Turque”, 147–78 and Ozan Ozavci’s essay in this volume.

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sovereignty through political revolution, on the one hand, and national separatism, on the other. Such interpretations tended to conflate Ottoman Jews with individuals who were either not Ottoman or not Jewish. Conspiracy theories about the Jews’ role in propping up the new revolutionary regime often focused less on Jews than on Dönme, members of a religious group descended from Jewish followers of the self-proclaimed Jewish messiah Shabbetai Zvi, who had converted to Islam in the seventeenth century. Legally considered Muslims by the Ottoman state, Dönme practiced endogamy and maintained their own cemeteries, mosques, and liturgy well into the twentieth century. Under the sway of newly emerging racialist theories of the time, various commentators came to treat Dönme as Jews by dint of their Jewish “blood.”35 The fact that a number of Dönme had been influential in supporting the revolution drove conspiratorial thinking about the “Jewish” nature of the new regime, as did claims that it was the work of Freemasons, since masonry too had come to be associated with Jews in international antisemitic discourse.36 The fact that the Freemasons who had supported the revolution in the empire were Christian, Jewish, and Muslim made little difference to those who sought out such connections.37 Those who feared that Zionists were planning to wrest Palestine from Ottoman control, for their part, focused much of their attention on nonOttoman Jews, among whom were many prominent European Zionists who had arrived in the empire following the revolution of 1908. But they also directed their wrath against Ottoman Jewish and Dönme deputies, ministers, and party members, whom they accused of financially and politically aiding the Zionist project of settling foreign Jews in Palestine. As had been the case during the Hamidian era (1876–1909), when various Jews and Muslims in particular came to speak of Jews as a “model” community, during the Second Constitutional era Jews continued to be associated with the imperial “center.” Precisely what this center represented, however, was shifting. In each case, over-identification with the Ottoman government had its hazards. In the nineteenth century, it sparked new tensions between Jews and members of other non-Muslim millets,  For recent studies of the Dönme, see: Baer, The Dönme; Şişman, The Burden of Silence.  Kedourie, “Young Turks, Freemasons and Jews,” 89–104; Kemâl Öke, “Young Turks, Freemasons, Jews and the Question of Zionism in the Ottoman Empire,” 199–218. 37   Michelle Campos, “Freemasonry in Ottoman Palestine,” 37–62; idem, Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth Century Palestine; Sommer, Freemasonry in the Ottoman Empire. 35 36

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particularly during moments of politicized violence within the empire. Following the Young Turk revolution, Jews’ association with the new regime, whether real or imagined, also drew the ire of various members of a newly emerging opposition, who claimed to represent the “true” Ottoman center that had been displaced by the new regime. For many such individuals, hostility toward the regime, toward Jews, and toward other Ottoman non-Muslims went hand in hand. Antisemitic and anti-­ Zionist positions now functioned as a cultural code that stood in for a broad array of oppositional politics during this period. Such developments appear to bring the case of Ottoman Jews back more squarely into the realm of modern European Jewish history, where ideas about Jews’ outsized influence and nefarious, behind-the-scenes machinations abounded. Indeed, if the nineteenth century was a moment in which Ottoman Jews’ position in society diverged from that of Jews in most other parts of the world, the early twentieth century represents a point of convergence. To some extent, this should not surprise us, since many of the notions, protagonists, and movements at the center of the Ottoman “Jewish Question” that emerged in the wake of the 1908 revolution were part of broader global developments with deep roots in Europe. Yet parallels between Ottoman and European Jews’ experiences in this period also have their limits. In the empire, active political mobilization against Jews not only appeared late—in the shadow of other Ottoman “Questions”—Jews were also never the principal targets of oppressive measures or violence in the empire. In this sense Ottoman Jewish history arguably has more in common with American Jewish history, where groups other than Jews—including Native, African, and Asian-Americans—have historically borne the brunt of the most pervasive forms of violence and discrimination. Although, like Ottoman Jews, American Jews have experienced different forms of prejudice, exclusion, and physical attacks throughout their history, much of this has come in the form of broader xenophobic campaigns or movements that have targeted a number of different groups simultaneously—African-­ Americans, Catholics, and Jews, in the case of the newly reconstituted Ku Klux Klan of the early twentieth century, or various immigrant groups in the case of the nativist campaigns and policies of the same period. Although Eastern European Jewish immigrants were among the principal targets of white Protestant Americans’ attempts to block immigration in the 1920s, examples of restrictive immigration laws, such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, were already in place to serve as a model. Simply put, Jews

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in the United States have not filled the role of the paradigmatic other, as was so often the case in Europe. This has meant that American Jews who have sought to strengthen their alliances with members of other minority groups by focusing on their shared histories of suffering have often turned either to the biblical past or the Holocaust—rather than Jews’ experiences in the United States—to make their case. In both cases, they have often been forced to contend with tensions between members of their own and other communities, partly stemming from the perception which emerged starting in the 1890’s in the Ottoman empire, and the 1950’s in the US in particular of Jews’ relatively privileged position in each society.38 There are also parallels in the ways that Ottoman and American Jewish histories have come to be told. Both Ottoman and American Jewish history share a welcome myth—one beginning with the reception of Jews expelled from Iberia in 1492, in the Ottoman case, or the arrival of the first group of Jewish immigrants to New Amsterdam in 1654, in the American instance. (Each of these, in turn, spurred major public celebrations, in 1892 in the Ottoman Empire and 1992 in Turkey, on the one hand, and 2004 in the United States, on the other.) Chroniclers of both histories also share a longstanding insistence upon their exceptionality, contrasting the relative freedoms Jews continued to experience under various Ottoman sultans or in North America with the experience of persecution, expulsion, and annihilation that Jews experienced elsewhere throughout the late medieval, early modern, and modern eras. In both cases, ideas about Jews as a model minority have been formative in shaping scholarly and public discussions alike. Such portrayals not only leave out crucial parts of the story of American and Ottoman Jews’ experiences of modernity, they also fail to recognize the interconnected nature of the societies in which they lived. Rather than serving as a useful category, the model minority paradigm serves as a retort to those who challenge either the viability of the American dream or Ottoman (and later “Turkish”) tolerance, and as an indictment of other minorities or marginalized communities who are judged to have been less “successful” (in the American case) or “loyal” (in the Ottoman case), 38  Brodkin How Jews Became White Folks. American Jews’ path to privilege, and whiteness, was not a straight one, however. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Jews found that their Protestant neighbors considered them members of a broader “Caucasian family,” an approach that changed again with the arrival of much larger numbers of Jews from Eastern Europe and the Middle East starting in the late nineteenth century. On this: Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness.

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implying that the fault for this is their own rather than structural.39 Recognizing Jews as part of a larger interdependent web of asymmetrical social and political relations allows us to move beyond such simplistic characterizations. The very idea that certain groups achieve exemplary status by good will alone obscures the larger structures that allow them to choose this path even as it is closed off to others.

Bibliography Baer, Marc David. 2010. The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Barnai, Jacob. 1988. Blood Libels in the Ottoman Empire of the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries. In Antisemitism Through the Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog, 189–194. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Ben-Naeh, Yaron. 2008. Jews in the Realms of the Sultan. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Brodkin, Karen. 1998. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Campos, Michelle. 2005. Freemasonry in Ottoman Palestine. Jerusalem Quarterly 22/23: 37–62. ———. 2011. Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth Century Palestine. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Case, Holly. 2018. The Age of Questions or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohen, Julia Phillips. 2014. Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era. New York: Oxford University Press. Cohen, Julia Phillips, and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, eds. 2014. Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700–1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Deringil, Selim. 2002. Jewish Immigration to the Ottoman Empire at the Time of the First Zionist Congresses: A Comment. In The Last Ottoman Century and Beyond, ed. Minna Rozen, vol. 2, 141–149. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University. ———. 2009. ‘The Armenian Question is Finally Closed’: Mass Conversions of Armenians in Anatolia during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895–1897. Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (2): 344–371. Dumont, Paul. Jewish Communities in Turkey During the Last Decades of the Nineteenth Century in the Light of the Archives of the Alliance Israélite

39  For a trenchant relational analysis of the function of claims of American Jews’ ‘model minority’ status, see Freedman, Klezmer America.

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Universelle. In Braude and Lewis, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire 1: 209–242. Findley, Carter. 1989. Ottoman Civil Officialdom: A Social History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fishman, Louis. 2011. Understanding the 1911 Ottoman Parliament Debate on Zionism in Light of the Emergence of a ‘Jewish Question. In Late Ottoman Palestine: The Period of Young Turk Rule, ed. Yuval Ben-Bassat and Eyal Ginio, 103–123. New York: I. B. Tauris. Freedman, Jonathan. 2008. Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. Freeze, ChaeRan Y. 2002. Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. Friedman, Isaiah. 1986. The System of Capitulations and Its Effects on Turco-­ Jewish Relations in Palestine, 1856–1897. In Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period, ed. David Kushner, 280–293. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Press. Friedman, Michal Rose. 2020. Unsettling the ‘Jewish Question’ from the Margins of Europe: Spanish Liberalism and Sepharad. In Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: A New History, ed. Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam. London: Palgrave. Göçek, Fatma Müge, and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds. 2011. A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire. New  York: Oxford University Press. Goldstein, Eric. 2007. The Price of Whiteness. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Karal, Enver Ziya. 1947. Osmanlı Tarihi, vol. 5, Nizam-ı Cedit ve Tanzimat Devirleri (1789–1856). Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi. Kedourie, Elie. 1971. Young Turks, Freemasons and Jews. Middle Eastern Studies 7, January. Öke, Mim Kemâl. 1986. Young Turks, Freemasons, Jews and the Question of Zionism in the Ottoman Empire (1908–1913). Studies in Zionism 7 (2): 119–218. Ozavci, Ozan. 2020. A Jewish ‘Liberal’ in Istanbul: Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Young Turks, and the Zionist Press Network, 1908–1911. In Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: A New History, ed. Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam. London: Palgrave. Philliou, Christine. 2010. Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rodrigue, Aron. 1990. French Jews, Turkish Jews. The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Şişman, Cengiz. 2015. The Burden of Silence: Sabbatai Sevi and the Evolution of the Ottoman-Turkish Dönmes. New York: Oxford University Press. Sommer, Dorothe. 2015. Freemasonry in the Ottoman Empire: A History of the Fraternity and Its Influence in Syria and in the Levant. London: I.B. Tauris.

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Suny, Ronald Grigor. 2017. “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tsur, Yaron. 2020. Who Introduced Liberalism into the Damascus Affair (1840)? Center, Periphery, and Networks in the Jewish Response to the Blood Libel. In Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: A New History, ed. Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam. London: Palgrave. Türesay, Özgür. 2009. Antisionisme et antisémitisme dans la presse ottomane d’Istanbul à l’époque Jeune Turque (1909–1912): L’exemple d’Ebuzziya Tevfik. Turcica 41: 147–178.

CHAPTER 10

From East to West: As the Liberal Melting Pot of Jewish Politics M. M. Silver

Probably the best-known sound bite synopsis regarding liberalism and the American Jews is a quip attributed to Milton Himmelfarb, a Brooklyn-­ born Commentary magazine writer and long-time head of the American Jewish Committee’s research bureau. In a quote cited in The New York Times 2006 obituary for Himmelfarb,1 an individual deeply connected to the turn taken by an influential circle of American Jewish intellectuals from liberalism to neo-conservatism, he opined: Jews in America “earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans.” Considered some years after it was first articulated, the aphorism emits traces of political incorrectness, but its gist remains a staple in the scholarly literature. American Jews, a strong consensus of researchers concluded decade after decade, have a A short, reworded, portion in this chapter is printed with permission of the University of Alabama Press. 1

 “Milton Himmelfarb, Wry Essayist, 87, Dies,” The New York Times, Jan. 15 2006.

M. M. Silver (*) Max Stern College of Emek Yezreel, Safed, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_10

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propensity for political liberalism that is exceptional and primarily ideological, and not a reflection of sociological circumstances alone. Were it the case that sociological parameters were determinative in the American Jewish case, the community would display a more conservative (pro-­ Republican) voting pattern consonant with groups connected to higher brackets in relevant categories (income level, education level, and so on). Instead, over the past century, American Jews have voted overwhelmingly on the liberal (pro-Democrat) side of the spectrum. Why this has been so has inspired considerable debate among scholars. In an influential 1983 volume, Deborah Dash Moore located the origins of American Jewish liberalism among the “second generation” of New York Jews, roughly in the 1920s, when the children of East European immigrants started to feel “at home in America” and found their way in sociopolitical settings by forging alliances with other minority groups, typically under the aegis of the Democratic Party (which was soon to be on the rise in the era of Franklin Roosevelt).2 In a subsequent volume, Marc Dollinger explained the persistence of American Jewish liberalism after this New Deal era starting point as a “quest for inclusion.”3 Starting outside of the American establishment, Jews were drawn to an ideology, liberalism, which conceptualized American experience as ever expansive democracy, and which would propel them into the mainstream, Dollinger claimed. By the end of the twentieth century, articulate “neo-con” American Jews began to attack such conventional explanations, viewing the community’s liberalism as an aberration.4 Far from the harmonious adaptation of bona fide American ideologies of empowerment, American Jewish liberalism represented an unnatural import of Europe-based anxieties that had never been particularly relevant under American political ­circumstances, commentators such as Norman Podhoretz claimed. While neoconservative analysis, such as Podhoretz’s 2009 volume,5 remains somewhat off the American Jewish mainstream, a number of recent scholarly publications (e.g. Henry Feingold’s 2013 volume6) convey indications of a search for new explanations regarding American Jewish liberalism. Rather than a lasting fixture of the community as a whole, at least subsequent to its  Moore, At Home in America, 201–30.  Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion. 4  For an overview: Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution. 5  Podhoretz, Why are Jews Liberal. 6  Feingold, American Jewish Political Culture. 2 3

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consolidation in the 1920s interwar period in New York City, liberalism is coming to be seen as a passing phenomenon, one which in past decades masked a complex array of social interests and cultural tendencies, some of them readily associated with a genuinely “liberal” America agenda of social inclusion and gradual but steady democratic expansion, others more conservative and ethnocentric in character.7 Efforts to identify distinctive or prominent aspects of Jewish liberalism in the United States are complicated by ongoing debates about the meaning of liberalism in the country’s political history as a whole.8 Nonetheless, several key ideas and developments wed specific Jewish dealings with liberalism to the general history of liberalism in America. From the founding of the country onward, liberal advocates of citizenship rights appealed to the Constitution as an extraordinary source of protection against various forms of persecution, and religious minorities, including the Jews, had a heightened tendency to pinpoint church-state separation as a particularly attractive, liberal, constitutional principle. Moving into the twentieth century, liberalism in the United States was revitalized as a rhetoric of inclusion, largely in consequence to modernization processes such as mass immigration and urbanization. As in the pre-1930s example of the Progressives, liberals who exhibited anxiety about the maintenance of social order and who were drawn to models of elite, technocratic control,9 not all liberal streams were uniformly pro-immigration; but all liberals became locked in a discourse about social inclusion and bridge-building between ethno-national minorities, and some liberal sub-groups, including (as this chapter details) American Jews, clutched open-door ­immigration as the engine of liberal democratic development. Especially in the 1960s, discourse about inclusion and expansive democracy came to include items (e.g. environmentalism) which are not readily perceptible in earlier phases of American liberalism; but the enduring concern about the status of some groups, particularly African Americans, in the country’s democracy kept the focus on social inclusion as liberalism’s linchpin throughout the twentieth century. 7  For an example of such critical reexamination of whether Jewish processes in a particular urban milieu emanated out of an ideological devotion to liberalism: Berman, Metropolitan Jews. 8  See, for example, Stanley and Bell, Making Sense of American Liberalism; McGown, American Liberalism; Foner, The Story of American Freedom; Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal. 9  Wiebe, The Search for Order.

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Focusing on Jewish experience, this article takes on liberalism in the American context in relatively early phases, from the mid-nineteenth century through World War I. At first glance, its two central contentions are contradictory. One claim posits that because liberalism in the American Jewish case cannot be separated from leading trends and concerns of Jewish politics in Europe from the mid-nineteenth century onward, it is not “exceptional” in Jewish History; the second claim is that American Jewish liberalism developed its own special character as a result of the extraordinary pace of immigration settlement and the attendant threat of outright assimilation (i.e. in America, Jewish liberals had special incentive to wonder about whether democracy might be too integrative and inclusive). In fact, the two claims are complementary. Worried about assimilation, Jewish liberals in the United States routinely reached for discourses and ideologies, particularly Zionism, that were prominent in European Jewish politics. Hence, proximity to European Jewish politics, rather than sui generis, New World, distinctiveness, is the signature feature of American Jewish liberalism, at least in this formative period. American Jewish liberalism emerged in a wide network of modern Jewish political discourse in the 1870s, about half a century before the starting point identified by Moore and many other researchers. Comparable to the development of other Jewish discourses, including Zionism (in the pre-Herzl, Hibbat Zion (Lovers of Zion) era),10 key ideas of American Jewish liberalism, including the separation of church and state, developed as responses to the overriding issue of the modernization of East European Jews, particularly in the tsarist empire. In contrast to the Podhoretz-­ neocon interpretation viewing liberalism as a kind of accidental or mistaken foreign import in America, this chapter discusses figures who began to conceptualize cardinal notions of American liberalism (specifically church-state separation, and also “melting pot” and “cultural pluralism” ideas of a socially inclusive America) as logical responses to experiences they themselves endured, or plausibly imagined, in mid-to late-nineteenth-­ century tsarist Russia. Generalizations about Jewish liberalism are hard to come by because, as this volume amply demonstrates, political liberalism is not a static category mechanically applicable to differing national settings and periods, and scholars also have in mind differing definitions as to what counts as “Jewish” in liberal political expressions. However problematic  Vital, The Origins of Zionism.

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generalizations on this subject might be, various notions about the “exceptionalism” of liberalism in the American Jewish case can be challenged with some cogency. American Jewish liberalism is not solely a response to domestic dynamics of minority coalition building in New York or other cities, but rather a phenomenon largely grounded in East European Jewish experience. Similarly, it is misleading to contend that Jewish liberalism is an especially important ideology in American Jewish experience because opportunities of socioeconomic integration rendered Jewish separatist ideologies, such as Zionism, less relevant in the United States. In actual fact, the development of liberalism and Zionism is typically inextricable in the careers of American Jewish individuals and organizations. Nor does Jewish liberalism have exceptional status in early-twentieth-century America because of the country’s relative lack of overseas colonial control; clear echoes of colonial discourse on issues such as race can be heard in seminal discussions of American Jewish liberal ideas. This chapter considers three examples of religious activists and writers who developed two core concepts of American liberalism, religious-state separation and open door inclusion of immigrants in the “melting pot,” as a result of their concerns about the fate and modernization of east European Jews. These three figures (Max Lilienthal, Emma Lazarus, Israel Zangwill) were themselves rooted in the Jewish west, but they became heavily immersed in the issue of Jewish modernization in the “east” (i.e. Tsarist Russia), and in the challenge of Russian Jewish resettlement in North America. Jewish liberalism, as reconstructed from these three examples, ran along an east-west axis whereby imagined and objective realities of illiberalism in the tsarist empire were readily contrasted with an imagined polity of liberal inclusiveness, a New World democracy authoritatively defined by Zangwill as the “melting pot.”

Max Lilienthal: From Riga to Cincinnati In fall 1839, not quite 25 years old, with rabbinical ordination (conferred by Munich rabbi Hirsch Aub, a theological moderate) and a doctorate under his belt, Max Lilienthal travelled to Russia, where he embarked on a dramatic, ill-fated crusade to modernize the tsarist empire’s Jews. His errand in Eastern Europe was sponsored and manipulated by officials in Nicholas I’s reactionary regime, most conspicuously Education Minister Sergei Uvarov. In retrospect, historians have been puzzled about the precise motives animating these officials, but at the time, only a small stratum

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of pro-modernization Russian Jews, known as Maskilim (Enlightened Jews), cast them as philosemitism, whereas the masses of Russian Jews by and large rejected this attempt to upset their traditions “from above.” Lilienthal loomed in the collective mind of eastern European Jewry as an interloper serving the interest of Christian proselytizers and anti-Semites in Nicholas’ detested regime. The young rabbi was too confused and inexperienced to fathom fully how his own well-intentioned effort had ignited a firestorm of responses in the Pale of Settlement – in fact, during the era of Nicholean conservatism, only the mandatory conscription of youngsters into military cantons more decisively convulsed Jewish communal life, and historians have identified an eye-popping array of consequences yielded by Lilienthal’s compulsory education campaign, including the initial consolidation of “Orthodox” Judaism.11 Bewildered, and constricted by the tsar’s censorship, Lilienthal conceded that his experience was inexpressibly complicated. Writing to a brother in December 1840, just a year after his arrival, Lilienthal lamented, “My position is so difficult, the circumstances are so varied and interdependent, the whole requires so much subtlety, suppleness and, alas, dissimulation, that one cannot give expression to it in a correspondence.”12 After a few years, he was utterly traumatized. In 1843 he confided to his fiancée that he held “no hope” for Jews in Europe, and longed for America. Two years later, he left Russia, to marry Pepi, and also to re-start his career in the United States.13 It might be an exaggeration to say that everything that happened to Lilienthal in America until his death in 1882 reversed the logic of his traumatic experience in Russia. But his American career as a Reform rabbi was largely successful, and its faltering aspects resulted from indefiniteness in his own Reform outlook, as well as from power struggles in splintering spheres of American Judaism, and not from any sense of disenchantment with America. As far as Lilienthal was concerned, America’s free sociopolitical system was genuinely antithetical to Russia’s tsarist despotism. This diametric opposition explains Lilienthal’s attachment to key planks in the 11  For an assessment of the compulsory education affair’s impact on the consolidation of Orthodoxy:: Etkes, “Compulsory Education as a Crossroads,” 202–16; Silver, “Rabbi Max Lilienthal,” 343–72; Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I, 111–54; Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics, 111–54. 12  Ruben, Lilienthal, 54–5. 13  Circumstances and motives propelling Lilienthal’s flight from Russia are discussed in: Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I, 85–91.

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evolving ideology of American Jewish liberalism. In Lilienthal’s uniquely intense comparative view, the evolving Jewish ideology of the American melting pot was directly responsive to the problem of the modernization of Russian Jewry—as a result of church-state separation, Russian Jews in America could modernize in a free private world, whereas in Russia the state’s coercive promotion of Jewish modernization bred mostly alienation and resistance. At the start of the 1870s, Lilienthal was uniquely positioned to propound a vision of Jewish liberalism: Jews could assimilate in America, at least to some sensibly limited extent, because its constitutional commitment to a neutral sphere of citizenship was substantive. From his miserable stint in East Europe, he knew exactly how the absence of such a commitment spelled trouble for masses of Jews. After a transitory decade in New York, Lilienthal took up the pulpit at Bene Israel in Cincinnati in 1855. Bene Israel was at the time a traditional congregation, and Lilienthal quickly became involved in discussions and disputes about liberalizing prayer ritual. Some of this was sparked by the rabbi’s own doings and disposition. For instance, his refusal to observe the Tisha B’Av (Ninth of Av) fast day commemorating the destruction of the two temples in Jerusalem, on the grounds that the subsequent dispersion of the Jews enhanced the enlightenment of mankind,14 split his congregation down the middle. Lilienthal was also drawn into arguments about the present and future of Judaism in America as a result of his colleague Isaac Mayer Wise’s ambitious attempts to codify a distinctively American set of rituals, in accord with a Minhag America (“Tradition of America”) siddur (prayer-book). This protracted process of creating an American form of Reform Judaism was set in motion by an 1855 rabbinical conference staged in Cleveland by Wise, with Lilienthal by his side. In essence, Lilienthal’s career before the American Civil War can be seen as a successive series of tactical retreats. In 1845, he fled from the intensely traditional religious culture of the Pale of Settlement (and from the tsar’s oppressive political system), in order to pursue a rabbinical career in the more invitingly modern and free atmosphere of the United States. A bit more than a decade later, he was still a rabbi in Cincinnati, but the religious traditionalists and radicals replicated (albeit on a much less vitriolic scale) the conflicted circumstances he had endured as a religious modernizer in the Pale of Settlement. For these reasons, to some degree,  Ruben, Lilienthal, 142.

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Lilienthal retreated from Jewish affairs,15 and became increasingly involved in various civil causes in Cincinnati in the late antebellum period. In these public square matters, Lilienthal staked out positions that would become characteristic of American Jewish liberalism, particularly with regard to the separation of church and state. From 1860, he served on the city school board; and, as a staunch advocate of educational neutrality, he eventually became involved in an important test case (Minor versus Board of Education of Cincinnati, the so-called “Bible Case”) about the propriety of the use of religious books in the classroom.16 In such activities, he won recognition and admiration among Gentile elites. Lilienthal’s advocacy of the wall of separation principle intriguingly positioned him at the crux of modern Jewish politics in this era. He passionately argued for public square neutrality, and against state intervention in religious matters, because he had witnessed how Nicholas’ reactionary regime (which touted Christian “Orthodoxy” as one of its operating principles)17 undermined human freedom by coercively trying to modernize traditional Jewish heder (religious primary school) and yeshiva (religious seminary) education in the Pale. As a minority deeply invested in its own traditions, Jews in the Diaspora could not allow a Christian regime to presume to reform its own spiritual and educational practices, presumably for the Jews’ own benefit—if the lamentable partnership with Count Uvarov in the Pale had taught Lilienthal anything, it was that. In an America reconstructed from the carnage of the Civil War, Lilienthal in the late 1860s was charting a constitutional course of rigid church-state separation that would become virtually synonymous with American Jewish liberalism. “Shall our schools be free schools, indeed, or shall they be tinged with any kind of sectarianism,” he pointedly asked in the Bible case. Subsequently, he accorded sacred status to the principle of public square neutrality, as though keeping God out of the schools was God’s own will: Our progressive civilization is neither Jewish nor Christian. It is something greater, something broader than all these sectarian terms, it is divine and providential. It is as deep and beneficial as God’s unfathomable wisdom.18

 Ibid., 161.  Ibid., 166–168. 17  Raisanovsky, Nicholas I. 18  Ruben, Lilienthal, 167. 15 16

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Scarred by the embedded proselytism of Tsar Nicholas’ policy toward the Jews, Lilienthal became in Cincinnati a vigorous opponent of missionaries, unabashedly challenging their propaganda (Jews were too good at mathematics, he noted in one polemic about the Trinity, to believe that One is Three19). He worked hard to apply his non-sectarian principles in the higher education sphere, partly by serving on the founding board of McMicken University (later the University of Cincinnati), the first municipal college in the United States; and he was a pioneer in ecumenical matters, initiating pulpit exchanges with local Unitarian matters.20 This impressive flurry of civic-minded work expressed Lilienthal’s surging patriotism, particularly as the Civil War struggle became apprehensible as a righteous crusade for the liberation of the enslaved. As the fighting culminated, Lilienthal conspicuously attributed religious dimensions to American democratic experience. “With millions of lives and millions of treasure, we have brought sacrifice for our national experience,” the rabbi declared in his Union Victory address. The emancipation of the slaves was a triumph for freedom everywhere: “We have fought and conquered for the nations all over the world, for by our victories we have reinstated labor in all its pristine and becoming dignity.”21 His patriotic rhetoric expressed the elation shared by innumerable Americans at the time, but this particular speech is revealing in that the Reform rabbi delivered it during Passover season, but did not entwine the Jewish holiday’s theme of escape from slavery in his celebration of the North’s triumph.22 This was because as a result of his life’s experiences, Lilienthal did not view Americanism as a mere supplement to Judaism. Americanism, conceptualized in an optimistic vein of inter-faith harmony and a liberal key of public square neutrality, was a fully integrated part of his Reform Jewish ideology. American constitutionalism allowed Jews to practice their religion freely, something they could not do anywhere else; and as a result of the unprecedented fact that Judaism could develop with genuine creativity and confidence in America, the whole world would reap benefits.

 Ibid., 175.  Ibid., 169, 186. 21   Max Lilienthal, “The Flag and the Union,” reprinted in Philipson, ed., Max Lilienthal, 404. 22  Ibid., 182. 19 20

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This was, in short, an impressively calibrated, and biographically coherent, precursor of a liberal Jewish melting pot ideology. The Jews’ integration in America’s democratic institutions was consistent with their own finest traditions; such measured assimilation perfected these institutions, just as a measured degree of Americanization provided Reform Jews with ways and means to spread their religion’s universal messages beyond their country’s borders. In one formulation or another, many Jews have expressed this idea of synergy between Judaism and America (one historian aptly classified the phenomenon as the “cult of synthesis”23). However, in place and time, Lilienthal can be ranked as a patriarch, as someone who stands at the base of an historically intelligible liberal Jewish outlook in America. More than anything, Max Lilienthal’s credibility as an American Jewish ideological architect rests on his status as a personification of the Old World/New World contrast. Implicitly at least, his very presence in America delivered to fellow Jews the message that religious modernization and liberalism did not work in all places, certainly not in tsarist Russia. But it was viable in America—a point vividly apprehensible to American Jews in the 1870s, as they witnessed how efficiently Reform was working in America via the rise of impressive new synagogues, the organizational consolidation of the movement in the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and the initiation of steps in the founding of a Reform rabbinical college, the Hebrew Union College.24

Emma Lazarus’ “New World Colossus” In twentieth-century America, liberalism came to be identified as an inviting orientation toward the democratic participation of minority groups, identified through the 1950s in terms of white ethnic minorities. During the second half of the century, this liberal conceptualization of democratic inclusion applied increasingly to African Americans and to minorities defined in non-ethnic senses, such as sexual orientation. At various phases, the inclusion of immigrant minorities ranked high on the liberal agenda, in contradistinction to immigration restriction advocates (“nativists”) on

 Sarna, “The Cult of Synthesis,” 52–79.  Jick, The Americanization of the Synagogue; Sarna, American Judaism, 124–34.

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the conservative right25 – it bears mention, however, that this distinction between pro-immigration liberalism and right-wing nativism is not absolute.26 In the first part of the twentieth century, the liberally inclusive attitude on immigration fell within the “melting pot” ideological rubric, meaning that immigrants were to conform to the existing Anglo-Saxon template. By the end of the century, liberalism buoyed on ideas of multi-culturalism (originally called “cultural pluralism”27), assuming that minority groups ought to retain some measure of autonomy. The difference between these two ideologies, the melting pot and multi-culturalism is quantitative, pertaining to expectations of levels of minority conformity to majority culture28; in their successive periods, at both ends of the twentieth century, both ideologies were (and remain) quintessentially liberal ideas which expressed future-oriented visions of ever-expansive democracy and enlightened progress. The theories of the melting pot, and of cultural pluralism, departed from conservative, backward-looking, ideologies which are rooted in some form of racial or national determinism, and which mandate the sociopolitical exclusion of newcomers or minorities who are perceived as threats to some racial-national essence.29 In various late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century European settings, Jewish liberals had incentive to contest various ideologies of social separation (such as nationalism, including its Jewish, Zionist, 25  The standard exposition of immigration politics, through the 1920s, is: Higham, Strangers in the Land. 26  For instance, in pre-WWI America, the important, middle class left-liberal movement, Progressivism, was by and large pro-restriction, being sympathetic to the organized labor argument about how large-scale immigration presumably lowered the wages of working Americans. Noah, The Great Divergence, 213–214. 27  Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” (February 18, 1905): 190–4; Ibid., (February 25, 1915): 217–20. 28  A strong presentation of this argument about inherent liberalism connecting melting pot and multi-cultural theories can be found in: Gleason, Speaking of Diversity, 25–6. In his influential volume, David Hollinger makes the same point, though he formulates it somewhat obliquely (“Part of the problem is that virtually no one defends monoculturalism, with the result that multiculturalism is deprived of an honest, natural opposite.”): Hollinger, Postethnic America, 80. 29  Gleason (p. 26) makes this point in strong language, arguing that “for many Americans,” the melting pot became a “cherished” symbol of liberal values  – “openness toward the future, receptiveness to immigrants and the cultural values they bring, and the gradual and harmonious integration of these immigrants and their descendants into the ever evolving life of the nation.”

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variant) because the issue of Jewish integration remained contested, owing to antisemitic agitation, the nature of the political regime, and the absence of pro-immigration traditions. In contrast, due to the relatively low level of antisemitic pressure in the United States and to the strength of pro-­ immigrant Open Door policies in the country up to the 1920s, Jewish liberalism in the “New World” did not develop in perpetual contestation against theories of social separation. In this specific sense, Jewish liberalism in the United States was rather distinctive: social integration was obviously a priority for Jewish thinkers and activists everywhere, but unlike the situation in various European contexts, inclusion in the United States was as much of a problem as it was a solution. Jews were rapidly assimilated in America’s melting pot. This melting pot theory of social inclusion in the United States being intimidatingly powerful, its application might possibly obliterate any semblance of Jewish ethno-religious continuity. Hence Jewish discourse about melting pot liberalism in the United States had a peculiarly ambivalent duality—Jewish writers and activists who invented melting pot ideology as a liberal creed of immigrant and minority inclusion also happened to be extremely prominent Zionists. In America’s melting pot discourse, Jewish liberalism and Jewish nationalism amalgamated as they could not in other countries, where traditions and policies on immigration, the sine qua non of Jewish politics in the early twentieth century, were relatively illiberal. During the early 1880s, Emma Lazarus sometimes borrowed a phrase from George Eliot, carrying “the torch of visible community,”30 as a description of the goal or procedure of Jewish nationalist activity. The phrase can only make sense to someone who regards communal bonds of spiritual continuity throughout centuries of Jewish history in the diaspora as being invisible  – and many prominent Zionists, certainly including Lazarus in the American setting, had this blind spot. When she contemplated Jewish life between the eras of the Bible in Eretz Israel (Land of Israel) and the New Colossus in America, Lazarus thought lachrymosely about suffering; and in this miserable mass of Jewish time and energy, the most honourable form of behaviour she could identify was courageous martyrdom.

30  Lazarus opened her Zionist manifesto with a quotation from Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and then refers to this novel’s allusion to the “torch of visible community” in the booklet’s opening letter: Lazarus, An Epistle, 15.

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Lazarus inculcated this bleak message in a revealing play, The Dance to the Death,31 written in early 1880, and published two years later in a cheekily titled volume, Songs of a Semite. Owing to its stilted poetic language, and the inherent weightiness of a plot that must culminate in a brutal massacre of a Jewish community, this fascinating play was never staged, but its messages and tone invite comparison to the theatrical composition of the other English language, Jewish writer responsible for the emergence of America’s liberal “melting pot” ideology, Israel Zangwill. In historical memory, Emma Lazarus became even more indelibly linked with melting pot liberalism than Zangwill, who popularized the term and concept. In fact, her poem became so iconic that in the months after Donald Trump’s 2016 election it figured in widely publicized debates as a liberal antithesis to immigration restriction proposals forwarded by the new Republican administration in America.32 Yet the comparison to Zangwill, and also a close analysis of the famous sonnet, show that nationalist and liberal orientations never really found equilibrium in her thinking. As a result of challenges she faced as a precocious female intellectual pressured by the patriarchal culture of the Gilded Age, and also owing to the fact that Jewish nationalism and other Jewish political ideologies remained relatively under-developed at the time of her death, Lazarus remained, to the end, quite anxious about what a melting pot model of minority integration might really mean for the Jews. Lazarus’ The Dance to the Death revolves around the proposed betrothal of a young Jewish woman to the gentile son of the ruler of the Free City of Nordhausen, at the time of the Black Plague in the mid-fourteenth century (in a plot twist, the daughter, Liebhaid von Orb, turns out to have been adopted by her prominent Jewish family; her biological father, Henry Schnetzen, the terrifying nemesis of Nordhausen’s Jewish community, is unaware that she is alive). Zangwill’s 1908 melodrama, The Melting Pot,33 which unlike Lazarus’ forgotten play was staged repeatedly and enthusiastically received, also orbits around a proposed intermarriage of Jew and gentile; like Lazarus’ drama, Zangwill’s play evokes the prospect of symbolically full reconciliation between the two faiths by highlighting an improbable plot situation wherein one of the young lovers turns out to be  Lazarus, Songs of a Semite..  “Huddled Masses? What Poem Would Trump Like to See on the Statue of Liberty,” Guardian staff The Guardian, August 20, 2017. 33  Zangwill, The Melting Pot. 31 32

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the offspring of a notorious mass murderer of Jews (Zangwill’s villain persecutes Jews during the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, an atrocity that precedes the action in his American-based drama). Being optimistic about America and about intermarriage (the playwright was himself a practitioner of the latter), Zangwill’s proposed union is consummated. Being pessimistic about Jewish life in the pre-modern diaspora, and being undecided about intermarriage (Lazarus herself remained single, and her own sexual orientation serves as an object of inconclusive speculation among researchers), the proposed betrothal in Lazarus’ drama can never happen. Tragically, Lazarus died young, at the age of 38, in 1887, meaning that her public career as a Jewish intellectual ended just as the mass cultural energy of large-scale Jewish immigration to the United States became manifest in the 1880s. Though her fascinating 1882–1883 polemic, Epistle to the Hebrews,34 is rife with precocious insight that anticipates a considerable measure of subsequent American Zionist ideology, Lazarus passed from the scene without having had any window for sustained reflection about the implications of mass Jewish immigration and emergency, pogrom-related, politics. Her liberal melting pot poetics are internally inconsistent and non-programmatic, yet emotionally authentic. In contrast, Zangwill, whose writing in 1908 rested on two decades of Jewish cultural refashioning in an era of pogroms and mass relocation, produced a play that was didactically programmatic, consistently finessed and emotionally inauthentic. Lazarus’ indefinite wrestling with liberal integration and nationalist separation tropes proved to be monumentally influential. She was never able to strike a coherent balance between the safe, neat Victorian sensibilities of a westernized Jew who came of age in the 1870s, and the pulsating ethno-nationalism personified by non-acculturated Jewish immigrants from East Europe who were on the move in the 1880s. Ironically, her radical ambivalence as to whether these two sensibilities, liberalism and nationalism, could fuse as one became fully appreciated by a diverse American audience in her only famous work, “The New Colossus,” a sonnet composed in 1883, and placed posthumously two decades later in a bronze plaque, on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Commissioned in a campaign to raise funds for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal, the poem indelibly associated the monument with the arrival of immigrants in  Lazarus, An Epistle to the Hebrews.

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America’s melting pot (France bestowed the statue in tribute to America’s democracy, and as a symbol of mankind’s ongoing struggle against tyranny, but never referred to the gift as a symbol of immigration). “Emma Lazarus was the first American to make any sense of the statue,” casting the monument as a liberal symbol of open immigration, writes one recent biographer.35 Uninviting Europe, based on Hellenic culture, is symbolized negatively in the poem’s memorable, and sexually provocative, opening lines, “Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame/With conquering limbs astride from lamb to lamb”—to make it in Europe, the soul of a Jew or any other wanderer must be rapingly penetrated by what comes between the “conquering limbs” of this unenlightened, “brazen” male “giant.” America, whose enlightenment is betokened by the “lamp” and whose promise to immigrants lurks benignly behind the “golden door,” is represented by a not necessarily weaker woman, the Statue of Liberty (her equivalence in power to the ancient statue, the Colossus of Rhodes, is evoked by the phrase “mighty woman with a torch”); but unlike the uncontrolled (“brazen”) European male, the power exerted by this American mother over orphaned exiles is controllable, being contained as “imprisoned lightning.” Is the Mother of Exiles’ disposition really amenable to reasonable control? The flicker of genius in this poem is Lazarus’ visceral grasp that any imposition of enlightenment upon the chaotic unruliness of immigrant life must be a contradiction in terms. There is no such thing as “imprisoned lightning,” just as almost any phrase we use to impose a sense of rational containment upon immigrant experience must be inherently inconsistent. “Imprisoned lightning” is an oxymoronic image, one that remarkably reflects Lazarus’ intuitive understanding that liberal catch phrases used to describe America’s ongoing transformation by immigration must be, on some level, imperfect. No single phrase can ever capture the complex volatility of past, present and future in immigrant identity (for instance, to call America “a nation of immigrants” creates as much confusion as clarity – doesn’t a country become a “nation” when newcomers to it, and their descendants, cease and desist as “immigrants”?). In the union of this welcoming mother and the bewildered, incoming migrant, the New World Colossus’ seductive power becomes neutered. Lazarus’ poem is the asexual dream of a trapped, late-nineteenth-century 35  Schor, Emma Lazarus; quote from: Sam Roberts, “How a Sonnet Made a Statue the ‘Mother of Exiles,” The New York Times, City Room Blog, October 26, 2011.

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proto-feminist, proto-nationalist woman who could not quite believe in the promise of liberal fulfilment either through tediously subservient marriage, or an elusively unobtainable professional career. The mighty woman with a torch of the poem’s bold opening morphs in its middle passage as a virtually un-feminized beacon of bland presence (symbolized by her “mild eyes”); and by the end of the poem she is politically and sexually mute. In this celebrated poem, America’s most famous message of melting pot liberalism is actually a non-message, a zipless sexual encounter without the sex, a confusedly oxymoronic statement of public policy in the New World. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” says the Mother of Exiles – but she can never really say that (nor has America sustained a coherently liberal immigration policy over time) because she has “silent lips.” Zangwill, another Jewish author affiliated with Jewish nationalist ideologies, effectively lobbied in his 1908 play, The Melting Pot, because he correctly prophesized that intermarriage would become a viable existential possibility for tens of thousands of Jews and others; Lazarus, in contrast, could never become committed on marital issues, neither in an individual, nor in a collective Jewish, sense. Her poem about the melting pot became enshrined on the statue’s pedestal and in the American imagination, but it really offers no concrete recommendation as to how Jews and other newcomers might become integrated in America. The closest it comes to being real is its late Victorian insistence that we might all end up being more comfortable in the New World if we just let do without sex.

Israel Zangwill and the “melting pot” In October 1908, five years after Lazarus’ poem was emplaced at the pedestal of the Status of Liberty, Israel Zangwill first brought his melodramatic but influential play, The Melting Pot, to stage in Washington D.C.36 Portraying the marriage union of a Jewish immigrant musician to New York City, David Quixano, to a fetching gentile woman, Vera Revendal, Zangwill imaginatively proposed an American solution to the crisis in global Jewish politics that had been triggered five and a half years earlier by the Kishinev pogrom.37 A famous Anglo-Jewish author, Israel Zangwill had a flair for advocating iconoclastic positions, some of them not easily located within the orbit  Zangwill, The Melting Pot.  Penkower, “The Kishinev Pogrom,” 187–225.

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of Jewish liberalism. In some phases of his Zionist advocacy, for instance, he adopted a militant hardline, phrasing his support of the transfer of Palestine’s Arab population as a call for “amicable measures of race redistribution.”38 Some of his liberal attachments were, in some measure, incidental, such as his relationship with feminism, sparked by his 1903 marriage to a gentile woman, Edith Chaplin Ayrton, who became instrumental in the founding of the Jewish League for Woman Suffrage.39 In a career marked by robust and often contradictory ideological affiliations, the writer became indelibly identified with American liberalism via his theatrical presentation of the melting pot concept. In turn, this melting pot lobbying was indivisibly linked to Zangwill’s involvement in global Jewish politics. Zangwill’s play hit the stage at a time when the economically and politically constrained Zionist movement implemented a real-life plan to relocate real-life Kishinev orphans in the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Ottoman Palestine.40 Largely in response to the resurgence of pogroms in tsarist Russia in 1903, Theodor Herzl that year brought to the Sixth Zionist Congress England’s offer for Jewish nationalist settlement in East Africa41; after two years of raucous debate, the Zionist movement rejected this “Uganda” plan at its Seventh Congress, precipitating a walkout of delegates who believed that Jews should accept a Nachtasyl (night shelter) temporary settlement refuge wherever it could be found in the world. Zangwill himself led this walkout, and, implementing the night shelter philosophy, he became head of the Jewish Territorialist Organization (known as the ITO),42 meaning that in 1908 he was, concurrently and contradictorily, proposing Jewish assimilation in America’s melting pot, and national Jewish collective settlement, on any locale that could be secured, in the ITO framework. In The Melting Pot, Zangwill promised his protagonist, David, a fictionalized Kishinev orphan, a perfect future in America, thanks to his inter-­ marriage with Vera, the daughter of the Russian army officer who supposedly gave firing orders at the Kishinev pogrom. Throughout the  Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto, 188.  Israel Zangwill was one of this League’s male members. Kuzmack, Woman’s Cause, 135. 40  Shilony, Jewish National Fund, 125–30. 41  For background to the Uganda proposal: Heymann, ed., The Uganda Controversy Vol. 1. 42  The story of the Zangwill-led ITO is a growth industry in Jewish historical scholarship. Two recent studies on this subject are: Alroey, Zionism without Zion; Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion. 38 39

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drama, David perorates about the invincible power of the melting pot, “God’s crucible” in which “fifty” immigrant groups rapidly and, it seems, totally, assimilate as full-blooded Americans. The process is as close to instantaneous as Zangwill’s character could believably describe it on stage. In the following soliloquy, probably the play’s most familiar section, Quixano talks about thoroughly full-blooded Americanization as a liberal prescription that “won’t be long” in attainment: America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you’ve come to – these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.43

Despite its saccharine plot, Zangwill’s play conveyed an extremely intriguing liberal message about integration in America’s melting pot as a panacea in Jewish politics.44 Zangwill’s insistence that in America’s inventive democracy, where pre-­ World War I techno-industrial heroes like Henry Ford were expressly contemptuous of the past, Jews could happily forget about Old World persecution and humiliation, wedded him to ideological precursors such as the Reform rabbi Max Lilienthal, who imagined that Jews, with all others in America, would forever be democratically transformed by epochal New World events such as the Civil War. A few years earlier, as a pro-Uganda Jewish nationalist, Zangwill had shared with the most prominent anti-Uganda agitator in the “Zion Only” (Tzione Tzion) faction, Ber Borochov, an understanding that Jewish immigration and national settlement issues could not be divorced from conceptualizations of race in this pre-war, colonial era. In his pro-Uganda advocacy, Zangwill extensively played the race card. “Why the whole white population of the British Colonies is only some twelve millions,” he noted;

 Zangwill, The Melting Pot, 33.  For analyses of the play’s themes and public effects: Rochelson, A Jew in the Public Arena, 180–9; Wohlgelernter, Israel Zangwill, 176; Shumsky, “Zangwill’s The Melting Pot,” 29–41; Nahshon, From the Ghetto; Gleason, Speaking of Diversity, 3–31. 43 44

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by getting Jews involved in British colonialism, first in Uganda, the empire’s white population would “double,” he promised.45 Zangwill, whose ideas on race, his latest biographer notes, were perhaps “even more complicated than his views on Judaism,”46 felt obligated to pursue the issue of where blacks came into America’s melting pot. In his 1914 Afterword to a printed version of the play, Zangwill concluded that racial intermarriage ought generally to be avoided in America, on account of the “unpleasantness” of the “blending of colors”; and he added that in the absence of untoward “gamic interaction,” the socioeconomic advance of blacks in America would vindicate the empowering logic of the melting pot for everyone, Jews included.47 45  Meri-Jane Rochelson, “Zionism, Territorialism, Race and Nation in the Thought and Politics of Israel Zangwill,” in: Between the East End and East Africa, eds., Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman, The Jew in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 150. 46  Ibid., 157. 47  Zangwill’s 1914 Afterword conveys his confused attitudes on race, combining liberal condemnation of contemporary racism with reinforcement of various pitilessly racist stereotypes. On the one hand, Zangwill predicts that “negrophobia” in America is “not likely to remain eternally at its present barbarous pitch,” and he does not completely rule out merits of black-white intermarriage, though he confines recommendation of this “adventure” to just a “few heroic souls.” He acknowledges that the “prognathous face” of the black in America is an “ugly and undesirable type of countenance,” and adds that this physiognomy “connotes a lower average of intellect and ethics.” His positive characterization of black features also depends on crude stereotype (blacks in America have a “joy of life, love of colour, keen senses, beautiful voice, and ear[s] for music”); and the playwright’s superficial outlook on race issues is underscored by the way he tries to project an air of fair-mindedness by criticizing and essentializing various white qualities (whites, it turns out, also have ape-like qualities, such as their “hairiness”). These confused ruminations are noteworthy in three ways. First, Zangwill recognizes that the issue of race is an exception (an “inconvenient element”) to his theory of the melting pot. Second, his statements about the desirability of keeping the melting pot white reflect the author’s highly personalized, and primarily aesthetic (as compared to ethical), commitment to whiteness (as explained in a previous chapter). Here Zangwill writes that whites should remain with whites in America’s melting pot unless they are indifferent to the inevitable ugliness that will stain their descendants:

The negroid hair and complexion being, in Mendelian language, ‘dominant,’ these black traits are not easy to eliminate from the hybrid posterity; and in view of all the unpleasantness, both immediate and contingent, that attends the blending of colours, only heroic souls on either side should dare the adventure of intermarriage. (p. 207) Finally, and most importantly, just as he advocated East Africa settlement as territorialist because he was convinced that Jewish settlement in the colony would strengthen the whiteness of their status in the empire, Zangwill lobbied for the melting pot in America because

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Zangwill’s meditations about race in America’s melting pot warrant comparison to positions taken by his antagonist in the Uganda debate, Ber Borochov, whose influential essay “On the Question of Zion and a Territory”48 is heavily saturated by racial determinism. The comparison merits comment because it shows that melting pot liberalism did not develop exclusively, or perhaps even primarily, because Jewish thinkers and writers opportunistically grasped that America’s socioeconomic system might be unusually malleable and accommodating toward Jewish immigrants. Instead, in an era of mass Jewish immigration and resettlement in innumerable locales (including resettlement in Russian cities, outside of the Pale of Settlement49), melting pot discourse fixated on the issue of Jewish continuity or transformation resulting from dramatic changes in the Jewish position as a minority (or, possibly in the Palestine future, a majority) vis-à-vis a Christian or Muslim group; and this melting pot ­rhetoric developed in many contexts and places, not only in America. Also, though scholars have assumed that the issue of “whiteness” has special import or status for Jewish liberals in America,50 owing to the peculiarly tragic history of race relations in that country, this Borochov-Zangwill comparison suggests that the issue of race in Jewish politics was negotiated in melting pot debates whose borders extended well beyond North America. “On the Question of Zion and a Territory” is based on 1904–1905 anti-Uganda sermonizing in the Pale of Settlement carried out by Borochov’s under the supervision of Tzione Tzion leader Menachem Ussishkin51; and the preacher’s ultimate, knockdown proof about the the Jew could and would remain white in it. This is the message Zangwill conveys in the final lines of this key section in his Afterword: “The Jew may be Americanised and the American Judaised without any gamic interaction.” (p. 207). See: Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot: A Drama in Four Acts, (London: AMS Press, 1925), 199–216. 48  Ber Borochov, “On the Question of Zion and a Territory,” in Borochov, Philosophical Writings. 49  Nathans, Beyond the Pale. In this 1904–1908 juncture when Borochov imposed melting pot rhetoric on the Uganda debate, and Zangwill influentially transposed the concept to the American setting, Vladimir Jabotinsky and other Jews were involved in salon debates in elite urban settings in the tsarist empire regarding the pros and cons of Jewish integration in a Russian melting pot. 50  Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness. 51  For background about Borochov: Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 329–63; Mattiyahu Mintz, Ber Borochov: Circle One, 1900–1906 (Hama’agal harishon) (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1976).

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scientifically ordained inevitability of Jewish colonization and positive growth in Ottoman Palestine is that the land’s Arabs will have a racial proclivity to amalgamate in the Yishuv’s Hebraic culture. In this article, Borochov ardently lobbies for Arab integration in a Hebraic melting pot in the Yishuv, just as Zangwill a few years later championed Jewish assimilation in America’s melting pot. Only in Eretz Israel, Borochov concludes, will Jewish settlers turn into a productive proletariat working alongside “people close to us in terms of blood ties and spirit.” Ottoman Palestine’s indigenous Arabs are “closer to Jews than other people in terms of racial structure, and even belong to the ‘Semitic’ family”—the racial difference between Diaspora Jews and Arab peasants in Eretz Israel is no more prominent that the difference between Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic Jews who were born in Eretz Israel (and whom gentile travellers mistakenly call “Arabs,” or “Turks”). As Arab peasants are pulled into the Zionist melting pot—when they learn to speak Hebrew, to dress as Zionist pioneers and assimilate Jewish-Zionist manners—“they will be completely indistinguishable from a real Jew,” and any trace of Jewish-Arab animosity will evaporate.52 Overlooking considerable evidence about settlement travail in Liberia which had accumulated over the nineteenth century53 (and which ­foreshadowed a cruelly problematic history in the twentieth century54), Borochov drove his point home with a telling analogy: since blacks from the American south were able to “plant their language, culture and customs” among black Africans in Liberia, a native people whose socioeconomic level was lower in every way than that of the fellaheen (Arab peasant) in Eretz Israel, his scenario of Arab assimilation in the Zionist melting pot had to be realistic.55 Borochov supposed that African American history reinforced his Jewish nationalist ideology, just as Zangwill conceived that the progress of blacks in America would vindicate his melting pot program. One was saying that  Borochov, “On the Question,”, 139–41.  Reports of disease and social discontent in Liberia circulated widely from the mid-nineteenth century, even though the sponsoring settlement organization, the American Colonization Society, was disposed to suppress them: Clegg, The Price of Liberty. 54  Ibrahim Sundiata, Brothers and Strangers: Black Zion, Black Slavery: 1914–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); James Ciment, Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013). 55  Borochov, “On the Question,” 141. 52 53

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if Americanized blacks could redefine Liberia on their own terms because their less civilized indigenous racial cousins would follow their lead, the westernized Zionists could peaceably create a modern Jewish state in Ottoman Palestine because their less advanced, ancestral Semitic cousins would follow their lead; the other was saying that if blacks could make it in America, so too could the Jews. Zangwill, the liberal prophet of Jewish assimilation in America in this pre-World War I era, and Borochov, the nationalist prophet of Second Aliya halutz (Zionist-ideological pioneer) socialist-communal pioneering in Eretz Israel, both operated out of deep visceral concern about the preservation of Jewish whiteness, and both also relied on black experience as proof text. In the initial, influential presentation of the concept of the melting pot in the 1908 play, and in Zangwill’s subsequent 1914 musings about the democratic inclusion of African Americans, echoes of the twists and turns of Jewish politics in global colonial contexts are strongly discernible. Arguing with interlocutors like Borochov in the Uganda debate, Zangwill was compelled to explain how white Jews would prosper in black Africa, whereas in his New World advocacy the Anglo-Jewish writer cum Territorialist was forced to contemplate whether black Americans could thrive in the predominately white melting pot. The challenges and opportunities of Jewish whiteness were shadowing Zangwill wherever he turned in Jewish politics; and the way he attributed social potentialities and limits to American liberalism, that is to the melting pot, was influenced by his dealings with white-black immigration and resettlement processes in the Uganda debate, a topic that would have seemed utterly esoteric to an American theatre audience in 1908, and one that was ignored in subsequent scholarly treatments of Zangwill’s invention of melting pot liberalism.56

 For instance, David Biale’s important discussion of Zangwill’s position on race issues in the melting pot does not refer to how the writer’s ideas about whiteness and racial amalgamation developed in his Jewish nationalist work, particularly during the Uganda debate. David Biale, “The Melting Pot and Beyond: Jews and the Politics of American Identity,” in, Biale, Galchinsky, and Heschel, eds. Insider/Outsider, 19–24. 56

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Jews and the Making of American Liberalism Of course, in later periods of American History, Jewish liberals were generations removed from debates and formulas salient in world Jewish politics before the world wars and the Holocaust. In socio-cultural, as well as temporal, senses, Jewish student radicals in the 1960s who opposed the Vietnam War seem very far removed from the compulsory education fiasco in tsarist Russia that fuelled the Reform rabbi Max Lilienthal’s early dabbling with liberal concepts in Civil War era America. Nonetheless, perhaps the most enduring concepts of American liberalism—church-state separation, and democratic inclusiveness via immigration and enlightened social policy—were originally championed by the country’s Jewish minority in ways that were inextricably connected to developments in world Jewish politics, as this article has tried to delineate. That this fusion of American Jewish liberalism and global Jewish politics has been overlooked might seem surprising.57 After all, this union girded the mantra of the country’s most celebrated Jewish liberal, Louis Brandeis. In our own era of spiralling economic inequality and growing illiberal or Nativist sentiment on immigration issues, the pertinence of Brandeis’ liberal messages, such as his warnings about economic concentration (the “curse of bigness”) is attracting increasing scholarly notice58; but the Supreme Court justice’s avowed connections to world Jewish politics in his era is a somewhat less appreciated facet of his liberal career.59 When Brandeis declared “To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists,”60 he revived the aforementioned trend wherein influential Jewish American commentators relied on Jewish nationalism as a kind of checks and balances mechanism to counter the overly seductive, liberal-integrative, power of the melting pot. More 57  One scholar who made an unusual, and prodigious, effort to follow how east European Jewish political debates impinged on the Jewish political scene in the United States was Jonathan Frankel, in his volume Prophecy and Politics. Frankel’s analysis, however, was limited to reciprocal relations between Jewish nationalism and Jewish socialism along the Old World-New World axis, whereas this article has followed the interaction between Zionism and Jewish liberalism along the same east-west axis. 58  Rosen, Louis D. Brandeis. 59  These connections are explored in greater length in: Silver, Who Can Beat the Big Money?, 161–202. 60  For the context of this remark: Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis, 409–13.

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than that, he was indirectly equating at least one phenomenon of world Jewish politics, Zionist settlement on the First and Second Aliyot (waves of Zionist immigration) to Ottoman Palestine, with the Jeffersonian foundations of American democracy. Since the problem with America was the mechanical materialism of “bigness,” liberal means must be found to protect individual identity and independent dignity and restore frontier farmer ideals of democracy, Brandeis suggested. According to this line of thought, Zionism (or pro-Israel activity, as it is called today) would prevent Jewish immigrants and their descendants from injuring their core identity and surrendering to the imitative coarseness of “bigness.” The country’ most revered Jewish politician never viewed liberalism as an innately exceptional American condition. As Brandeis saw it, each ethno-religious sub-group would promote liberalism by drawing from its own special traditions and political reservoir; and in the Jewish case, this theory validated the pertinence of an especially intense variant of world Jewish politics, Zionism, on the American landscape.

Bibliography Alroey, Gur. 2016. Zionism Without Zion: The Jewish Territorial Organization and Its Conflict with the Zionist Organization. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Bar-Yosef, Eitan, and Nadia Valman, eds. 2009. The Jew in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Berman, Lila Corwin. 2015. Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race and Religion in Postwar Detroit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Biale, David, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel. 1998. Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Borochov, Ber. 1944. Philosophical Writings (L’she’alat tziyon v’teritoriya) (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim. Ciment, James. 2013. Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It. New York: Hill and Wang. Clegg, Claude. 2004. The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia. Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press. Cohen, Steven. 1989. The Dimensions of American Jewish Liberalism. New York: American Jewish Committee. Dollinger, Marc. 2000. Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Etkes. 1978. Compulsory Education as a Crossroads in the History of the Haskalah Movement in Russia (Parashat hahaskalah mita’am v’ha tmura b’ma’amad tnuat hahaskalah b’russiya) (Hebrew). Zion 43: 202–216. Feingold, Henry. 2013. American Jewish Political Culture and the Liberal Persuasion. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Foner, Eric. 1998. The Story of American Freedom. New  York: W.W.  Norton & Company. Frankel, Jonathan. 1981. Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews 1862–1917. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, Murray. 2005. The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gleason, Philip. 1992. Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-­ Century America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Goldstein, Eric. 2006. The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heymann, Michael, ed. 1970. The Uganda Controversy. Vol. 1. Jerusalem: Israel Universities. Higham, John. 1955. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Hollinger, David. 1995. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books. Jick, Leon. 1976. The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820–1870. Hanover: University Press of New England. Kallen, Horace. Democracy Versus the Melting Pot. Nation 100 (1905, February 18):190–194 and, (1915, February 25): 217–220. Krugman, Paul. 2009. The Conscience of a Liberal. New  York: W.W.  Norton & Company. Kuzmack, Linda Gordon. 1990. Woman’s Cause: The Jewish Woman’s Movement in England and the United States, 1881–1993. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Lazarus, Emma. 1882. Songs of a Semite: The Dance to Death, and Other Poems. In The American Hebrew. New York. ———. 1987. An Epistle to the Hebrews. New  York: Jewish Historical Society of New York. Lederhendler, Eli. 1989. The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGown, John. 2007. American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Mintz, Mattiyahu. 1976. Ber Borochov: Circle One, 1900–1906 (Hama’agal harishon) (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press.

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Moore, Deborah Dash. 1981. At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews. New York: Columbia University Press. Nahshon, Edna. 2006. From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Nathans, Benjamin. 2004. Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Noah, Timothy. 2012. The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality and What We Can Do About It. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Penkower, Monty Noam. 2004. The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903: A Turning Point in Jewish History. Modern Judaism 24 (3): 187–225. Philipson, David, ed. 1915. Max Lilienthal, American Rabbi: Life and Writings. New York: Bloch. Podhoretz, Norman. 2010. Why are Jews Liberal. New York: Vintage. Raisanovsky, Nicholas. 1959. Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rochelson, Meri-Jane. 2008. A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Rosen, Jeffrey. 2016. Louis D.  Brandeis: American Prophet. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rovner, Adam. 2014. In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands before Israel. New York: University Press. Ruben, Bruce. 2011. Max Lilienthal: The Making of the American Rabbinate. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Sarna, Jonathan. 1999. The Cult of Synthesis in American Jewish Culture. Jewish Social Studies 5 (Fall-Winter): 52–79. ———. 2004. American Judaism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schor, Esther. 2006. Emma Lazarus. New York: Schocken Books. Shilony, Zvi. Jewish National Fund and Settlement in Eretz-Israel, 1903–1914 (Hakeren hakayemet le-Yisra’el veha-hityashvut ha-Tsiyonit 1903–1914) (Hebrew). Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi, 1990. Shumsky, Neil. 1975. Zangwill’s The Melting Pot: Ethnic Tensions on Stage. American Quarterly 27: 29–41. Silver, M. M. 2006. Rabbi Max Lilienthal: From ‘Compulsory Education’ to the Separation of Religion and State. (Harav maks liliyental: mihaskalah mita’am l’hafrada ben dat v’medina) (Hebrew). Zion 71: 343–372. ———.. 2016. Who Can Beat the Big Money? (Me yachol l’kesef hagadol) (Hebrew). Hevel Modi’in: Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, Dvir. Stanislawski, Michael. 1981. Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–1855. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Stanley, Timothy, and Jonathan Bell. 2012. Making Sense of American Liberalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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Sundiata, Ibrahim. 2003. Brothers and Strangers: Black Zion, Black Slavery: 1914–1940. Durham: Duke University Press. Udelson, Joseph H. 1990. Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Urofsky, Melvin. 2009. Louis D. Brandeis: A Life. New York: Pantheon Books. Vital, David. 1975. The Origins of Zionism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wiebe, Robert H. 1967. The Search for Order, 1877–1920. New York: Hill and Wang. Wisse, Ruth. 1992. If I am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews. New York: Free Press. Wohlgelernter, Maurice. 1944. Israel Zangwill: A Study. New  York: Columbia University Press. Zangwill, Israel. 1909. The Melting Pot. New York: Macmillan.

PART IV

Liberalism, Empire, Zionism

CHAPTER 11

Who Introduced Liberalism into the Damascus Affair (1840)? Center, Periphery and Networks in the Jewish Response to the Blood Libel Yaron Tsur

The Damascus blood libel of 1840 was the first notable event in the history of the Afro-Asian branches of the Jewish diaspora, in which European liberalism was present and had a decisive impact. The blood libel is based on the belief that Jews needed Christian blood to prepare the dough for matzot and that it was the custom of Jews to slaughter Christians around the time of Passover and collect their blood for this ritual purpose. This belief was common in Europe, but the liberal France of the July Monarchy was the last place where one would expect it to be tolerated. And yet, in 1840 Damascus, the French consul endorsed the blood libel and played a leading role in the persecution that followed  – without his government calling him to order.1 1

 The best study of the affair is, by all means: Frankel, The Damascus Affair.

Y. Tsur (*) Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_11

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Blood libel accusations were a new phenomenon in Syria: they did not spread among the Muslim majority but among a Christian minority, and Ottoman governors usually nipped such accusations in the bud.2 Although European Jews understood the Damascus blood libel in terms of a common tradition of ritual murder accusations, the situation in the East did not bear out this assumption. Indeed, the first blood libel case known to us in detail in the region had occurred in Basra in 1792, when Jews accused Armenians of ritual murder, not vice versa.3 Such an episode – inconceivable in Christian Europe  – illustrates the gulf between the Jewish community in Damascus, the original source and center of the affair, and the affair’s “periphery” in diasporic terms, the Jewish communities in Western Europe. In the common historical narrative about the Damascus affair, emphasis is put on the European periphery, the story is told from its perspective and its “heroes” are Western Jews. This was the first time that European Jewish notables intervened in a remote Muslim country, beyond Europe and the Holy Land, on behalf of their co-religionists. Two very different Jewish personalities travelled to the East to rescue the Jews of Damascus: a religious British Jew, Moses Montefiore, and a completely secular French Jew, Adolphe Crémieux.4 While they only appeared to share the traditional religious values of Jewish solidarity, they truly shared a belief in European civilization, the values of the enlightenment and the liberal idea of progress. Their journey to the East, it later transpired, was a key event in modern Jewish history  – a starting point for a whole series of fundamental processes and developments – and they rose to world fame on account of their actions.

2  Landau, Jews in Nineteenth Century Egypt; Landau and Ma’oz., ‘Yehudim velo yehudim bemitsrayim ubesurya bameah ha-19’ [Jews and Non-Jews in Egypt and Syria in the Nineteenth Century], 6–8; Ma’oz., ‘Hareka la’alilat damesek – mavo vehe’arot’ [Background of the Damascus Affair: Introduction and Comments], 29–36; Barnai, “‘Blood Libels’,” in: Almog, ed., Antisemitism through the Ages, 189–94. 3  Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, and Murder, 108–116; Yehuda, “The Jewish Blood Libel,” in Yehuda, The New Babylonian Diaspora, 129–67; Tsur, Gvirim veyehudim aherim bamizrah HaTikhon Ha’autmani 1750–1830 (Notables and Other Jews in the Ottoman Middle East,1750–1830), 142–53. 4  On Montefiore, see Green, Moses Montefiore; on Crémieux, see Posener, Adolphe Crémieux.

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Until recently, the presence of European liberalism in the Damascus affair was exclusively associated with these two Western Jewish notables.5 However, in his now-classic study, Jonathan Frankel helps us to review the role of Montefiore and Crémieux by pointing at a local Jew, Isaac Picciotto, as the first to invoke liberal values against those who accused the Jews. Who was Isaac Picciotto? How did he get involved in the Damascus affair? Was his use of liberal values effective? And was he alone in this “liberal campaign” of a local Jew? The Picciottos had special status in Syria, and in order to understand it, one needs to take a closer look at the Jewish international networks of the time. Aleppo, the commercial capital of Syria, where the Picciottos usually lived, was a long way from London, yet for generations ties of one sort or other had linked Picciotto’s family to that of Montefiore. Both families belonged to the “Western Sephardi diaspora”: a trans-regional Jewish trade network that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, extended from the Americas to the Indian subcontinent, with its centers in western Europe, among other places in the Italian port of Livorno that was Montefiore’s birthplace. I wish to argue, that this Western Sephardi diaspora did not completely disappear in the late eighteenth century as historians have assumed. In Muslim lands, some networks that were its rudimentary branches, or might be interpreted as such, became highly active even throughout the nineteenth century, long after its traditional centers in Amsterdam, Bordeaux, London and Livorno disintegrated.6 Was the blood libel affair part of that story? And if so what characterized Levantine members of the Western Sephardi diaspora so that a man like Picciotto could emerge as a local exponent of European liberal ideas in the Damascus of the early 1840s?

5  On the situation of Jews in Syria at the time, see Harel, Syrian Jewry in Transition, 1–57; see also al Qattan, “The Damascene Jewish Community,” in: Philipp (ed.), The Syrian Lands in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, 197–216. 6  Tsur, “Dating the Demise of the Western-Sephardi Jewish Diaspora,” in: Benichou Gottreich and Schroeter, eds., Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, 93–104. The Western Sephardi diaspora is one of the most studied topics of Jewish history in the early modern period. See, for example, Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora; Kaplan, An alternative path to modernity; Nahon, ed., Metropoles et peripheries. For research on the Western Sephardi diaspora in the Levant, see Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers; Rozen, Binetivey hayam hatikhon: hapezurah hayehudit-sefaradit bame’ot ha-16–18 [Mediterranean Routes: The Sephardic Jewish Diaspora in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries]; Tsur, Gvirim.

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Jewish Economic Elites in Syria c.1840 Jews and the various Christian denominations (Armenians, Greek Orthodox and Catholics) had traditionally competed over the same economic niches in the Ottoman world. This was especially true of their economic elites, whose status and power stemmed from the positions they held as economic agents and financiers (sarafs) for institutions of the Ottoman ruling class (askeri), its military commanders and high officials. Some other Jews engaged in international trade, but in this respect there was a difference between the Jewish, the Greek and the Armenian elements. Only Jews had a trading network the centers of which were on the Atlantic coast. The centers of their Christian rivals were in south east Europe, the Middle East and further eastward. The Western Sephardi diaspora established only a few of its outposts in the Balkan and Muslim lands, where the majority of its Ottoman Christian rivals lived.7 To the best of my knowledge, the Western Sephardi diaspora did not establish a branch in Damascus but rather in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city for a long time.8 Trade in Damascus focused on Ottoman markets and the huge hajj caravans to Mecca that departed from the city, while Aleppo was located at the crossroads of intercontinental trade routes beginning in India, passing through the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia, and ending in Europe.9 Since the Western Sephardi diaspora was primarily active in international and intercontinental trade, Aleppo fitted more into this trade network. The encounter between a local, stationary community and a commercial diaspora led to social segmentation. Irrespective of their family origins, all members of the Jewish community in eighteenth-century Aleppo spoke Arabic and earned their living in the local or regional market. The new arrivals from the Western Sephardi diaspora spoke Portuguese, and they needed other European languages too in order to engage in the lucrative 7  For a general survey of the religious minorities in the Ottoman Empire see: Braude and Lewis. eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire; see also: Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World. 8  See Trivellato, Familiarity of Strangers. On the whole Jewish community in Aleppo, see: Bornstein-Makovetsky, ‘Ir shel hakhamim vesoharim: hakehilah hayehudit baaram-tsovah 1492–1800 [A City of Sages and Merchants: The Community of Aleppo during the years 1492–1800]. 9  On Aleppo as trade center, see Masters, The Origins of Western Economic Dominance; Marcus, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity.

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international trade. Resulting differences in culture, professional occupation, level of income, rights and self-image between these two kinds of Jew reflect an encounter between two different social groups, or social “sectors”: the Arabic-speaking majority who belonged to the local or indigenous society alongside Muslims and Christians; and the Portuguese Jews, descendants of anusim, who were closer to the small groups of European merchants also engaged in international trade in Aleppo. Both the Portuguese Jews and the European traders were known as “Francos” (strangers of European origins) and enjoyed special rights that allowed them to evade local laws and taxation. With time, some Portuguese Jews, who now belonged to the Levantine branch of the Western Sephardi diaspora, took up permanent residence in Aleppo, learnt Arabic and were influenced by the surrounding culture. However, they were careful to preserve their European cultural capital, their role in international trade and the special rights that came with their connection to Europe. The segmented Jewish society in Aleppo thus consisted of an indigenous and a hybrid, quasi-European or Levantine sector.10 One family belonging to the quasi-European sector was particularly successful: from the 1780s, members of the Picciotto family were consistently able to obtain appointments as European diplomatic representatives in the city.11 No such quasi-European sector emerged in the Jewish community in Damascus. The main reason was the different economic orientation of these two large Syrian urban centers – although the strength of the indigenous economic elite may also have been a factor. For another kind of social segmentation, which we might term “imperial”, emerged in Damascus and other Ottoman urban centers. Here a few of the wealthiest,  For further details on the methodological concepts mentioned in this paragraph, which will be used throughout this chapter, see Tsur, Gvirim, 210–13 an English translation will soon be published as: Y. Tsur, The Jews in the Lands of Islam 1750–1830, Vol. I, the Ottoman Middle East, Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool (in press). This classifies the Jewish elite in the major commercial centres of the Ottoman Empire into three kinds of elite members whose power may derive from outside the local community: askeri Jews, port Jews and temple Jews – the last term refers to the rabbinical elite. By using the term “port Jews” on which there is a vivid debate concerning European and Atlantic ports, I wish to expand the debate to Muslim lands. On port Jews see: Dubin, The Port Jews of Habsurg Trieste; Sorkin, “The Port Jew,” 87–97; Cesarani and Romain, eds., Jews and Port Cities, to cite only some basic works. See also my discussion of port Jews in Aleppo and in other Ottoman cities in Gvirim, 134–8, 185–8, 197–9. 11  Harel, “The Status and Image of the Picciottos,” 171–86. 10

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most respected members of the Ladino or Arabic-speaking Jewish community could communicate in Ottoman Turkish, the written language of the Ottoman authorities: they served the empire’s ruling class (‘Askeryi) and their economic activities were not limited to the local market, but trans-regional and imperial in scope. These “askeri Jews” consequently functioned as mediators between the state authorities and the vast majority of the Jewish population; they usually provided the Jewish community with its leaders. Nurturing ties with each other, these askeri Jews formed a trans-­ communal network whose strength occasionally became apparent.12 This network was activated, for instance, in 1792 during the “inverted” blood libel affair in Basra. There were no Jewish Francos in that port city, but there were some askeri Jewish merchants, of whom the most prominent was Abdallah Faraj, resented by his enemies as the real ruler of the city. Faraj’s opponents claimed that he promoted the blood libel as a way to force out his Armenian economic rivals. Since these Armenian merchants were protected by the British vice consul in Basra, the affair became a struggle between Faraj and the British vice-consul during which the Ottoman network of askeri Jews was successfully activated.13 At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Damascus-based Farhi family was the most powerful Jewish family in Syria, acting as the economic agents and financiers of provincial governors in the area. They successfully eliminated competition for this role—Christian, and perhaps Jewish as well. The Farhis were active in trade, and in international trade as well, but their power base and main focus of interest were their connections with the internal askery imperial networks in which they were firmly integrated. The Farhis had come to the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the expulsion from Spain but probably only arrived in the Damascus region during the eighteenth century. They engaged in a particularly long and bitter rivalry with the Syrian Catholic Bahri family, forcing the Bahris to flee to Egypt, where the power relationship between Jews and Syrian Catholics (Melkites) 12  For example, members of this network together with other elite members of Jewish Istanbul assumed responsibility for the huge debts of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, but exerted authority there from afar. [Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century; Benayau, Rabbi Hayim Yosef David Azulai, Vol. 2, 379–413; Tsur, Gvirim, 99–104]. Similarly, Haim Farhi of Acre borrowed money from leading askeri Jews in Istanbul to intervene in the appointment of the local governor. [Philipp, Acre, 88]. 13  Abdullah, Merchants, 108–16; Yehuda, “The Jewish Blood Libel,” 129–67; Tsur, Gvirim, 142–50.

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was quite different.14 In Egypt during the 1770s, the local askeri Jews had been stripped of their traditional positions as toll lessees and their lucrative business passed into the hands of Melkites.15 This inter-communal rivalry was a prominent feature of the Damascus affair many decades later. The blood libel of 1840 occurred at an exceptional moment in the city’s history. Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman governor of Egypt, was in open revolt against the Sultan, having occupied the empire’s Syrian provinces since 1831. When the Egyptians came to Syria, they brought with them their Syrian Catholic sarafs and suppliers, and the head of the Bahri family, Hanna, replaced the head of the Farhi family, Raphael, as the favorite financial agent of the heads of the Egyptian forces.16 It was more generally a time of upheaval. After painful military defeats at the hands of European powers, Sultan Mahmut II (1808–1839) had attempted reforms. These encountered conservative resistance mainly from members of the old army, the Janissaries – a group with whom the askeri Jewish elite, including the Farhis, were strongly associated. At the time of the massacre of the Janissaries (1826), the sultan therefore made a point of killing several prominent askeri Jews, key figures in the network of Jewish Ottoman notables.17 That the Farhis succeeded in retaining their position as sarafs of the Ottoman governors in Damascus is remarkable. It was perhaps easier for Jewish notables to retain their status in the periphery than at the imperial center. Mahmud’s reforms gathered pace after the defeat of the Ottoman fleet at Navarino (1827). This led, in 1839, to the formulation of an overall reform policy called tanzimat, which essentially entailed adopting a list of Western military, political and economic norms. Meanwhile, Muhammad ‘Ali competed with Istanbul by distinguishing himself also as a westernizing reformer. The Ottoman pasha ruled Egypt as if he were able to read the new international map and understood that the key to power no longer lay just within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire, but rather in the ability of governors like him to lower the economic and cultural barriers separating them from the Christian West. Willing to open his territory  On the Farhis see Philipp, “The Farhi Family,” 37–52; Bouchain, Juden in Syrien.  Ben Zeev, “Ali Bey Alkabir vehayehudim bemitsrayim” [Ali Bey Alkabir and the Jews in Egypt], 237–49; Livingston, “Ali Bey al-Kabir and the Jews,” 221–8; Philipp, The Syrians in Egypt, 31–9; Tsur, Gvirim, 170–6. 16  Harel, Syrian Jewry, 119–20. 17  Tsur, Gvirim, 94–9. 14 15

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to the world market economy, he brought foreign experts and advisers to Egypt and sent delegations of young Muslims to Europe for training in military matters, medicine and the sciences.18 At the dawn of the conquest of Syria Egypt lacked a strong, prominent Jewish elite of askeri Jews because, as mentioned above, in the 1770s the local ruler at that time, ‘Ali Bey al-Kabir, replaced them with askeri Christians. Jews benefited from the new openness towards religious minorities, but unlike Christians they did not enjoy any special preference. The appointment of one Christian to the position of foreign minister, and of another as head of the ministry of the interior, was an unprecedented step. Religiously speaking, their essential inferiority as non-believers was incompatible with formal nomination as minister, especially when the task demanded authority over Muslims.19 Muhammad ‘Ali signaled thereby that his regime was in tune with the new European norms of civil and religious equality we associate with liberalism, and demonstrated his support for local Christians, that part of the population most closely identified with Christian Europe. But “Christian Europe” was not in fact a unity. Memories of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods had not yet faded, and the resentment and suspicion between France and the other European powers was an important factor in international politics. In the conflict between the Ottoman sultan and Muhammad ‘Ali, Britain supported the former and France the latter. This too had a profound impact on the fate of Damascus Jews.

The Blood Libel Affair Not long before Passover in 1840 a Capuchin monk, Father Thomas, and his Muslim servant, Ibrahim Amara, disappeared in Damascus.20 In Europe such disappearances could give rise to a sort of mass hysteria among Christians, whose religious toolbox included a ready-made explanation for the phenomenon: the blood libel. A similar hysteria now developed in the  For Muhammad ‘Ali and Egypt at the time, see notably, Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men.  On the formal religious status of Christian and Jews in the lands of Islam see: Astren, “Dhimma,” in: Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (EJIW), http://referenceworks. brillonline.com; Bosworth, “The Concept of Dhimma,” in: Braude and Lewis, eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, ii. 37–51; Friedmann, “Dhimma,” in: Encyclopedia of Islam, http://referenceworks.brillonline.com 20  The name is commonly thought to have been Amara, but it may have been Qamara, pronounced “Amara” – see Illustration no. 2 in Frankel, Damascus Affair, 21. 18 19

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Christian quarter of Damascus.21 Rather than defending members of religious minorities from “medieval” superstitions, the Comte Ulisse de Ratti-Menton who was the French consul in Damascus became convinced that this was a case of ritual murder. His obsessive accusations and active persecution of the Jews gave tailwind to the blood libel. The alliance between France and Muhammad ‘Ali ensured Ratti-­ Menton the cooperation of Sharif Pasha, the Egyptian governor of the city. Both men appear to have believed the Jews were guilty, and there were many other reasons for them to side with the Christians. They tried to get at what they thought to be the “truth” through a time-tested cultural-­legal method in the Ottoman world: torture. Torturing the prisoners enabled them to extract confessions that reinforced their case, and so the ritual murder narrative took shape. The first to “confess” to the murder was a Jewish barber, who testified that on Wednesday, February 5, 1840 he had been summoned to slaughter Father Thomas at the home of the Jewish notable David Harari, in the presence of seven other people. Harari’s servant confirmed this testimony. Torture was permitted and freely employed when interrogating the other alleged culprits. All but two broke down and “confessed”; four died in the process. One, Moses (Mushon) Abulafia, the son of a prominent rabbi then living in Palestine, converted to Islam and was to play a central role in “proving” the blood libel. The discovery of some bones that were identified as those of Father Thomas, and buried on March 2, intensified religious tensions. After the “funeral,” Sharif Pasha had to move hundreds of soldiers to the city to protect the Jewish quarter. On February 24 David Harari’s servant, Murad, also began to provide details about what happened to Ibrahim. The focus of the investigation now shifted from the fate of Father Thomas to that of his Muslim servant. Confessions extracted under torture revealed that Ibrahim too had been murdered by seven Jewish notables, including members of the Farhi and Picciotto families. Mushon Abulafia claimed that the murder had been directed by the chief rabbi of Damascus who also received a bottle containing the blood of Father Thomas. Rabbi Ya’acov Antebi (1787–?) was now arrested and heavily tortured, but held fast and did not confess anything. At this point the pace of the investigations stalled. In late April an order arrived from Cairo explicitly prohibiting further torture. This provoked  The following account is based on Frankel’s reconstruction, Ibid., 17–31.

21

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general outrage in Damascus. Once again, hundreds of soldiers were brought to the city to protect the Jewish quarter, preventing a full scale pogrom but failing to stop attacks on individual Jews and Jewish property. Synagogues were looted, and the looters reportedly dressed dogs in the prayer shawls and phylacteries they had stolen. Cemeteries were desecrated, gravestones smashed and bones taken out, Jews were apprehended in the street and forced into building a church, and other atrocities. The most serious incident occurred in Mount Lebanon: Druze and Christian rebels against the Egyptian regime captured a group of travelers, separated the eight Jews from the rest, and murdered them. The blood libel affair thus led to a deterioration in the relations between Jews and the surrounding society, Muslims as well as Christians. For there were in fact two murder trials, the first of a Christian and the second of a Muslim. While the first ended relatively quickly, and the Christian population eagerly awaited the execution of the murderers, the trial of the murder of the servant Ibrahim dragged on and took an unexpected course. In September 1840, all those accused in both trials were summarily released. This outcome was undoubtedly the result of Montefiore and Crémieux’s intercession. They had travelled to the East in early August to meet Muhammad ‘Ali, and after a few weeks in Cairo they obtained the release of the Jewish prisoners. Their success reflected the rising power of the West in the Ottoman East, and especially the power of Britain  – now directly menacing Muhammad ‘Ali. Yet this chronology does not explain why those accused in early February and convicted soon afterwards were not simply executed long before Western Jewry began to take action in late May. To answer this question, we must turn our attention to the local Jewish elites.

Weakness and Power in the Jewish Leadership How did these elites react to the attack on the Jewish community in Damascus? In 1840, the Jewish community was – perhaps surprisingly – formally led not by an askeri Jewish notable but by a rabbi, Ya’acov Antebi. Real economic and political power usually lay with notables rather than rabbis, so by bestowing official authority on rabbis the Ottomans had in fact weakened the Jewish leadership. This suited a regime that sought to strengthen its centralized power at the expense of autonomous Jewish agencies  – a process underway in Europe for several decades. Ottoman reformers sought to adapt this approach by turning some rabbis into a

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new type of askeri Jew, one who lacked a power base beyond the Jewish community and was therefore much more dependent on the authorities. Antebi’s memoirs of his role in the affair document the outcome.22 His detailed descriptions of his meetings with Sharif Pasha show that he tried hard to protect his flock, but was completely helpless in dealing with the Egyptian governor – who had him flogged already in their first meeting.23 Antebi then appealed to the Jewish notables for help. Two of them, Raphael Farhi and Isaac Picciotto, had in fact already attempted to reach the governor and the French consulate, in order, first, to stop the affair in its tracks and later to support the prisoners. But Raphael Farhi was himself arrested on February 14. He was not accused of participating in the murder, nor was he tortured, but he was detained for several months. Meanwhile, the wheels of “justice” continued to turn. Neither the rabbinical elite nor the askeri Jews in Damascus were able to stop them. In early March, the authorities came to arrest the seven Jews suspected of murdering the monk’s servant, Ibrahim. Six were now in hiding. Twenty-year-old Aslan Farhi was the first to be found. The son of Raphael Farhi and son-in-law of Rabbi Antebi, he broke under torture. Then, on March 23, fifty-year-old Meir Farhi was caught after his wife, under heavy torture, disclosed his hiding place with a Muslim laundry woman. Only Isaac Picciotto did not try to go into hiding and his arrest was a turning point in the affair. Isaac ben Ezra Picciotto was a youngish man of twenty-five, engaged in international trade; although not well-off, he had considerable backing as a member of the Picciotto clan. He had been named early in the investigation as someone who tried to buy the silence of Shlomo the barber, the first Jewish witness to break under torture. Therefore, Picciotto had good reason to disappear, yet he felt safe as an Austrian citizen and personal 22  For the limited information pertaining to reform of the rabbinate in the 1830s, we only really have information about Istanbul (see Kennedy, Mossad hahakham bashi vehukat hahakham Chane beIstanbul bitemurot hameah ha-19 (1835–1914) [The institution of the “Haham Bashi” Constitution in Istanbul in light of Changes in nineteenth Century (1835–1914)], 55–80; I see Rabbi Antebi’s memoirs and his role in the affair as indirect evidence and interpret them accordingly (cf. Harel, Syrian Jewry, 58–9). There are two known editions of the memoirs: one by A. Alhalil, ‘te’uda mekorit vehashuva al alilat hadam bedamesek’ [An original and important document on the blood libel in Damascus], Mizrah uMa’arav, 3 (1928/29): 34–49 (henceforth: Alhalil edition, used here throughout); the second appears in Rabbi Haim Kapusi’s book, Be’Or HaHayim (Jerusalem: Defus EretsYisrael, 1929), 199–208, (henceforth: Kapusi edition). 23  Antebi (Alhalil edition), 36–7.

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friend of his country’s vice-consul, Caspar Giovanni Merlato. The Picciottos had represented Austria in Aleppo since 1784: Isaac’s father had served as Austrian consul from 1817 until 1822, when the position passed to his uncle, Elias (Eliahu). Various Picciottos also represented the Netherlands, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Prussia, Russia and Sweden.24 To begin with, the Picciotto case followed the usual pattern, and it seemed inevitable that a confession extracted under torture would lead to a death sentence. However, on March 8, there came a radical turnaround. Merlato withdrew permission for Ratti-Menton’s arrest of his protégé, and took steps to return Picciotto to Austrian jurisdiction. Interrogated at the Austrian consulate, Picciotto provided an alibi for the evening of the “murder”, which was confirmed by a Christian friend. Thereafter, Picciotto remained in detention at Merlato’s residence. The vice consul consistently accompanied him whenever he was brought to the governor’s court for interrogation.25 Picciotto’s response to interrogation was completely different from that of the other defendants. He decided that attack was the best defense and – as Frankel puts it – told the truth in an environment where there had been nothing but lies. Emphasizing that witnesses were coached under torture for their appearance in the diwan (governor’s court), he did not blame them for their confessions. One should forgive Aslan Farhi, he said: “I would have done the same.” He pointed the finger at those fomenting the blood libel – “some people intend to bring about the total destruction of the Jewish nation.” Above all, he demanded proper procedures. For instance, he refused to accept Sharif Pasha’s order that Bahri should translate his statements from Arabic to Turkish for the preparation of the trial protocol. Bahri gave way. Nor did Picciotto hesitate to attack Ratti-Menton as a “murderer.” He insisted throughout that the trial could only be conducted in front of the highest Austrian authorities.26 Picciotto’s behavior during the interrogations was possible because he enjoyed foreign legal protection. Yet his personality was also a factor. We have no information about his education and his life prior to the affair: where he studied or whether he visited Europe. But his family background and involvement in international trade surely brought him into relatively close contact with European culture and its representatives. It is no  Frankel, Damascus Affair, 88–90.  Ibid., 89. 26  Ibid., 94. 24 25

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coincidence that he was a personal friend of Merlato. The legal protection he enjoyed had a more than utilitarian value, surely he was directly or indirectly influenced by new, European ideas about legal process, humanitarian values and even Jewish rights. He knew that torture, which was in fact consistent with Ottoman judicial norms in serious criminal cases, was no longer acceptable in the Western legal order, and used this weakness  – in Western eyes  – of the trial as a tool to totally refute its legitimacy. Lynn Hunt has highlighted the place of debates about torture at the heart of the eighteenth-century European origins of “human rights.”27 Partly this reflected the almost sacred place allotted to the human body, its integrity and health in a society influenced by humanism and the enlightenment. Partly it was a product of the association of torture with the Inquisition, which symbolized in liberal eyes perhaps the most disgraceful practice of the Catholic Church as an obstacle to progress. It was probably his contact with Western culture and its representatives that enabled Picciotto to target this weakness and use it as leverage for the benefit of the tortured. This understanding of Ottoman culture, reinforced by the new international power relations already apparent in Damascus, perhaps gave Isaac Picciotto the strength of mind he surely needed to take such an aggressive stance under interrogation. His resistance should not be taken for granted, and consular protection alone cannot explain his stand and behavior. From the new perspective he introduced to the trial, the rules of the local culture no longer appeared necessarily normative, but were rather open to criticism. Moreover, if they did not meet the criteria, they were unacceptable, anomalous. Thanks to Picciotto the burden of responsibility in the affair now shifted. The central question was no longer the disappearance of Father Thomas and his servant Ibrahim, but rather whether the trial that allegedly exposed the ritual murder case had been properly conducted. In European terms, the Ottoman judicial process and its underlying premise represented “anomalies” to which Ratti-Menton’s intensive involvement now linked the French consul. Norms and concepts were supposed to flow from the West to the East, not the other way around. Slowly, Ratti-Menton and his aides were forced onto the defensive, and with them Cochelet, Ratti-Menton’s superior in Alexandria.  Hunt, Inventing Human Rights.

27

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The Network of the Port Jews Goes into Action The leadership of the Jewish community in Damascus had managed its affairs effectively for generations without giving rise to comparable crises. But the Egyptian occupation unsettled their position and it became clear that routine efforts at the local level needed to be supplemented by an appeal for external support. In such circumstances it was usual to use the contacts with powerful Jewish notables in other parts of the Ottoman Empire.28 Letters sent to two Jewish personalities in Istanbul, Cohen and Conorti, dated February 21 – a week after Raphael Farhi’s arrest – suggest that this network was activated almost immediately, and a delegation sent to Istanbul from Jerusalem as the result of the intervention of the converted Mouchon Aboualafia’s father, now living in the Holy City, reinforce this impression.29 But Damascus under Sharif Pasha was no longer a typical Ottoman eyalet (governorate), and the power of the Jewish notables in Istanbul was no longer what it had been before the massacre of the Janissaries. Thus the chances of success were slim. Meanwhile, Sharif Pasha forbade members of the Jewish community to send letters about what had happened to them.30 According to Rabbi Antebi, the possibility of contacting outsiders depended on the willingness of a Jew from Damascus, disguised as a Muslim, to smuggle letters to Antebi’s uncle in Aleppo. But the uncle too was a rabbi, and the Antebis’ power was just as limited in Aleppo as it was in Damascus, so the uncle turned to: “the noble notable, the exalted official and commander from the [Piccioto] dynasty, Senior Eliyahu de Picciotto, may God preserve him and strengthen him [and] may his memory be blessed, who held several appointments on behalf of the Franco communities [European states], he hurried to jump in and announce our sorrow to the cities of Europe, full of thrill .…”31 While the networks upon which both Rabbis and askeri Jews relied in the Ottoman world were now weak or paralyzed, this Picciotto was better placed to raise the alarm. He was not only a port Jew but also the diplomatic representative of a number of European states. To the powerless Antebi, this powerful port Jew was the first savior of sorts, serving as intermediary to convey news of the plight of the Jewish community in Damascus to the “cities of Europe”.  Tsur, Gvirim, 95.  Frankel, Damascus Affair, 79, 156. 30  Antebi, Kapusi edition, 207. 31  Ibid, Ibid. 28 29

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Members of the Picciotto family and other quasi-European Jewish merchants began to spread the news, and it is likely that one destinee was Jacque Altaras, head of the Consistoire Israélite (practically the Jewish community) in Marseilles and descended from the Altaras family of port Jews of Aleppo. Jacque Altaras may even had played a role in recruiting Adolphe Crémieux for the Orient mission, as during his journey to the East, Crémieux corresponded with him. Better informed about the progress of the affair than the editor of Les Archives Israélites, Altaras chose (or was asked) to send an excerpt from his correspondence to be published in the newly founded Jewish journal.32 Altaras could even make his appeal on ethnic Sephardi grounds: Both men were Sephardim from the south of France, and though their family backgrounds differed, their ties might had deepened through their involvement with the Consistoire Israélite of Marseilles and Crémieux’s native Nimes.33 Tracing the way news of the affair reached James de Rothschild in France highlights the spread of the news through another chain, linking Levantine port Jews and Ashkenazi bankers and philanthropists. A Jewish merchant from Beirut, Yitzhak Alfandari, had connections to Hirsch Lehren of Amsterdam, the Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox patron of Torah scholars and the poor in the Holy Land. Alfandari informed Lehren about the affair and its consequences and Lehren, who used to transfer his alms through Alfandari, was the first to inform Rothschild of the blood libel.34 But the most striking activity in this context is the role played by some Jewish notables in Egypt, which seems to be an emerging center of Jewish networking in the region. Under Muhammad ‘Ali, Egypt was a country of immigration. Alongside Jewish refugees from the Greek War of Independence, Jewish immigration from Italy, especially from Livorno, resumed. For centuries this kind of migration had underpinned the quasi-­ European sector in Levantine and North African communities.35 Now, however, Italian immigrants rushed even less than before to integrate into local society and become Latin-Arab cultural hybrids. The rise of Western power made it important that they retain their European pedigree. But in  33 Les Archives Israélites, Vol. 1 (1840), 548 (letter from Alexandria, 1/9/1840).  On Altaras, see Szajkowski, “Naye materyaln vegn Altrasn un zayn kolonizir plan” [New materials on Altras and his colonization plan], 45–70; on Crémieux’s background, see Posener, Crémieux, vol. 1, 7–64. 34  Frankel, Damascus Affair, 67. 35  Milano, Storia degli ebrei Italiani nel Levante; Schwarzfuchs, “La ‘nazione ebrea’ livornaise au Levant,” 707–24. 32 33

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this respect Alexandria differed from Cairo where the remnants of the old Jewish community of Ottoman Egypt remained predominant.36 Frankel emphasizes that Jews based in Alexandria took the lead in Egyptian efforts on behalf of the Jewish community in Damascus. Two militants, Morpurgo and Valensino, surely had Italian roots. The names of two others, Isaac Luria and Ventura, make it harder to determine their exact ethnic identity. We cannot determine the cultural background of Morporgo, Valensino or Ventura, but we know that Luria could communicate in Ottoman Turkish.37 Lehren’s Ashkenazi records reveal that Luria also played a role in transferring funds from Europe to the Holy Land as the connecting link between Jacob Minervi in Trieste and Yitzhak Alfandari in Beirut.38 Thus he clearly belonged to the quasi-European sector. The leaders of Alexandria’s Jewish community met with Muhammad ‘Ali several times. On one such occasion, he told them that his son, Ibrahim Pasha, the commander of the Egyptian forces in Syria, had warned that pardoning the Jews would provoke a rebellion in Syria and urging his father not “to embarrass himself for Jewish murderers.”39 The main step taken by the community leaders was to submit the following petition to Muhammad ‘Ali: Your Highness, the people of Israel has neither its own king nor its own state; its glory is shrouded in the annals of antiquity … The Jews of Damascus are your children, because God confided them to your government … The name of Muhammad ‘Ali is celebrated throughout the world, because … [he upholds both] glory and … justice … The Jewish people has been unfortunate, it is true, but it withstood adversity with its character intact … Your Highness, we do not demand pity for our coreligionists, we demand justice … Order them [be] brought before you. Let them be heard, and if guilty, punished them. But if they are innocent, let their innocence be proclaimed. The issue involves an ancient religion which people seek to destroy. God, it seems, is offering you a new path to glory  – that is liberating an oppressed people.40 36  A beautiful description of this is found in the different accounts of the two communities by the Jewish traveller called Binyamin II.  See Benjamin II, Cinq années de voyage en Orient, 102–6. 37  Frankel, Damascus Affair, 182. 38  Kargila, Hayishuv hayehudi beerets yisrael bitekufat hakibush hamitsri (1831–1840), [The Jewish Community in the Land of Israel at the Time of the Egyptian Occupation (1831–1840)], 104. 39  Frankel, Damascus Affair, 165. 40  Abridged citation from ibid.

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Like Picciotto, the Jews of Alexandria were not especially concerned with disproving the blood libel itself. They too understood that the legal procedures adopted by the authorities were the weak point in the trial – although they did not go so far as to state explicitly that the Ottoman Egyptian authorities should fall into line with Western liberal norms regarding torture. The blood libel had no hold in the Muslim imagination and consequently did not shape the authorities’ response. Justice, on the other hand, was promised to the “people of the book” (ahl al-kitab) within the framework of the dhimma arrangement on which their lives in Muslim lands were based.41 In other words, this principle was familiar to the authorities, and the authors of the letter explicitly hint at the obligation it entails. Due to the capitulations, the authorities also understood foreign legal procedures. From both perspectives, it made sense to focus on the correctness of the judicial procedure. By early April, Ratti-Menton was coming under pressure. He began compiling the trial protocols and translating them into French as evidence of compliance with European norms. He tried to defend himself against the accusation that he had not adhered to rules governing the treatment of European protégées, and that he had encouraged torture. He undertook to send these protocols to Paris and asked the French Prime Minister, Adolphe Thiers, for a commission of inquiry to examine his conduct and – so he hoped – exonerate him.42 On April 17, in his only letter to Ratti-­ Menton, Thiers instructed him to calm the situation and make sure the trial did not become a pretext for resuming the attacks, since fanaticism was no reason to blame an entire people. In short Thiers did not exclude the possibility of ritual murder, but he did not assume that this practice was prevalent among all Jews and  – unlike Ratti-Menton  – treated the affair in Damascus as an isolated incident. News of the French commission of inquiry prompted the Austrian consul Laurin to urge Jewish activists in Alexandria to organize a parallel initiative. Luria and Ventura were chosen as members of this investigative mission, and Luria even met with Muhammad ‘Ali who granted him permission to leave for Damascus  – though without official authority. Muhammad ‘Ali reportedly told Luria that the affair was a conflict between Jews and Christians; France had already sent someone to investigate and

 See the sources mentioned in note 19 supra.  Frankel, Damascus Affair, 151–3.

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others would soon follow. He did not want anything to do with the matter.43 We know little about this Levantine Jewish mission. Frankel assumes that it gathered a list of individuals willing to provide alibis for the defendants, or willing to make complaints against Ratti-Menton. The upshot was that the French consul and his allies now had to defend themselves not just in Europe and Alexandria, but also in the local judicial arena. They accused Luria of bribing a Muslim witness in order to confirm the alibi of Joseph Farhi, a defendant who had eluded arrest. Bribery of this kind was established practice among Christian and Jewish notables in Damascus, but had proved ineffective in this case. However, the steps taken by the quasi-European notables from Alexandria who enjoyed the backing of the Austrian consul posed a real threat for the French consul and his camp.44 In this sense, the small Jewish delegation from Egypt marked a new phase in the defense efforts of the Jews of the region against the blood libel. Its members were neither askeri Jews nor Rabbis (temple Jews), but port Jews able to mediate between the local Arabic and Ottoman-Turkish language arena and the Western powers and their representatives in the Levant, who spoke European languages. Members of the Levantine network of port Jews had relayed some of the initial calls for help to the other side of the Mediterranean, and were behind initiatives which required organization, coordination and competence, like the petition to Muhammad ‘Ali and the Egyptian Jewish delegation to Damascus. The network seems to have been less ethnically exclusive than the Western Sephardi diaspora had been. But Livorno remained pivotal, even as social weight of port Jews from other communities increased. In 1840, the network of port Jews enjoyed greater freedom of action than those of the askeri Jews and the Rabbis thanks to their involvement in international trade and the protection extended to them by European consuls representing imperial interests. Yet its strength depended on those granting it protection. Left to his own devices, Picciotto would probably not have succeeded in halting the trial. In this context the support of the Austrian diplomatic apparatus proved critical. We do not know why the Austrian vice-consul Merlato – who had initially believed the blood libel – changed his mind. But it is plausible to assume that the many years the Picciottos had served the Austrian empire contributed to his rapid change  Ibid., 175.  Ibid., 176–83.

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of heart. Crucially, Merlato’s superior in Alexandria was Consul-General Anton Laurin – a man who stood by the Jews all the way. The two men acted in complete coordination. They transformed Isaac Picciotto’s detention in early March 1840 into an effective weapon that halted the trial and became an anchor for the efforts to rescue those already condemned to death. It was Laurin who, in April 1840, convinced Muhammad ‘Ali to prohibit further use of torture in the case, and it was Laurin who extended the Jewish campaign to Europe.45 He also stood behind the delegation of Jewish notables from Alexandria. This delegation, which left for Damascus in July, shortly before the arrival of Montefiore and Crémieux, gave further impetus to the new direction given to the affair by Isaac Picciotto’s conduct in March. Until then, only the local Christian population and its notables had been able to harness the rising power of the West in the region. Now the Jews of the quasi-European sector showed they too knew the ropes. Some in Damascus even though Luria himself was a European consul.46 Ultimately, however, neither the network of port Jews nor that of Austrian diplomats brought the affair to an end. Those accused of murder were not executed, but remained in prison or in hiding. The resolution only came in the next stage of the affair, with the arrival of Montefiore and Crémieux in August.

Liberalism and the Jewish Levant in the New Age of Empire The leaders of Western Jewry were not the first to use liberalism as a strategy for overturning the Damascus blood libel. This honor goes to a local protagonist, Isaac Picciotto and to the Austrian consular staff that supported him. But the story, as told from Damascus, highlights the fact that in the age of imperialism liberalism appeared here in a significantly different guise than in Europe. The peculiar relationship between liberalism and Jewish rights now emerging in Europe  – or rather the opposition between progress and the “medieval” beliefs about Jews that were mobilized to justify their persecution – was not relevant in a context where the blood libel too was a European import from the Christian West.  Cf. Antebi’s discourse on the way news on the affair spread to Europe, supra.  Frankel, Damascus Affair, 183.

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Instead, the local protagonists emphasized aspects of European liberalism that were most relevant to the political and religious context of the Ottoman world, namely the rejection of torture and the emphasis on due legal process as a bulwark against despotism. With the help of his Austrian supporters, Picciotto thus halted the progress of the trial which, in the Ottoman court, had been moving towards the defendants’ execution. Yet, Picciotto’s “local” strategy emanated from the European scene, and not from the Ottoman one, reflecting the global balance of power and its implications for the Jewish world. This global balance of power has also shaped the historiography of the affair, marginalizing those who were the first to change the course of the trial, and placing European Jews center-stage. Thus the Jews of Damascus and everything connected to them were pushed to the historiographic periphery  – a trend which, by adding few facts and certain assumptions to Jonathan Frankel’s thick description and multiply discoveries, can be now modified. This is, for example, the case of the roots of Montefiore and Crémieux’s involvement in the Damascus affair. Their intervention is usually presented as a complete novelty, yet it merits further attention. Through their ethnic and/or personal connection to the Western Sephardi diaspora they had closer ties to this Levantine world than historians have appreciated. This connection is clearly documented in the case of Crémieux and Altaras, and may be assumed in the case of Montefiore and Picciotto, both of whom belonged to families well-established in the Western Sephardi diaspora. This network no longer operated as a commercial diaspora with functioning centers in Western Europe and branches all over the world, but that does not mean that its traditions, ties and channels had completely vanished so. Where circumstances were favorable, it could experience a kind of revival. This seems to be the case with the growing Jewish community in Alexandria c.1840. Egypt of Muhammad ‘Ali attracted Jewish immigrants from declining Livorno and from other places in Europe and the Ottoman Empire afflicted by manmade and natural disasters. Thus a stable Italian Jewish nucleus of port Jews emerged in Alexandria, that was very active in the Damascus affair. It did not necessarily follow the exact tradition of the Western Sephardic diaspora and did not unite and revive all its Mediterranean features, but it was capable of transforming itself into a new center of port Jews, that was present and reacted rather successfully to the anti-Jewish upsurge and the plight of the Damascus Jews.

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The Levantine Jewish story of the blood libel in Damascus extends geographically to Aleppo in one direction and to Alexandria and Cairo in the other. On the way it intersects with different social milieu, sectors, classes and networks. Here I have focused mainly on one of these groups, the Levantine network of port Jews, that due to the changing international balance of power was the most active in the Damascus affair. It might be argued that the 1840 crisis briefly revived a certain branch of the Western Sephardic diaspora, but that it returned to its grave when the crisis was over. Alternatively, this early modern commercial diaspora, its traditions, patterns and connections were more powerful than one might expect of a ghost.

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Green, Abigail. 2010. Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press. Harel, Yaron. 1996/97. The Status and Image of the Picciottos in the Eyes of the French Colony in Aleppo, 1784–1850 (Heb.). Michael 14: 171–186. ———. 2010. Syrian Jewry in Transition 1840–1880. Oxford/Portland: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Hofman, Yitzhak. 1975. The Administration of Syria and Palestine under Egyptian Rule (1831–1840). In Studies on Palestine During the Ottoman Period, ed. Moshe Maoz, 311–333. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. Hurt, Lynn. 2015. Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights. In Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights, ed. P.  Slotte and M.  Halme-Tuomisaari. I-Ii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inalcik, Halil, and Quataert Donald, eds. 1994. An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kagen, Richard L., and Philip D.  Morgan, eds. 2009. Atlantic Diaspora: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kaplan, Yosef. 2000. An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Kapusi Rabbi Haim. 1929. BeOr HaHayim. Jerusalem: Defus Erets Yisrael. Kargila, Zvi. 1989/90. The Jewish Community in the Land of Israel at the Time of the Egyptian Occupation (1831–1840) [Hayishuv hayehudi beerets yisrael bitekufat hakibush hamitsri (1831–1840)]. Tel Aviv: Hevra veKalkalah. Karmi, Ilan. 1996. The Jewish Community of Istanbul in the Nineteenth Century: Social, Legal and Administrative Transformations. Istanbul. Kennedy, Mazal. 1985. Mossad haHakham Bashi veHukat haHakham Chane beIstanbul beTmurot vaMeaa ha-19 (1835–1914) [The institution of the “Haham Bashi” Constitution in Istanbul in Light of Changes in nineteenth Century (1835–1914)]. M.A thesis, University of Haifa, (Heb.). Landau, Jacob M. 1961. Ritual Murder Accusations and Persecutions of Jews in 19th Century Egypt (Heb.). Sefunot 5: 415–460. Landau, Jacob M., and Moshe Ma’oz. 1980/81. Jews and Non-Jews in Egypt and Syria in the Nineteenth Century (Heb.). Pe’amim 9: 4–13. Lewis, Bernard. 2014. The Jews of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Livingston, John W. 1971. Ali Bey al-Kabir and the Jews. Middle Eastern Studies 7: 221–228. Lutzki, Alexander. 1940/41. The ‘Francos’ in Aleppo and the Impact of the Capitulations on its Jewish Residents (Heb.). Zion 6: 46–79. Ma’oz, Moshe. 1983/84. Background of the Damascus Affair: Introduction and Comments (Heb.). Pe’amim 20: 29–36. Marcus, Abraham. 1989. The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Masters, Bruce. 1988. The Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism and the Islamic Economy in Aleppo, 1600–1750. New York/ London: New York University Press. ———. 2001. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milano, Attilio. 1949. Storia degli ebrei Italiani nel Levante. Florence: Einaudi. Monaco, Chris S. 2009. Port Jews or a People of the Diaspora? A Critique of the Port Jew Concept. Jewish Social Studies 15 (2): 137–166. Nahon, Gerard, ed. 1993. Metropoles et peripheries sefarades d’Occident: Kairouan, Amsterdam, Bayonne, Bordeaux, Jerusalem. Paris: Editions du Cerf. Philipp, Thomas. 1984. The Farhi Family and the Changing Position of the Jews in Syria, 1750–1860. Middle Eastern Studies 20 (4): 37–52. ———. 1985. The Syrians in Egypt, 1725–1975. Stuttgart: F. Steiner. ———, ed. 1992. The Syrian Land in the 18th and 19th Century. Stuttgart: F. Steiner. ———. 2001. Acre: The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian City, 1730–1831. New York: Columbia University Press. Pozner, Solomon-Vladimirovich. 1933. Adolph Cremieux, 1796–1880. Paris: F. Alcan. [French]. ———. 1940. Adolphe Cremieux, 1796–1880: A Biography. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. Rozen, Minna. Mediterranean Routes: The Sephardic Jewish Diaspora in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries [Binetivey hayam hatikhon: hapezurah hayehudit-sefaradit bameot ha-16–18]. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1993. [Heb.]. Schwarzfuchs, Simon. 1984. La ‘nazione ebrea’ livornaise au Levant. La Rassegna mensile di Israel 50: 707–724. Shaw, Stanford J. 1976. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sheikovsky, J. 1943. Neue Materialen wegen Altrasan un sein Colonizer Plan. YIVO Blaetter 21: 45–70. Sorkin, David. 1999. The Port Jew: Notes towards a Social Type. Journal of Jewish Studies 50 (1): 87–97. Studnicki-Gizbert, Daviken. 2003. La ‘nation’ Portugaise: Réseaux marchands dans l’espace atlantique à l’époque modern. Annales: Histoire, Sciences sociales 58 (3): 627–648. Toaff, Renzo. 1990. La Nazione Ebrea a Livorno e a Pisa, 1591–1700. Florence: Olschki. Trivellato, Francesca. 2006. The Port Jews of Livorno and their Global Networks of Trade in the Early Modern Period. In Jews and Port Cities, 1590–1990: Commerce, Community and Cosmopolitanism, ed. David Cesarini and Gemma Romain, 31–48. London: Vallentine Mitchell.

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———. 2009. The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tsur, Yaron. 2011. Dating the Demise of the Western-Sephardi Jewish Diaspora: The Mediterranean Aspect. In Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, ed. Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J.  Schroeter, 93–104. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2016. Gvirim veYehudim Aherim baMizrah HaTikhon haAutumani 1750–1830 (Notables and Other Jews in the Ottoman Middle East, 1750–1830). Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik. Yehuda, Zvi. 2017. The Jewish Blood Libel against Christians in Basra (1791). In The New Babylonian Diaspora, ed. Zvi Yehuda, 129–196. Leiden: Brill.

CHAPTER 12

A Jewish “Liberal” in Istanbul: Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Young Turks and the Zionist Press Network, 1908–1911 Ozan Ozavci

In the aftermath of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, with the lifting of the censorship and amidst the boom of Istanbul papers, a French language journal called Le Jeune Turc (LJT) began publication in the Ottoman imperial capital. Funded by the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) which had in view the creation of a Jewish colony in Ottoman Palestine,1 LJT was one of several organs of the Zionist press network that had been created in the Ottoman Empire at the time. What makes LJT a matter of curiosity is the fact that the journal both supported and encouraged the nationalist policies of the Young Turks’ Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), 1  The two short studies on the journal are; Orhan Koloğlu, “Celal Nuri’nin Jeune Turc Gazetesi ve Siyonist Bağı” (Celal Nuri’s Newspaper Jeune Turc and its Zionist Links), Toplumsal Tarih, (Dec., 1992), 46–48; Gershon Lewental, ‘Le Jeune Turc,’ in Stillman, ed., Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, 220–1.

O. Ozavci (*) History of International Relations, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_12

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whose key figures assumed ministerial positions after the summer of 1909. The journal’s editor-in-chief Celal Nuri (1881–1938), and its most prominent contributors such as Ahmet Aghayeff (Ağaoğlu) (1868–1939) and Moiz Cohen (Munis Tekin Alp) (1883–1961) were members or sympathisers of the committee or renowned pro-CUP advocates of Turkish nationalism. Aghayeff, in particular, defended an Ottoman community of millets—although still under Turkish domination—with equal rights and privileges, while at the same time expounding a communitarian and nationalist defence of liberalism in the imperial context. The LJT question that I would like to consider here is how a journal could be an organ of the Zionists and the nationalist pro-CUP men at one and the same time. How did this marriage come into existence? What fruit did it bear in its early years? How did Zionist ideology and the nationalist liberalism of such figures as Aghayeff tally with each other? And what lessons can we derive from the LJT experience for the purposes of this volume?2 I will seek to answer these questions with particular reference to the foundation and early years of the journal and emphasis on the Istanbul sojourn of one of the initiators of the Zionist press network: Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940). A self-defined liberal, struggling at the time for the communal rights of the Jews in the Russian Empire, Jabotinsky was a young member of the Russian branch of the WZO.  His ideology and methods for penetrating into the Ottoman press shine much light upon the Zionist/Turkish nationalist nexus and provide us with new insights into various types of nationalist liberalism in the late Russian and Ottoman empires, and their formation.3 The common denominators between the ideas and ideals of the young Russian writer and his (Ottoman) Turkish associates also reveal the lesser-known synergies between imperialism, liberalism and nationalism in the late Ottoman world and beyond.

2  Although there is already substantial literature on the Zionist activity in the late Ottoman Empire, no in-depth study has been made to this date specifically on LJT, which was the principal organ of the Zionists in Istanbul in the Second Constitutional era. On the history of Zionism in the Ottoman Empire, see, Benbassa, “Zionism in the Ottoman Empire,” 127–40; Campos, Ottoman Brothers, especially 201–18; Ben-Bassat & Ginio eds., Late Ottoman Palestine; Öke, “The Ottoman Empire, Zionism, and the Question of Palestine,” ̇ 329–41; Öke, Osmanlı Imparatorluğ u, Siyonizm ve Filistin Sorunu (1880–1914); Cohen, Becoming Ottomans, Chapter 4. 3  Campos, Ottoman Brothers, especially chapter 6.

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The Jabotinsky Plan Jabotinsky was dispatched by the Saint Petersburg journal Rassvyet (The Dawn) to Istanbul in 1908 to make observations in the empire after the July Revolution, which had brought a relatively more liberal atmosphere following the decades-long authoritarian regime of Sultan Abdulhamid II. In autumn 1908, several Ottoman ministers received the young journalist and he met the leading figures of the Young Turks, including Mehmed Cavid Bey and Enver Pasha, who were looking then to procure international support to their revolutionary cause. Jabotinsky writes in his memoirs that the Ottoman authorities univocally told him that the empire was now “a paradise” where there was no longer any difference between a Turk, a Greek, and an Armenian; they were “all Ottomans: one nation, one language.”4 When the issue of Jewish immigration to the empire came up, they would say: “Why not? We shall be very glad if they would be scattered in every corner of the country…and especially if accommodated in Macedonia, as well as if they commit themselves to the Ottoman language.”5 Upon his return to Russia at the end of 1908, Jabotinsky published a series of articles under the title “New Turkey and Our Perspective,” in which he shared his observations from the Ottoman Empire with his Russian audience. Jabotinsky’s two principle considerations in this series of articles formed the ideological basis [of the foundations] of Zionist activity in the empire in the following years: (i) supporting the ruling Turkish element, and (ii) helping maintain good relations between the Sephardi Jews and the Turks. These also laid the seeds of a future alliance with nationalist liberals in Istanbul. Although in his first interviews with the Young Turk leaders Jabotinsky heard favourable statements toward Zionism, by the end of his trip he had become convinced that the Ottoman Turks were not sympathetic to Jewish settlement in Palestine because of “their scant knowledge of the movement” and their fear of a potential Jewish separation.6 In point of fact, the Young Turk leadership had chosen to adopt a very cautious

4  Jabotinsky, Povest’ Moih Dnej, Jerusalem: Biblioteka-Aliya, 1985, accessed February 10, 2017, http://readli.net/chitat-online/?b=51283&pg=28, 26. 5  Ibid. 6  V. Jabotinsky, “Novaya Turciya i Nashy Perspektivy” (New Turkey and Our Prospects), Rassvyet, 18 January, 1909.

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attitude toward the Zionists from the start, so as not to let Palestine share the bitter fate of Lebanon and Macedonia. Jabotinsky was optimistic nevertheless: “[o]nce Turkey calms down [after the revolutionary chaos], the Young Turks will understand the difference between nationalism and separatism, which we should make very clear.” He wrote that the Turkish leadership were aware that “[the Turks] are outnumbered [among other millets]” and they were neither culturally nor economically superior to the rest. The new governance was not giving the Turks as much power as the old one had done. Therefore, it was clinging to the hope that other nations would join the new culture by their free own will, under an Ottoman identity through which the Turkish language would dominate. The only thing that could support the hopes of the Turks, he ventured, was the fact that the population was very mixed, except for the Arab [region] of the empire, of which Palestine was a part. In the eyes of Jabotinsky, this could be interpreted as an opportunity for the Zionists. The settlement of a Jewish population in the Arab region could be beneficial for the Turkish leadership then to undermine an Arab demographic domination by diluting its population there.7 According to Jabotinsky, given this commonality of Turkish and Zionist objective, winning the support of the Sephardi Jews that formed the majority of the Ottoman Jewry was vital for the Zionists. He believed that this was merely “a question of energy and tact,” firstly because Ottoman Jews were hardly assimilated in terms of absorbing the Turkish language and culture, although their political tendencies were similar. It was highly unlikely that this would change in the near future, especially given that a “battle of nationalities” in the Ottoman Empire was likely to break out, in which the Turks would fail to attract the rest of the other millets in the empire by their own volition. This would draw the Jews closer together.8 Secondly, Sephardi Jews were truly a tabula rasa in terms of ideology and politics, and an ideal material for propaganda. Third, concepts like “nation” and “Zionism” were well received by them. Their only worry about Zionism was that they feared that the Basel Program of 1897 was calling for the division of Turkey. “Once this belief is broken they become fine.”9 And fourthly, even though Sephardi Jews were not interested in 7  V. Jabotinsky, “Novaya Turciya i Nashy Perspektivy” (New Turkey and Our Prospects), Rassvyet, 25 January, 1909. 8  Ibid. 9  Ibid.

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emigration, Jewish colonisation in Palestine could be politically beneficial to them. They were feeling uncertain about their future, and Zionism was offering a valuable option.10 Jabotinsky maintained that Sephardi Jews carried great importance in terms of political and diplomatic support for the Zionist cause. “Out of all Turkish nations they are the only ones who have total trust of the Turks, both “young” and “old,” since they have always stayed away from any fights.” The only time they were actively involved in politics was the 1908 revolution, which was a big bonus for Jews in Young Turk eyes. “And now the Turks will need the Jews to fight other nations.” This had been proven lately by parliamentary elections when the Turks were trying to decrease the number of representatives of other nations, but not the Jews. “[I]n order for the Sephardi Jews to really help us,” Jabotinsky added, “we need … the maintenance of the good relationship between the Turks and Sephardi Jews. The latter should pursue a distinctive national politics, very different from that of other nations.” It should not be against, but with the Turks, defending their political hegemony and bolstering their dominance. “National politics of Sephardi Jews should have a clearly defined Turcophilic character.”11 While in Istanbul, Jabotinsky had also met the director of the Zionist liaison, Victor Jacobson.12 Jacobson had arrived in the imperial capital in August 1908 to establish the first Zionist office there.13 Operating under the aegis of the Anglo-Levantine Banking Co.,14 the objective of the office was to obtain both governmental and widespread support for Zionism in the Ottoman capital and major Jewish towns of the empire.15 Neither Theodore Herzl’s five visits to Istanbul between 1897 and 1902, nor those of his successor David Wolffsohn (1856–1916), in 1907, had garnered support for the Jewish settlement in Palestine.16 But Jacobson believed that the Young Turk revolution could possibly be a new opportunity for the movement. 10  V. Jabotinsky, “Novaya Turciya i Nashy Perspektivy” (New Turkey and Our Prospects), Rassvyet, 22 February, 1909. 11  V. Jabotinsky, “Novaya Turciya i Nashy Perspektivy” (New Turkey and Our Prospects), Rassvyet, 8 March, 1909. 12  Jabotinsky, Moih Dnej, 36. 13  Der Matossian, Shattering Dreams, 84. 14  Esther Benbassa,“Zionism in the Ottoman Empire,” 127. 15  Ibid., 128. Campos, Ottoman Brothers, 205. 16  Friedman, Turkey, Germany and Zionism, Chapter 8.

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As the “man on the ground,” he was instructed to act reservedly and to merely gather “information and establish contact with competent Turkish personalities.”17 He then held meetings with the leaders of Jewish communities, including Rabbi Naim Hahum, as well as with Emmanuel Carasso, Nissim Mazliah, and Nissim Russo, all Ottoman Jews and CUP deputies.18 Among these, only Rabbi Naim Hahum proved not to be “fond of Zionists.” This was partially because the Zionists had backed his opponent Rabbi Ya’kov during the Chief Rabbinate elections in 1909. He would thereafter be seen as an opponent of the Zionist cause.19 Mazliah and Russo, by contrast, expressed “a keen interest in Zionism.”20 Wolffsohn sought to use the two as a channel for influencing the Ottoman parliament. He asked the Ottoman Jewish statesmen to explain in parliament that “Zionism did not have a separatist aspiration.”21 Its aim was to “create a shelter, a cultural centre for the Jewish nation in Palestine, and promote its economic, physical, intellectual, and moral rejuvenation.”22 And thus, with its benign and limited aims it was congruent with Ottoman patriotism.23 The support of Emmanuel Carasso—an influential Jewish figure within the CUP—to the Zionist cause was seen as the greatest “gain.” Carasso expressed in an interview published in the Salonican paper L’Epoca that after a conversation with Jabotinsky and Jacobson, he was “in complete agreement with them with regard to Zionism.”24 In a similar vein, the Salonican journalist Sam Levy wrote in March 1909 that after attending one of the lectures of Jabotinsky the previous winter he had come to embrace the cause of Zionism, like many others in his town that hosted Zionist clubs. This, in his view, was the true spirit of patriotism, bolstering

17  Wolffsohn to Jacobson, 31 August 1908, 15 September 1908, C.Z.A.  Z2/7; cf. Friedman, Turkey, Germany and Zionism, 140–1. 18  Friedman, Germany, Turkey and Zionism, 142; Jacobson to Wolffsohn, 1 January 1909, CZA Z 2/7, cf. Matossian, Shattering Dreams, 85. 19  Memo, 3 February 1910, Archives of the Jabotinsky Institute, A 1–4/4. 20  Matossian, Shattering Dreams, 85. 21  Wolffsohn to Mazliah and Russo, 24 January 1909, CZA Z2/7, cf. Matossian, Shattering Dreams, 85. 22  Wolffsohn to Mazliah and Russo, 24 January 1909, CZA Z2/7, cf. Campos, Ottoman Brothers, 205. 23  Rassvyet, 18 January 1909, cf. Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman, 158; Campos, 205. 24  La Epoka, 8 January, 1909, cf. Matossian, Shattering Dreams, 209.

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love for “the one and indivisible Ottoman fatherland”.25 Moreover, Rıza Tevfik, a popular member of the CUP at the time, would declare in a speech at a Jewish club in Istanbul in the same month that [A] good Ottoman could be a Zionist… I myself am a Zionist. Zionism is fundamentally nothing more than the expression of the solidarity which characterises the Jewish people. What is the aim of Zionism? A humanitarian one: to find a more friendly fatherland for unfortunate co-religionists, where they can live as free men in the enjoyment of their rights… Palestine is your land more than it is ours.26

Zionism was thus re-formulated in the Ottoman context, or was at least perceived so by local Jewish or non-Jewish Ottomans, as an ideological counterpart of Ottoman liberalism, the peaceful co-existence of millets with religious freedoms, on the one hand, and a countenance of Turkish nationalism, as seen in Jabotinsky’s writings, on the other. This hybrid ideological penetration initiated by Jabotinsky would soon be institutionalised and allow for the establishment of new journals and newspapers, including Le Jeune Turc. After meeting Jabotinsky, Jacobson “warmly” recommended to Wolffsohn that the Odessan journalist be offered a position in Istanbul. The latter could make a good impact on the project of starting a daily newspaper in the Ottoman Empire in order to gain the Jewish and the educated non-Jewish public opinion to the Zionist cause.27 Jabotinsky knew the conditions of the Ottoman Empire well, and possessed “a great oratorical talent and the capacity to inspire confidence in people and win over them.”28 However, Wolffsohn was hesitant to invest in such a v­ enture, in consideration of past experience and the still reluctant attitude of the leading Ottoman cabinet members toward the Zionist cause, as far as the questions of settlement in Palestine, “special privileges,” and “autonomy” were concerned.29

25  Sami Levy, “Le Sionisme: Une Satisfaction Personelle” (Zionism: A Personal Satisfaction), La Journal de Salonique, 7 March, 1909. 26  “A Turkish Deputy on Zionism,” The Times, 12 March 1909. 27  Der Matossian, Shattering Dreams, 85. 28  Jacobson to Wolffsohn, 8 December 1908, cf. Schechtman, 154. 29  Benbassa, “Presse d’Istanbul et de Salonique,” 339; see also Jacobson to Wolffsohn, 21 October 1908, C.Z.A. Z 2/7, cf. Friedman, Turkey, Germany, and Zionism, 141.

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For Jabotinsky, this was no excuse for complete pessimism. Upon his return to Odessa from Istanbul he met Menachem Ussishkin, a member of the Russian Committee of the Zionist Organisation, and asked him to start a campaign for Zionist activity in Ottoman Turkey. When the Russian Committee took the initiative at Jabotinsky’s suggestion, Wolffsohn agreed to review his stance, and went to Istanbul at the end of June 1909 to meet the Russian committee.30 He altered his pessimistic position there. In a memorandum penned in August 1909 to gather financial support from the Jewish world, he wrote that sympathies had to be gained, maintained, and developed. The Zionists had to act with great energy and begin a major reconnaissance mission in the empire. “The future,” he concluded, “belongs to him that shall have a good and great press … only a large and versatile press can provide us with a boost.”31

The Zionist Press-Complex and Le Jeune Turc A Zionist press network had already been in the making in the Ottoman Empire by then.32 Connections had been made with two papers in Istanbul, Le Courrier d’Orient (The Courier of the Orient) and Tasvir-i Efkâr (The Description of Opinions).33 Both were owned by Ebuzziya Tevfik, a Unionist deputy for Antalya and, paradoxically enough, an outspoken antisemitic journalist.34 An agreement had been made also with another ̇ Turkish daily, Ittihad (The Union), which was linked to Mazliah and Russo and which would take a sympathetic attitude towards the Zionist publications, and extend the Zionist connection to the ranks of the CUP. In addition to these publications, the plan was to provide a French-­ language daily review. It would deal with all current Turkish questions in 30  David Wolffsohn, memo, 18 August 1909, A.J.I. A 1–4/3. Wolffsohn was convinced, on the basis of his investigations and discussions with the local elites, that it was not possible to gain concessions directly from the Turks. 31  Ibid. 32  Ottoman intelligence closely monitored the actions of the Russian committee as well as the committee from Cologne when they arrived in the empire, and regarded them as a potential threat to order in the empire. Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri (BOA hereafter), DH.MUI ̇ 27–1/66/2, 19 October 1909 and 13 November 1909. 33  “Protokoll der Schluss-Sitzung über die Regierung der Presse in Konstantinopel” (Minutes of the closing session on the government of the press in Constantinople), 2 August 1909, A.J.I. A 1–4/3. 34  Türesay, “Antisionisme et antisémitisme,” 147–178. An annual fee of 23,000 francs was to be paid for these journals.

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a serious and scientific manner and would indirectly defend Zionism. This body was to be given a high rank in the general Turkic press by employing outstanding staff, including prominent Ottoman and foreign intellectuals. Moreover, an organ devoted specifically to the acquisition of Ottoman Jews would be established.35 At the August 1909 meeting of the WZO, a committee was created to run the press complex in the empire. It consisted of Jabotinsky, Jacobson, and Sami Hochberg, an ex-professor of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Iran. The latter was appointed to manage the financial details. Jabotinsky was brought in to be in charge of redaction.36 His new post put Jabotinsky in a financially less favourable situation than in Russia. Finances in Istanbul were tight. The Central Committee of the Zionist organisation in Russia had previously collected a sum of 50,000 francs to cover the expenses on this press network.37 An accurate budget was showing that for the first year the organisation would need at least 100,000 francs.38 The lion’s share of this budget was to be allocated to the daily French paper. Although the idea was to establish it as soon as possible, plans changed on the way.39 In October, when a disagreement emerged between Ebuzziya Tevfik and Celal Nuri, an editor of the paper, the latter left the journal and founded Le Jeune Turc. Türesay argues that there was a good possibility that Celal Nuri had made agreements with the Zionists for Le Courrier and Tasvir-i Efkar in the summer of 1909 without the approval of Tevfik, while Tevfik was away in London along with the Ottoman delegation. The disagreement between the two had sprung up when Celal Nuri published an article on Zionism in Le Courier d’Orient that contrasted with the antisemitic convictions of Ebuzziya Tevfik. Two days after Nuri’s departure, Tevfik launched a new antisemitic campaign, which

35  For this purpose, a subsidy of 600 francs was secured for Ha-Mevasser (The Herald). In a similar vein, the Judeo-Spanish newspaper El Tiempo (The Times) was involved in the network at a rate of 2400 francs a year, along with Levy’s Journal de Salonique (The Journal of Salonica), which was allocated a subvention of 2000 francs a year, and Lucien Sciuto’s L’Aurore (The Dawn), which received an annual subvention of 3000 francs mainly to strive against the Alliance Israelite Universelle and win over educated Jewish readers. Lewenthal, ‘Lucian Scuito,’ in The Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, IV, 275. 36  Schechtman, 154. 37  Jabotinsky, Povest’ Moih Dnei, 36. 38  David Wolffsohn, memo, 18 August 1909, A.J.I. A 1–4/3. 39  Türesay, “Antisionisme et antisémitisme,” 159.

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triggered intellectual duels on Zionism in the Ottoman press at the end of 1909 (see below).40 LJT was established with a contract signed between Celal Nuri and the Zionist representatives Hochberg and Jacobson on 4 August 1909. According to the stipulations of the contract, the journal would aim for dispelling any misunderstanding with the Jews and the new government. It would moreover support the CUP and its policies; elaborate a democratic programme designed to inspire the committee; propagate Ottomanism including respect for the language, culture and nationality of all citizens (a preponderant place being granted to the Turkish language); provide support for the immigration of Muslims and Jews in all the provinces of the empire for its political and economic consolidation; and provide special support for Zionism, with the latter aiming only to create a Jewish cultural centre in Palestine, a creation which could only benefit the empire as a whole.41 Finally, it would advocate liberal policies towards Jews and other non-Turkish millets, while rebutting antisemitic publications and statements.42 Thanks to the skilful work of its editorship, on the one hand, and on the other, its liberal, as well as nationalist, outlook, which addressed both the minds and hearts of its Ottoman audience, LJT nearly tripled its circulation in five months, a rather significant success.43 It was often quoted in diplomatic correspondences and the international media. Due to LJT’s success, and in consideration of their financial limitations, Jacobson and Jabotinsky proposed in early 1910 to abandon the idea of publishing another daily French journal in Istanbul, which was approved by the headquarters of the WZO in Cologne.44 Besides its journalistic popularity, LJT provided a platform for local journalists for meetings and discussions of contemporary issues at its offices at 8 Camondo Street in Galata. Local Jews were mobilised into  Ibid., 159.  Koloğlu, 47; Benbassa, “Presse,” 343. 42  Jacobson to E.A.C., 8 June 1911, C.Z.A. Z 2/12, cf. Friedman, Turkey, Germany and Zionism, 149. 43  Between November 1909 and June 1910, its circulation increased from five thousand to thirteen thousand copies, and in October 1910 to a staggering fifteen thousand. Moreover, from November 1909 to April 1910, the number of its subscribers went up from 1272 to 2115; see, Lewenthal, “Lucian Scuito,” 220; Benbassa, “Presse,” 343–344; Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman, 165. 44  Jacobson and Jabotinsky to Wolffsohn, 4 January 1910, A.J.I. A 1–4/4. 40 41

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clubs to establish an influential community.45 Jabotinsky, in particular, was active with delivering public speeches and lectures (“I remembered”, “Our National Revival,” etc.) on such topics as relations between the Jews and the Turks, the necessity for a united and strong Jewish community “both physically and ethically,” and “infusing the Jews with love for the Jewish nation.”46 According to Schechtmann, “during the several months of Jabotinsky’s activity in Constantinople, the small Zionist nucleus grew into several hundred Zionists, devoted, active and faithful.”47 Jabotinsky himself, though not its chief editor, contributed to the journal occasionally. His writings, a friend of Jabotinsky noted, “very soon became an event in the world of the press in Constantinople; people read and re-read them, quoted them, looked for the possible meaning between the lines, became enthusiastic over their pungency, simplicity and directness.”48 Jabotinsky believed that explicitly defending Jewish settlement in Palestine would bring more harm than good to the Zionist cause. As he stated in his own memoirs, he noticed the resistance of the Unionists on this subject and presented Zionism through a completely reverse mirror-­ image: one that rejected separation and defended full integration with the Ottoman Empire; a stream that did not target settlement in Palestine and Jerusalem necessarily.49 By the same token, he decided to keep the journal more objective in order to gain credibility on key issues when the time came.50 In his view, the Zionist plan had to be a long-term and systematic gathering of power and diaspora in Palestine. It could not transpire overnight.51 LJT’s contributors were engaged with a variety of issues such as critiquing the Hamidian despotism, the importance of the introduction of new rights and liberties such as freedom of expression as well as foreign policy 45  Jacob Landau, “Ottoman Turkey,” in Spector Simon, Laskier, Reguer, eds., The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, 287. 46  Speech at Ball of Association of Youth from Ortakoy, 1910, A.J.I. A 1–8/33 Catalogue. 47  Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman, 157. 48  Ibid., 156, 160. The copies of the founding years, 1909–1910, of Le Jeune Turc are not readily available in most Ottoman/Zionist archives and collections unlike a large majority of other contemporary journals. A few copies on 1911, and plenty on 1912–15 can be found at Islamic Studies Library (ISAM) in Istanbul, and at European universities including Leuven and Marburg as well as in Jerusalem at the Central Zionist Archives. 49  Koloğlu, 47. 50  V. Jabotinsky to Nahum O. Sokolow, 18 January 1910, A.J.I. 1–2/2 no. 56. 51   V.  Jabotinsky, “Sionizm i Turciya” (Zionism and Turkey), Odesskie Novosti, 4 November 1909.

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issues that sought to defend Ottoman interests often against what its authors described as foreign intrigues, the violation of the rights of the Ottoman Empire by these European powers, and even advocacy of an Islamic union. As of 1910, with the diplomatic crises in Crete, Bosnia and North Africa, LJT’s Unionist wing would increase the nationalist dose of the paper in foreign policy issues. It would allow in the journal’s columns attacks on the imperialisms of Italy and Russia (especially through Aghayeff), fierce criticisms of British policies, and occasional writings, mainly by Alexander Parvus (the revolutionary Social Democrat writer who was residing in Istanbul at the time) that would upset the international capital.52 In domestic politics, LJT followed a policy that accentuated Ottoman territorial integrity. There were fierce criticisms in its columns against separationist movements, criticising the Albanians, Armenians and Greeks. Yet there was never a critical article on the Jews. According to Benbassa, it was the economic motives, “whether it is for the survival of the newspaper or simply the concern of journalists to secure decent returns,” that could explain a marriage between the Zionists and the nationalist Unionists under LJT.53 She finds it difficult to suppose, among “militant nationalists” such as Ahmet Aghayeff, Moiz Cohen (Munis Tekinalp) and Alexander Parvus, an ideological allegiance to Zionism. Although Benbassa’s assumption on economic considerations was probably not false, there were also ideological common denominators that allowed for this co-existence. One must be wary of taking the notions of “Unionist,” “Ottoman Jewry,” or “Zionist” as pure communal actors here. There were internal diversities, even outright hostilities and conflicts, within each of these groups all along, and their political and ideological positions tended to shift pragmatically. LJT ran, by and large, a coherent editorial policy, and this was partially because the Zionist and pro-Unionist actors perceived no contradiction between the promotion of liberal discourses in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, a common stance against antisemitism, and advocacy of Turkish nationalism. Jabotinsky foresaw symbiotic advantages between Zionism and Turkish nationalism, arguing that at a practical level their alliance in diluting regional populations would permit the Turkish dominance the Unionist leadership envisaged. Moreover, figures like Aghayeff, who became a  Koloğlu, Celal Nuri’nin Jeune Turc 47.  Benbassa, “Presse,” 346.

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pioneer of Turkish nationalism in the 1910s and who emerged among the forerunners of Turkish liberalism in post-Ottoman era, was sympathetic to Zionism on ideological grounds. He was once described by Jacobson as one of the “friends of Zion” for he considered Zionism as “a reaction against European domination and Christian culture.”54 He would naturally favour the Zionists in their battle with the Alliance Israelite Universelle, which was considered an agent of French imperialism in the Ottoman Empire, while the Zionists did not promote any European imperial identity (at least at the time) but only that of the Jews and their own emancipation. A Russian émigré himself, Aghayeff was a defender of communal civic and cultural rights and cultural emancipation from imperial domination in the Russian context. These were the main two elements of his nationalist liberal thought. While some imperialist liberals in Britain and France during the long nineteenth century were preoccupied with justifying imperial expansionism, thus laying its groundwork by promoting free trade and individualism,55 reactionary (non-Western) liberals such as Aghayeff himself devoted his work to developing defensive, communitarian, nationalist, and emotional interpretations of liberalism, or one of those “other liberalisms,” that saw political, economic and religious protection from encroachments of overseas empires as a prerequisite of individual and communal emancipation, but not vice versa.56 These tendencies have deeply influenced the characteristics and fortunes of liberal thought, and its different strands, in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world. The reading of liberalism in these contexts hardly sat easily with the mainstream readings of Western liberalisms. The complexity and political and economic nature of the immediate discursive environments of these nonWestern liberals, the absence of a commercial spirit or a strong third estate, informed the nationalist, communitarian and anti-imperialist motifs of their interpretations of liberalism. These other liberalisms almost continuously, yet occasionally self-destructively, flirted with indigenous nationalism. In Aghayeff’s view, the strengthening of the Ottoman Empire entailed turning the millets into a community of communities with equal rights 54   Ortaylı, “Ottomanism and Zionism During the Second Constitutional Period, 1908–1915,” in Levy, ed., The Jews of the Ottoman Empire, 532. 55  Duncan Bell, “Empire and Imperialism,” in Claeys and Jones, eds., The Cambridge History of Nineteenth Century Political Thought. 56  Ozavci, Intellectual Origins of the Republic.

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and responsibilities, which necessitated particularly the cultural emancipation and bolstering of the Turkish nation, which he believed was one of the most backward nations of the empire. This sat well with Jabotinsky’s aforementioned ideas. And this was how Dr Lichtheim, the Zionist representative in Istanbul that succeeded Jacobson, correctly assessed the attitude of Aghayeff and his sympathy toward the Zionist cause.57 Though one can just as well contend that Zionism be construed as an expansionist colonial ideology, discourse, and, in turn, practice, neither Jabotinsky himself at the time framed it so (this would have to wait for about half a decade) nor did the “friendly” Turkish nationalists of the late 1900s and the early 1910s. The latter instead tended to see Zionism as a peripheral movement, and a reactionary element in the global (European) order. Unlike other millets, Ottoman Jewry, for its part, hardly acted as a reactionary actor within the Ottoman imperial system. In the Ottoman context, there was no inclusion problem where the Jews were concerned. It was therefore less problematic to relate to Zionist ambitions. Tekinalp’s sympathies went to such lengths that he participated in the December 1909 Zionist Congress in Hamburg and delivered a lecture there highlighting the congruence of Zionism with Ottomanism.58 And finally, in the aftermath of the revolution, both the Zionists and the Unionists found themselves in the receiving end of the same threat: antisemitism. Soon after the revolution, rumours that the Jews were the real bosses of Sublime Porte prevailed in the imperial capital, in diplomatic correspondence (mainly British), and in domestic and foreign media (mainly British and French). It was the British dragoman Gerald Fitzmaurice’s idée fixe that the Jews were running the empire. As he once wrote: [The Jews] have with enlightened self-interest rendered great services…and this captured the Young Turks. [They are now] reaping a splendid harvest in the war of influence and concessions to the detriment of the other non-­ Turkish economic elements e.g., Armenians, Greeks, Bulgar[ian]s who feel convinced that the Jews are exerting their influence to keep up Turkish distrust [and] all hostility towards them with the object of maintaining their economic conquest, if not monopoly, of Turkey.59 57  Ortaylı, “Otomanism,” 532; for Aghayeff’s role as a mediator between the Zionists and the CUP also see, Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, 118, 120, 146, 148, 163. 58  Landau, “The ‘Young Turks’ and Zionism: Some Comments,” in Landau Jews, Arabs, Turks, 202–3. 59  Fitzmaurice to Tyrell, 27 June 1909, The National Archives, Kew, FO 800/79.

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His arguments, which vaguely refer to a hidden “battle of nations,” were firmly rejected and ridiculed by the CUP leadership. Influenced by his dragoman, the British Ambassador Gerard Lowther reported in a long and detailed letter to the Foreign Office on 29 May 1910 along similar lines: [I]t is obvious that the Jew, who is so vitally interested in maintaining his sole predominance in the councils of the Young Turkey, is equally interested in keeping alive the flames of discord between the Turk and his (the Jew’s) possible rivals, i.e. the Armenians, Greeks, etc., while it is to be inferred that he would not be averse to the new regime increasing the national indebtedness to the Hebrew financiers ….60

Many leading Unionists believed that the counterrevolution in April 1909 was incited partially by the British embassy, and particularly by Fitzmaurice, who had financed as well as provoked the conservative masses against both the CUP and the Jews with his conspiracy theories on the Jewish and freemason links and origins of the Unionist elites.61 The maintenance of the CUP’s grip on political power and the Zionists’ ambitions relied on fighting against parochial and antisemitic accusations, though to say that they established a united front against hostile elements would be to exaggerate somewhat. The aforementioned public polemic between Tekinalp and Ebuzziya Tevfik is representative in this regard. Tekinalp refuted Ebuzziya’s allegation that Zionism was a threat to Ottoman territorial integrity and a project of the economically dominant Jewish society. In the first place, Tekinalp argued, the Jews who settled in the Empire were not rich, as Ebuzziya Tevfik implied, but they were mostly the poor. These refugees who were to obtain Ottoman nationality on leaving their nationality of origin could only retain the interest of their new country.62 He was highly critical of Ebuzziya’s appeal to the Ottoman Greeks to oppose Zionism: how could their economic and commercial domination be preferable to that of the Jews? How could he refuse the Jews a refuge in the Empire while nonetheless recognising their considerable gift in commercial affairs? It was precisely this type of population that “the empire needed!”63 60  Lowther to Hardinge, 29 May 1910, cf. Kedourie, “Young Turks, Free Masons and Jews,” 89–104. 61  Edib, Memoirs of Halide Edib, 278; Ünal, “Britain and Ottoman Domestic Politics,” 11. 62  Türesay, “Antisionisme et antisémitisme,“162. 63  M. Kohen, “Ebuzziya Tevfik Bey’e,” (To Ebuzziya Tevfik Bey), Yeni Tasvir-i Efkar, 4 November 1909, cf. Türesay, “Antisionisme et antisémitisme,” 163.

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While Aghayeff was hesitant with publicly disclosing his pro-Zionist stance in the Ottoman context, he wrote in the Russian journal Kaspii concurrently that antisemitism emerged as a pseudo-problem in Istanbul as an offspring of Europeanisation. As much as its positive aspects, the Ottomans were borrowing also the negative tenets of Europe such as prostitution and antisemitism: When the new [Young Turk] regime was introduced, the Jews, who rendered great services to [the] triumph [of the 1908 revolution], and therefore gained more influence over the course of affairs in the empire, undertook with even greater hope for the realization of the cherished dream [of Jewish settlement in Palestine]; they began to buy land, arrange Jewish colonies, found newspapers, magazines, schools ….64

Yet their manifest enthusiasm generated a suspicious attitude and apprehensions towards the Jews also among the Turkish circles in which rudimentary signs of antisemitism had already begun to be seen. “Indeed,” he wrote elsewhere: persecuted throughout Europe, [the Jews] find equality in Turkey, hospitality and full religious tolerance … and we think that the increase of this cultural, hardworking element that has a huge influence in the business spheres of Europe will only benefit Turkey, and the Turkish government would act wisely if it would really encourage the resettlement of Jews to Turkey and place them in the low-cultured and sparsely populated parts of the Empire. [T]his is also the general mood of the local leaders; but it is remarkable that here, too, Christians, and especially the Greeks, revolt against the Jews; these latter, however, are right from their point of view, … having seized economically all of Turkey, they certainly would not want to deal with such a dangerous and strong rival as the Jews; these Greeks and their press are trying to create an anti-Semitic movement here; they write burning articles about the danger that Zionism poses to the Empire; they threaten that soon the Jews, having captured the whole of Palestine, will create a new Macedonia there, and so on.65 64  A.  Aghayeff, “Korol’ Petr v Konstantinopole. Bolgaro-tureckii pogranichnyi incident. Greko-armianskie patriarhaty i novobrantsy. Sionizm v Turcii. Polozhenie kabineta” (King Peter in Constantinople. The Bulgarian-Turkish border incident. The Greek-Armenian Patriarchy and New Recruits. Zionism in Turkey. The Provision of the Cabinet), Kaspii 76 (4 Apri, 1910): 3. 65  A. Aghayeff, ‘Novyi skandal v parlamente; pereselentsy mohadzhiry; pereselentsy evrei; Dozi i Abdullha Dzhevdet” (The New Scandal in the Parliament. Migrant mohadjir; Migrant Jews; Dozi and Abdullah Cevdet) Kaspii 117 (26 May 1910): 3.

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Despite the pro-Jewish attitude of the pro-CUP writers, the Unionist leadership’s position with regards to the Zionist project of Jewish settlement in Palestine remained insistently negative. The Zionists would make several gestures to the CUP such as Francis Montefiore’s luncheon parties to the Ottoman delegations in London or with their offer of financial support in the construction of the Hejaz Railway.66 However, against the mounting voices of the opposition from within and outside the committee, and the increasing antisemitism, the CUP leadership could only make its adverse position more clear at this juncture.67

The Winter of Troubles Autobiographies, as Frederick von Hayek once speculated, “may lead to our knowing less about their subject-matter.”68 They can take us to an island of knowledge where the authors would like us to remain. Jabotinsky’s autobiography, which he penned about quarter a century after his Istanbul sojourn, suggests that, even though the first few months of LJT can be explained as a success story, the Russian writer was hardly happy in the Ottoman capital. For one, as he writes in his autobiography, he felt stuck: I was not successful with Nazim Bey, the Secretary general of the Young Turk party… I felt that no pressure would help: for them, wholesale assimilation is a sine qua non condition for that nonsense which is their state; and there is for Zionism no other hope but the destruction of that nonsense. I hated Constantinople and my useless work.69

In contrast to this passage, Shlomo Gepstein, Jabotinsky’s lifelong friend, would report to Rassvyat on 20 December 1909 that he had met Jabotinsky in Hamburg during the Ninth Congress of the WZO, and the latter had told him that he was “an incurable optimist, and the last six months in Constantinople did not reform me.”70 Whether Jabotinsky was merely careful there with his public statements, disguising his private concerns, or misremembering the past, is a matter of question. His contemporary correspondence does not suggest a deep displeasure, either. Notwithstanding  BOA DH.MKT. 2885/44, Ministry of Interior Report, 27 July 1909.  Landau, “The ‘Young Turks’ and Zionism,” 175. 68  Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, 16. 69  Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman, 158. 70  Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman, 159. 66 67

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this, he did feel by the end of 1909 that the crushing of Young Turks’ optimism after the international crises in Crete and the Balkans made the Zionist task more difficult. At the same time, he found himself having to grapple with considerable financial and political pressures, which led to his leaving Istanbul in the summer of 1910.71 Upon his return from Hamburg in December 1909, LJT was suspended for a week, due to aggressive nationalist pieces against Italy. Meanwhile, Hochberg informed Jabotinsky that little had remained from the money that the Russian committee had provided for the press complex. Jacobson and Jabotinsky then wrote to Cologne in early January for further financial support and permission to channel the funding allocated for the new review for the use of LJT.72 Wolffsohn’s reply, four days later, approved budgetary support and probably uplifted moods in Istanbul. Yet in the same letter, he would disapprove Jabotinsky’s demand to act as chief editor of the journal. Wolffsohn did not see any benefit in this, not least by antagonising Celal Nuri Bey with such a move.73 The biggest conflict with Cologne that led to the discontent with Jabotinsky occurred, however, when Jakobus H. Kann’s book titled Erez Israel: das jüdische Land (The Land of Israel: The Jewish Land) was translated into French. One of the members of the Inner Actions Committee of the World Zionist Organisation, Kann elaborated in this book “his Zionist political credo and program,” calling for an autonomous Jewish colony in Palestine, taking over all rights and obligations with respect to the location, controlling their own taxes, military, and police, yet under the sovereignty of the Sultan. These plans fully conformed to the Herzlian concept of Zionism, but in 1909 they were remarkably incongruent with the policy officially proclaimed and pursued by the Zionist Organisation.74 Erez Israel had been published in German in early 1909 and translated into French after the Hamburg Conference in December of the same year. Kann had then sent copies of the book “to leading Young Turkish statesmen and politicians, as well as to the press.”75 The Istanbul Press 71  V.  Jabotinsky to Nahum O.  Sokolow, 18 January 1910, A.J.I.  A 1–2/2 no. 56; V. Jabotinsky, “Pisma iz Konstantinopolya” (Letters from Constantinople), Odesskie Novosti, (November, 1909). 72  Jacobson and Jabotinsky to Wolffsohn, 4 January 1910, A.J.I. A 1–4/4. 73  Wolffsohn to Jacobson, 8 January 1910, A.J.I. A 1–4/4. 74  Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman, 160. 75  Böhm, Die Zionistische Bewegung (The Zionist Movement) Vol. I, 394; cf. Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman, 162.

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Committee was alarmed. They had almost “no hope that the book will go unnoticed. It is our common belief that the only possible answer to it would be a request of Kann’s resignation.”76 A major blow to their delicate and long-term mission, the existence of this book caused great damage to their work. Jacobson was away at the time in a sanatorium, due to his illness, which prevented the Istanbul Press Committee to take immediate action. But the Committee in the end wrote collectively, yet hesitantly, to Wolffsohn in January and early February, drawing his attention to how the book produced “a formidable consternation in Zionist circles in Constantinople and Salonica” and that “the special efforts made by the author of the book to secure the attention of the public in Turkey have made it possible for the book to be in the hands of some of our most influential enemies at this moment.”77 Jacobson also wrote to Wolffsohn, asking for the elimination of the chapter of “Zionist aspirations” from the French edition of the book. And the Press Committee suggested that “the Inner Actions Committee should state publicly that Kann’s views were not identical with the position of the Zionist organisation.” Wolffsohn “categorically refused to heed these demands,” to the bafflement of Jabotinsky.78 January and February 1910 witnessed a tensed exchange of letters and telegrams between the head of the Zionist Organisation and Jabotinsky.79 The latter wrote that “all those who have been speaking about Zionism in a formulation which is different from that given by Kann will be considered liars. [Lucien] Sciuto…and [C]elal Nuri will cease to trust us.”80 Even though Jabotinsky received full endorsement from the Russian Committee, Wolffsohn did not step back, and no action was taken concerning the book. In his eyes, Jabotinsky had gone too far by meddling with the administrative affairs of the Organisation whereas his task in Istanbul was “merely editorial.”  V. Jabotinsky to Nahum O. Sokolow, 18 January 1910, A.J.I. A 1–2/2 no. 56.  Press Committee to Cologne, undated, A.J.I. A 1–4/4. 78  V. Jabotinsky to Nahum O. Sokolow, 18 January 1910, A.J.I. A 1–2/2 no. 56; quote cited from Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman, 162. 79  A.J.I. A 1–4/4. 80  Jabotinsky to Wolffsohn, 29 January 1910, cf. Schechtman, 162–163. Scuito was the editor of L’Aurore. As we learn from Jabotinsky’s letter dated 15 February 1910 and addressed to Wolffsohn, he would express at the press committee meeting at Istanbul how Kann’s book jeopardised his situation as an Ottoman Jew: “Gentlemen, you can at any moment pack your bags and leave; but I have to remain in Turkey and I don’t want to become compromised in the eyes of my government.” Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman, 167. 76 77

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Meanwhile, the Inner Actions Committee resolved to suspend the subsidy to the press fund, “which was the very basis of its existence,” to the Ottoman Zionist press.81 The attitude of Cologne, coupled by his distrust of the Young Turks and personal dislike of “the Orient,” would lead to Jabotinsky’s concurrent resignation and dismissal. His Istanbul sojourn thus came to a bitter end in the summer of 1910. That his long-term mission in the Ottoman capital had remained unfinished was perhaps a source of relief, for he was convinced that the Unionist leadership were impossible to convince; yet it was at the same time a cause for frustration, for the Organisation had acted in complete disharmony. The latter was the very sentiment which would develop into a fundamental element of his political strategy in the coming years. The ideas and demands at the heart of Kann’s book would become the foundation of his Revisionism. This, his biographer writes, was Jabotinsky’s dramatic paradox.82 I will by contrast contend that it was instead an intellectual and pragmatic transposition. Jabotinsky’s position in 1909–1910 was informed by his first hand experiences with Ottoman realities such as the Young Turks’ adamant opposition to Jewish settlement and autonomy in Palestine and domestic and international opposition to Zionism. He had still held then an optimistic belief, albeit a gradually waning one, that a cautious and cloaked long-term policy could help overcome these difficulties. With World War I, however, he opportunistically suggested the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire with the support of Britain. This, Jabotinsky wrote, was “logic.” Yet Schechtman was right that there was a remarkable degree of incoherence between Jabotinsky’s take of events in the heat of the moment, when he preached for patience and a long-term process of persuasion, and his autobiographical account, in which he writes that as early as 1909 he was of the belief that there was no other hope but the destruction of “that non-sense” that was the Ottoman Empire.

The Unionist Parallax, Zionism, Liberalism and Nationalism Jabotinsky and the Press Committee were right. Kann’s book did not go unnoticed by “the enemies of Zionism” in the Ottoman Empire. The Hahambashi Haim Nahum got possession of the book in 1910, and  Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman, 164.  Ibid., 167–8.

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argued that it was an expression of the true Zionist conception, an “upright Zionism.” He was expecting that many now would want to deny this Zionism, but “Zionism is this.”83 Even though in September 1910 Jacobson made attempts to persuade Nahum to announce publicly that Zionism had no separatist motivations, the latter turned this down.84 Moreover, in March 1911, another overt “enemy” of Zionism and antisemite, Ebuzziya Tevfik, brought the content of Kann’s book to public attention.85 The discussion was fuelled by the parliamentary meetings where an opposition deputy named Ismail Hakki (Gümülcineli) fiercely directed accusations to the CUP leadership, and particularly to the Minister of Finance Cavid Bey, for wittingly or unwittingly collaborating with the Zionists.86 This, it was argued, had been the case especially with the 1911 loan agreement signed with an Austro-German syndicate and during the establishment of the National Bank of Turkey, which had allegedly been founded with Zionist capital. The Unionists, according to his account, were trapped by the Zionists for the single ultimate aim of obtaining Jewish immigration to Palestine. Ismail Hakki warned that Zionism was becoming a chronic political disease that would lead to great harm. Grand Vizier Ibrahim Hakki Pasha, Emmanuel Carrasso and Nissim Mazliah rejected these allegations.87 Ibrahim Hakki Pasha would label the Zionists as a small group of “charlatans.” And in May 1911, Carasso would tell the parliament that he was not sure what Zionism meant.88 The “friendlier” Unionists would thus step back and take a clear position against Zionism, since it was now used, as they perceived it, indeed as a destructive political instrument by their opponents. The latter exerted so much pressure that Talat Bey, the Minister of Interior and, Cavid Bey would resign in early 1911.89 The pro-CUP journal Tanin would write that Zionism was certainly a real problem for the empire, but its use by the  Memo, 3 February 1910, A.J.I. A 1–4/4.  Landau, “The ‘Young Turks1 and Zionism,” 203. 85  Türesay, “Antisionism,” 167–70. 86  Talbot, “Jews, be Ottomans,” 387. 87  Meclisi Mebusan Zabit Ceridesi (Ottoman Parliamentary Proceedings) (MMZC), 1:3:3, 331–333. 88  MMZC 1:6:3:99, 16 May 1911, 554; cf. Zeynep Uçak, “Emanuel Karasu 2,” Shalom, 4 May, 2016. 89  Ahmed Aghayeff, “Pisma Iz Turcii: Debaty Po Povodu Bjudzheta, Inostrannye Intrigi, Vozbuzhdenie k Antisemitizmu” (Letters from Turkey: The Debate over the Budget, Foreign Intrigues, The Stirring for Antisemitism), Kaspii, 11 March, 1911: 3. 83 84

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opposition as a demagogic argument against the CUP was much more dangerous to the interests of the empire than the Zionist project itself.90 Cavid Bey penned in his diaries that all theories about Zionism were “same old tales,” while Aghayeff lamented that “in the end all this artificially created anti-Semitic campaign, finding no soil [in Istanbul], will erupt on the heads of those who play with such a dangerous weapon.”91 To make things worse, the increasing nationalist dose in the columns of LJT would lead The Times to write that LJT and other major Zionist organs in Istanbul were Germanophilic and Anglophobic, especially given that several Germans were working in these journals.92 Together with the growing anti-Zionist sentiment in the Ottoman Empire, LJT’s nationalist columns, which, according to Wolffsohn, brought more harm than good, and The Times’ reaction, would urge Wolffsohn to pen an open letter, stressing that LJT “is a purely Turkish paper, which, it is quite true, has more than once advocated a Jewish immigration into the Ottoman Empire in the interests of the Empire itself, but there is not the least ground for deducing from this that we are even in the least responsible for the policy of the paper.”93 Wolffsohn also underlined that Zionism was not “a scheme for the foundation of a Jewish State in Palestine.” Simultaneously, after a two-day conference at Cologne, the Zionist Organisation announced that Zionist aspirations were in complete accord with the interests of the Ottoman Empire.94 LJT and the other journals in the Zionist press network continued their activities in the following years, though Celal Nuri terminated his agreement with the journal in 1912, after, according to a contemporary and his biographer, several Jews sold their shares to the Zionists and he, as a man  Hüseyin Cahid, “Siyonizm” (Zionism), Tanin, 4 March, 1911.  Mehmed Cavid Bey, Diary entry for 23 April, 1911, Tanin 12 October 1943, no. 47; Aghayeff, “Vozbuzhdenie k Antisemitizmu.” (The Stirring for Antisemitism) Kaspii, 11 March, 1911: 3. 92  (author N.A.) “The Young Turks and Zionism,” The Times, 14 April 1911. This article in The Times came out soon after Celal Nuri suggested the settlement of Jews in Mesopotamia, which was in line with the policies of the Unionists. According to Koloğlu, since the German Anatolian Railway Company was constructing the Baghdad railway at the time, there was belief in London that the settlement plan was a German-Zionist scheme. Koloğlu, Celal Nuri’nin Jeune Turc, 47. 93  (author N.A.). “The Young Turks and Zionism,” The Times, 10 May, 1911. 94  (author N.A.). “Zionism and Turkey,” The Times, 9 May 1911. 90 91

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“who advocates the rule of the Sultan and Islam,” realised the perils in publishing along with the Zionists and decided to quit LJT.95 Before the outbreak of the war, LJT maintained its traditional policy of calling for Jewish settlement in the Ottoman Empire, stressing that “the cradle of Judaism is an Ottoman province.”96 In 1913, Hochberg established a printing house to disseminate the Zionist cause by publishing journals and books in several languages.97 This was accompanied by the CUP’s establishment of a firm grip on power early in the same year. Its leadership would thereafter seek for Zionist assistance for the propaganda of the empire in Europe, which started a new episode in CUP-Zionist relations.98 To return back to the questions raised in the introduction, the marriage between the Zionists and the Turkish nationalists came into existence partly because Jabotinsky, as a self-ascribed liberal in the late Russian context and now a Zionist strategist, considered it highly important to act in accordance with the political and social realities of the post-­revolutionary Ottoman Empire. He envisaged a “battle of nations” in the empire. The Turks, he believed, would seek for dominance by the discourse of “freedom.” The nationalist liberal approach of the Young Turk leadership could be exploited by the Zionists by further encouraging the Young Turk-Sephardi Jew rapprochement. The ideas of figures like Ahmed Aghayeff were congruent with this strategy: the Ottoman Empire could be turned into a community of communities with equal cultural and political rights, while remaining under Turkish dominance; and the Jews, as a loyal and economically and financially profitable millet, could help the Turks in their endeavour. One of the fruits of this marriage was LJT which took upon itself a mission to uphold liberal values in the Ottoman Empire, nurture the ideas of cultural autonomy, constitutionalism and fight against despotism and antisemitism. This understanding of liberalism was inclusive of national and religious diversity, yet largely nationalist, largely communitarian, for preaching communal rights and collective action; and it was at once anti-imperialist, where European encroachments were concerned, and imperialist, where Turkish dominance was in question. As much as pragmatic financial concerns, it was this nationalist liberalism that  Kemal, Tarih-i istikbal Münasebetiyle Celal Nuri Bey, 11–13.  LJT, 14 September 1913. 97 ̇  BOA I.MMS. 163/1331, 6 April 1913. 98  But this rapprochement came to an end, during the war, when Hochberg was arrested by Ottoman authorities for being involved in Zionist activities. BOA.HR.SYS. 23/2267. 95 96

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allowed for the marriage of the Zionists and the pro-CUP men under LJT, and it was the internal contradictions of this peculiar liberalism that would render the marriage inconvenient all along and haunt it with suspicions and insecurity.

Bibliography Archives Archives of the Jabotinsky Institute., Tel Aviv, Israel. Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri. (Prime Ministry Istanbul, Turkey. The National Archives., Kew, United Kingdom.

Ottoman

Archives),

Newspapers Kaspii. Odesskie Novosti. Rassvyet. Tanin.

Other Sources Bell, Duncan. 2011. Empire and Imperialism. In The Cambridge History of Nineteenth Century Political Thought, ed. Gregory Claeys and Gareth S. Jones, 864–892. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benbassa, Esther. 1986. “Presse d’Istanbul et de Salonique au service du sionisme (1908–1914)” (Istanbul and Salonika Press in the Service of Zionism). Revue Historique 276 (2): 337–365. ———. 1990. Zionism in the Ottoman Empire at the End of the Nineteenth and the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. Studies in Zionism 11 (2): 124–140. Campos, Michelle. 2011. Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Early Twentieth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cohen, Julia Philips. 2014. Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era. New York: Oxford University Press. Der Matossian, Bedros. 2014. Shattering Dreams of a Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Edib, Halide. 1926. Memoirs of Halide Edib. New York/London: Century.

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Friedman, Isaiah. 1998. Turkey, Germany and Zionism, 1897–1918. New Brunswick/London: Transaction Publishers. Hayek, Friedrich A. 1951. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Friendship and Subsequent Marriage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jabotinsky, Vladimir. 1985. Povest’ Moih Dnej. Jerusalem: Biblioteka-Aliya. Kedourie, Ellie. 1971. Young Turks, Free Masons and Jews. Middle Eastern Studies 7 (1): 89–104. Kemal, H. (1913). Tarih-i istikbal Münasebetiyle Celal Nuri Bey. Istanbul: n.p. Koloğlu, O. (1992, December). Celal Nuri’nin Jeune Turc Gazetesi ve Siyonist Bağı (Celal Nuri’s Newspaper Jeune Turc and Its Zionist Links). Toplumsal Tarih, 18 (108): 46–8. Landau, Jacob. 1993. The ‘Young Turks’ and Zionism: Some Comments. In Jews, Arabs, Turks: Selected Essays, ed. Jacob Landau, 169–177. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press. ———. 2002. Ottoman Turkey. In The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times, ed. Reeva Spector Simon, Michael Menachem Laskier, and Sara Reguer, 277–291. New York: Columbia University Press. Levy, S. (1909, March 7). Le Sionisme: Une satisfaction personelle. Zionism: A Personal Satisfaction. La Journal de Salonique. Lewental, Gershon. 2010a. Le Jeune Turc. In Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, ed. Norman A. Stillman, 220–221. Leiden: Bliss. ———. 2010b. Lucian Scuito. In Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, ed. Norman A. Stillman, 275. Leiden: Bliss. Mandel, Neville J. 1976. The Arabs and Zionism before World War I. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Meclisi Mebusan Zabit Cerideleri (MMZC)., 1:3:3, 331–333. (The Ottoman Parliamentary Proceedings). Öke, Mim Kemal. 1982a. The Ottoman Empire, Zionism, and the Question of Palestine (1880–1908). IJMES 14 (3): 329–341. ̇ ———. 1982b. Osmanlı Imparatorluğ u, Siyonizm ve Filistin Sorunu (1880–1914), ̇ Ottoman Empire, Zionism and the Palestine Question. Istanbul: Üçdal Neşriyat. Ortayli, Ilber. 1984. Ottomanism and Zionism During the Second Constitutional Period, 1908–1915. In The Jews of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Avigdar Levy, 527–538. Princeton: Darwin Press. Ozavci, Ozan. 2015. Intellectual Origins of the Republic: Ahmet Agaoglu and the Genealogy of Liberalism in Turkey. Boston/Leiden: Brill. Schechtman, Joseph B. 1956. Rebel and Statesman: The Vladimir Jabotinsky Story. New York: Thomas Yoseloff. Talbot, Michael. 2016. Jews, be Ottomans: Zionism, Ottomanism and Ottomanisation in the Hebrew-Language Press, 1890–1914. Die Welt des Islams 56 (3–4): 359–387.

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Türesay, Özgür. 2009. “Antisionisme et antisémitisme dans la presse ottomane d’istanbul a l’époque des Jeune Turques (1909–1912): L’exemple d’Ebuzziya Tevfik” (Anti-zionism and Antisemitism in the Ottoman Press of Istanbul During the Young Turk Era). Turcica 41: 147–178. Ünal, Hasan. 2001. Britain and Ottoman Domestic Politics: From the Young Turk Revolution to the Counter Revolution, 1908–9. Middle Eastern Studies 37 (2): 1–22.

CHAPTER 13

Jews, Imperial Liberalism, and the Predicament of “Small Nations”: Lewis B. Namier’s Gentry Nationalism Arie M. Dubnov

This chapter presents a case study in the relationship between liberalism, nationalism, and empire. Its protagonist is the historian Sir Lewis B. Namier (1880–1960), known for his Groundbreaking studies of Georgian England, his unique and rigorous historical methodology (“Namierism”). Born Ludwik Bernsztajn vel Niemirowski in eastern Galicia and growing up in Austrian Poland, Namier’s biography did not follow the traditional trajectory of the leading British scholars of his age, nor did it comply with the well-rehearsed tropes of forced displacement and critical detachment that is often used to tell the life stories of twentieth century Jewish intellectuals. Instead, we have an assimilated young émigré who was trained primarily in England, acquired an unsuspecting anglophilia, and yearned to be endorsed by his mentors and join Britain’s academic elite. Namier did develop, however, an independent voice. During the interwar years, he became known

A. M. Dubnov (*) History Department, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_13

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as Britain’s leading expert on Central Europe, and quickly thereafter acquired a reputation for his numerous writings and activities in support of Zionism. This chapter will not retell Namier’s biography—a task accomplished by several previous excellent studies—but aims to solve a certain puzzle.1 Writing about Namier remains bifurcated, discussing the three dimensions of his life and thought—the British, the Zionist, and the Central European—separately; the present chapter, focusing on Namier’s academic training and early writings, attempts to connect the dots. Its aim is to show how far Namier’s fascination with liberal imperialist and federal imperialist notions corresponded with his view of nationalism in general, and his attempt to distinguish “good” territorial nationalisms from “bad,” linguistic and irredentist nationalisms in particular. Namier’s peculiar brand of interwar liberalism, the chapter argues, could be fully comprehended only once all three layers of his life and thought are taken together. Namier’s writings about 1848 provide a convenient departure point because in them he fleshed out his typology of nationalisms. The annus mirabilis 1848 was not simply a year in which the ideals of freedom and revolution reached boiling point. For Namier it signified a tipping point, a moment in which the lofty rhetoric of liberation was used and abused by a new class of irredentist intellectuals. His message was unambiguously anti-German: under the banners of self-realization and self-determination, German nationalism sought—ultimately successfully—to radically rearrange the map of Europe. The doctrinaires of German nationalism, Namier argued, had devised a new linguistic yardstick for drawing the borders of Europe, reflecting the slogan of the German nationalist Ernst Moritz Arndt who asserted that the German Fatherland extended as far as the German language resounds. Here, Namier introduced a profoundly important conceptual distinction between two types of nationality—linguistic and territorial: [T]erritorial nationality is [an] essentially conservative [conception of nationalism], for it is the product of a long historical development; nationalisms which place the emphasis on language almost invariably seek change, since no existing satiated community singled out one principle for its basis— the demand that the State should be coextensive with linguistic nationality was an internationally revolutionary postulate which, seeing that nations are  Julia Namier, Lewis Namier: A Biography; Rose, Lewis Namier and Zionism; Colley, Lewis Namier. David W. Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary: The Lives of Lewis Namier. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. 1

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seldom linguistically segregated, proved destructive both of constituent will growth and of international peace.2

On the one hand, Namier’s typology was a product of its age. Read against the Second World War and the Holocaust it appears to resemble the kinds of taxonomies offered by contemporaneous scholars of nationalism like Hans Kohn, who tried to distinguish between ethnic (“Eastern”) and civic (“Western”) nationalisms.3 On the other hand, Namier’s distinction rests on much older ideas, developed early in his career, and echoing a long-standing British suspicion of “Continental” ideologies, if not an anti-intellectualist aversion towards hyper-theorization. Unlike Kohn and most other post-1945 scholars of nationalism, Namier sought to differentiate between modern abstract ideologies and a grassroots liberty emerging from long periods of “landedness,” that is, association on a shared territory. His categorization rested on notions borrowed from Victorian luminaries like Lord Acton, who famously saw nationality as the wild brainchild of intellectuals, who began translating poetic imagination into politics, causing revolutionary mayhem: “devising an imaginary state, their motive is more definite and immediate, and their commonwealth is a satire as well as a model.”4 Paying homage to Acton in his lectures on 1848, Namier agreed: this tendency for over-reliance on ideas explained why nationalism went bad. He dubbed 1848 the “seed-plot of History” because it “crystallized ideas and projected the pattern of things to come; it determined the course of the following century. It planned, and its schemes have been realized: but non vi si pensa quanta sangue costa (Italian: ‘There they don’t think of how much blood it costs’, quoted from Dante).”5 Much more than a study of the revolutions of 1848, Namier’s dichotomy allowed him to defend England, an exemplary model of stability and landed aristocracy. In characteristically Namierist fashion, the move melded ardent English patriotism and a rejection of German volkism with an exhaustive historical narrative. Paradoxically, it allowed him to defend the ideal of liberty while repudiating the importance historians ascribe to  L. B. [Lewis Bernstein] Namier, “Nationality and Liberty,” 31.  Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism. 4  Acton, “Nationality” In: Lord Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays, 272–300 on 270, 272, 276. Acton’s essay was originally featured in Home & Foreign Review, in July 1862. 5  Lewis B. Namier, “1848: seed-plot of History,” 30. 2 3

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the source of this ideal, namely, men of ideas. As we shall see, this apparent paradox emerged from a lifelong project: simultaneously to defend nationalism and to provide a chronicle of England’s “moderate liberty”—a rigorous scientific register in his view, but a highly idealized portrait from today’s vantage point.6 This idiosyncratic conception of territorial nationalism will be termed here “gentry nationalism.” How Namier could utterly disavow nationalist ideologies yet throw in his lot with national movements remains an open question. I shall focus instead on his liberal-cumconservative defense of “territorial nationalism.” The frame of reference for this was palpably British Imperial, yet it was essentially informed by “Neo-Imperial” federalist theories, while accommodating a conception of nationality-as-­landedness. Namier’s “gentry nationalism,” in other words, was tightly tied to his interpretation of England’s history, the emergence and function of its ultimate political mechanism, the House of Commons, and merged seamlessly into the vision of Greater Britain he had adopted during his formative years at Oxford.

The Idea of Greater Britain Namier (still calling himself Niemirowski) arrived at Balliol College, Oxford, in October 1908, during the heyday of Asquith’s Liberal welfare reforms. Balliol was a bastion of Imperial policy-making and a veritable assembly line for the formation of future colonial officers. It was for many years a nursery for public service in the empire, and in particular the prestigious ICS—the Indian Civil Service. Here, students were instilled with a vision of Britain’s mission civilisatrice, a strong sense of a hereditary governing class, and a lofty conception of the Empire. For members of this prestigious “corps d’elite,” Empire was not a machinery for exploitation but a vocation and a spiritual force, bringing good to the world.7 Most “Balliol men” conceived of themselves as liberals. But their liberalism, like Namier’s, was connected by an umbilical cord to the Empire. During these happy Balliol days, Namier met and befriended Arnold Joseph Toynbee, the future pioneer of the field now known as World History. In the early 1920s Namier would introduce Toynbee to Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), which 6  I borrow the term from Stefan Collini, “Idealizing England: Élie Halévy and Lewis Namier.” In: Collini, English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture, 67—83, on 67 & 77. 7  Furse, Aucuparius: Recollection of a Recruiting Officer, 17, 221.

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was to influence Toynbee’s own magnum opus on the rise and fall of world civilizations. But the two ambitious students were thinking globally even before 1914. Namier recollected how, as young students, they sat together on the floor of Toynbee’s room one night, poring over a large map of Eurasia and the Orient: Toynbee traced the journeys of Marco Polo all the way to Central Asia and Old Cathay, “while I,” added Namier, traced “the Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela.”8 This familiarity with nonBritish geography and history later led to the appointment of both men as “area experts” for the Government’s wartime intelligence bureaus. Soon enough, the two found themselves sketching together again the maps of postwar Europe and the ex-Ottoman world. Crucially, his time at Balliol exposed Namier to three types of historiographical conversations: first, the liberal internationalist discourse promoted by Oxford’s classicists and led by Alfred E. Zimmern, who perceived contemporary politics through analogies to and contrasts with ancient Athens; second, attempts to modernize English history by introducing Maitland and Gierke’s ideas to Oxford, as part of a larger attempt to find new ways of thinking about community and corporation; third, efforts by scholars associated with the Rhodes Trust and the Beit professorship to design an academically rigorous narrative of Britain’s colonial project, coupled with an imperial federalist vision for the Empire’s future. All three conversations were readily available to Namier, who eventually blended them into a striking synthetic worldview. Of the three, we know most about the ideas developed by the Oxonian circle of “liberal internationalists.”9 In pre-1914 Oxford the two main proponents of these ideas were Gilbert A.  Murray, Regius Professor of Greek since 1908, and his younger colleague, Alfred E. Zimmern, then a fellow and ancient history tutor at New College. Both classicists began developing a version of liberal internationalism that emphasized the role of a future League of Nations in establishing an international legal framework, while stressing the vital role of the British Empire—which they soon began to refer to as the Commonwealth—in securing a framework of international standards of civilization. Key here was the vivid portrait of the Athenian League Zimmern offered in his popular The Greek 8  Lewis B.  Namier, “Toynbee’s Perspective,” 398–402 on 398. For Toynbee’s recollections of Namier see Toynbee, Acquaintances, Chapter 6. 9  Morefield, Covenants Without Swords; Long and Schmidt, eds., Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations; Mazower, No Enchanted Palace.

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Commonwealth (1911)—suspiciously similar to the way in which he conceived the British Empire and its overseas colonies and dominions: both were peace-seeking empires that built their sea-power less through wars than by trade; both groomed a sense of citizenship overseas; and both created a unique cultural and political network connecting distant geographical areas, which offered a sense of shared destiny and union through culture or “civilization,” without obliterating local differences.10 “Civilization” and “Commonwealth” alike became almost synonymous terms in Zimmern’s lofty vision. Both flourished in conditions of diversity within unity, in a transnational yet connected world in which disperse communities cooperate, trade and share goods, ideas and values. It was probably Lionel G. Curtis, the uncrowned leader of the Round Table group, who took Zimmern’s neo-Hellenic frame of reference and helped popularize the term “Commonwealth.” The classicist did not seem to object. Like Namier and Toynbee, now postgraduate students, Zimmern too was drawn to Curtis’s vision of a future federal British commonwealth.11 Yet unlike Curtis, Zimmern stressed that an “organic unity” of white AngloSaxon settlers was not a prerequisite for grooming a sense of unity among the peoples of the Empire. Instead, he hinted at a new kind of Empire, capable of accommodating a moderate degree of nationalist sentiment that would be also extended to non-whites. Zimmern further developed his ideas after 1919, once he had switched from classics to international relations, in particular during the later 1920s, when he began talking explicitly about the emergence of a “Third British Empire.” This interpretation of the post-1919 world differed strikingly from the customary narratives which depict it as marking the transition from an age of Empires to an era of nation-states. Zimmern accepted that national sentiments might be on the rise and that colonial administrators would have to accept “the principle of nationality”; but he believed that cross-national cooperation and unity were increasingly understood as attractive alternatives to balkanization.12 Though not a student of classics, Namier was exposed to this teaching during his student years at Oxford and when working alongside Zimmern during the war. Equally importantly, Zimmern’s “Hellenic” view of international affairs informed the approach of British delegates to the Paris Peace Conference, Namier included, who were required to read the  Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth.  Morefield, “‘An Education to Greece,’” 328–61. 12  Zimmern, The Third British Empire, 165. 10 11

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classified guiding draft Zimmern had prepared for a League of Nations.13 Zimmern thought highly of Namier. Writing in 1919 to C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, Zimmern described him as “a man of outstanding ability,” “the only [man] in the country with a thorough knowledge of the region of the Baltic to the Black Sea.”14 Though raised as a devout Christian, Zimmern’s sympathy for the young, ambitious Galician Jew may have had something to do with his Central European roots: his father came from a prominent Heidelberg Jewish family and had played a prominent part in the struggle for Jewish emancipation in Baden before fleeing to England after 1848.15 Much less well known is Namier’s exposure to the writings of Frederic William Maitland and Otto von Gierke at Oxford. Namier was exposed to the work of the prominent Cambridge historian of English law through his mentor, Arthur Lionel Smith, fellow and later Master of Balliol (1916–1924). In 1908, when Namier arrived at Oxford, Smith was writing a series of lectures about Maitland,16 and promoting the idea of establishing a Maitland Library at the University.17 His fascination with Maitland was no passing fancy, but closely tied to his attempts—and those of A. L. Fisher’s—to develop a school of modern history at Oxford. Though Maitland was primarily known as a jurist, Smith regarded his writings as offering the best training in history. Maitland’s comparative approach that read English law in relation to the law of Western Europe was, Smith believed, his greatest achievement. It forced English readers to discard old beliefs in a timeless “law of the land,” and to begin historicizing their legal system instead, appreciating the ways in which this unsystematic code had been developed under varying influences and during different periods. Above all, Maitland’s teachings forced future historians to pay close attention to corporate bodies—communal units that resided within the state, yet in formal separation from it. Namier quickly became Smith’s star student. The slim body of correspondence between the two, which continues long after Namier had graduated from Balliol, reveals faint echoes of a close, albeit asymmetrical  Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations, 99.  C.  P. Scott index card, A/N2/3, at the Manchester Guardian Archive, John Rylands University Library, Manchester. 15  Muhs, “Jews of German Background in British Policies,” 177–94 on 189. 16  Smith, Frederic William Maitland. 17  Elton, F.W.  Maitland, 3–4; On this project Smith cooperated with Fisher (who was Maitland’s brother-in-law). 13 14

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relationship between the tutor and his protégé. Smith made sincere efforts to help his ambitious student, whom he described to a colleague as “a man of most unusual brains, a Jew, whose family have (or had) large estates in Galicia, and suffered under Austrian rule,” emphasizing that “[h]e has long been naturalized, and is and always has been as ‘anti-German’ as anyone I have ever met.”18 Namier did not remain in debt. The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929) opened with a moving acknowledgment: “It is difficult for me to speak here about Mr. A. L. Smith who was much more than a teacher to us old Balliol men; he was our friend and guardian to whom we turned for help and advice … [and] perhaps the best history teacher of our time.”19 The strong emphasis Smith put on identifying “corporate bodies” provides one of the keys for understanding Namier’s seminal 1929 study, if not Namierism as a whole. Identifying corporations whose existence predates modern society allowed Namier to unearth the pre-ideological roots of the British parliamentary system and provide a different, nonWhiggish narrative about the development of Britain’s state apparatus. Here, both Smith and Maitland took their cues from Gierke. For Gierke, supra-individual associations captured a certain “group personality” which, Maitland believed, was not something that could be defined simply via technical legal language, because “group personality is no purely legal phenomenon. The law-giver may say that it does not exist, where as a matter of moral sentiment, it does exist.”20 For Namier, this was an exciting, new vernacular he could utilize for purposes of his historical research. He was not alone: Ernest Barker praised Maitland for turning legal scholarship into sociology,21 and John Neville Figgis, who began developing a pluralist theory in his lectures on Churches in the Modern State (1911), also drew inspiration from Maitland’s corporatism.22 These English readings of Gierke helped liberalize a thinker who was, after all, a 18  A. L. Smith to the principal, Reading College, June 25, 1918, A. L. Smith Papers, N1, Balliol College Archive, St Cross Church, Holywell. 19  L. B. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, xii-xiii. The first edition came out in London with Macmillan in 1929. References in this chapter refer to the paging in the 2nd edition. 20  F.  W. Maitland, “Moral Personality and Legal Personality,” in Nicholls, The Pluralist State, 158–69, on 165. 21  Ernest Barker, “Maitland as a Sociologist”,168–85 on 168–9. For discussion see Julia Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics, esp. 72–3. 22  Figgis, Churches in the Modern State. For A. L. Smith’s review see “Dr. Figgis’s Churches in the Modern State.” The Commonwealth: a Christian social magazine (February 1914): 53–57 (Pt.1) and (March 1914): 83–87 (Pt. 2).

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conservative nationalist. While Gierke assumed that studying primordial communities rigorously would provide him with access to raw expressions of the German Volksgeist, his British admirers did not think of a unitary, organic “body politic,” and stressed instead the multiplicity of “fellowships” (Genossenschaft). Maitland’s achievement, in this reading, lay in his ability to unearth these various civic bodies, which cut across state boundaries, resisting the temptation to centralize power. It was Maitland himself, a fine anti-Statist Whig liberal, who made the political warning explicit, declaring that “Roman law here as elsewhere, would sooner or later have brought absolutism in its train.”23 Reading English history as a dramatic clash between common and civil law provided one of the most powerful intellectual underpinnings for an English sense of otherness from “the Continent,” where legal edicts imposed by rulers from above provided the foundations for a centralized state power. This narrative, no doubt, intensified Namier’s sentimental anglophilia. Methodologically, it was also an approach which convinced Namier of the need to develop the new toolbox for historical research, which today bears his name, allowing him to unearth the deep, premodern roots of these local corporations. Imperial federalism, the third type of historiographical conversation to which the young Namier was exposed, emerged just as Fisher and Smith were making their first strides in modern European and English history. Before 1914 it was primarily promoted by Hugh Edward Egerton, another of Namier’s teachers who served as the inaugural Beit Professor of Colonial History at Oxford.24 Egerton plainly intended his scholarship to serve as a vehicle for his imperialist opinions. Unlike Zimmern and the younger ­illuminati associated with the Round Table group, Egerton felt no special urge to replace “Empire” or “colonialism” with the more politically correct “Commonwealth.” Instead, he believed that the historicist approach would allow him to show that underneath what the apparently random, even capricious reactions by British colonial policy makers to changing circumstances, there was in fact a mighty system in the making and a clear direction of development—namely, a consistent evolutionary move towards

 Frederic William Maitland, The Constitutional History of England, 22–3.  The story of the Beit Chair and the institutionalization of imperial history was told brilliantly in Behm, Imperial History and the Global Politics of Exclusion: Britain, Chapters. 4–5. 23 24

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federal imperialism.25 When Namier studied with him, Egerton was completing another major study, Federations and Unions within the British Empire, which surveyed the Canadian, Australian, and South African constitutional developments. Reviving a Victorian vision of imperial federation, Egerton interpreted the Dominions’ development through a teleological prism, as culminating in a federalism he described as the type of government that “is found where communities, which possess for certain purposes a distinct political existence, join together to form a common whole, without losing their separate organization.”26 Egerton sought to formalize and institutionalize this type of relationship by establishing an imperial executive and an imperial constitution, as did Arthur Berriedale Keith, the legal scholar and architect of the Dominions division at the Colonial Office (est. 1909). Published in 1911, the same year as Zimmern’s famous study on the Greek commonwealth, Egerton’s book was immediately set for History finals at Oxford. The imperial federalism he promoted was closely linked to his activities as an educator, a key figure at the Rhodes Trust which sent scholars to Oxford from all four corners of the Empire, and a member of the League of Empire.27 He sought to make Oxford the prime site for exercising soft power and grooming future colonial collaborators. At a meeting of the Royal Colonial Institute in 1908, he admitted that a student from the colonies educated in Oxford “who had come under the spell of its perennial beauty might in the future come to criticize British policy,” but believed his interaction with English students would prevent that, since “[t]he fresh air of personal contact could alone clear the cobwebs of misunderstanding and prejudice which germinate in the stuffy chambers of isolation and ignorance.”28 Namier’s first research projects were calculated to attract Egerton and secure funding from the Rhodes Trust. Yet unlike Smith, Egerton was not eager to help Namier; he found him quite obnoxious. “I know Namier to be a most conscientious and zealous worker,” Egerton wrote to the Secretary of the Rhodes Trust, “his one weak point, between ourselves,

25  Egerton, A Short History of British Colonial Policy, esp. 451–80. This was the book which established Egerton’s reputation, and thanks to which he was appointed the first Beit professor (1905–20). 26  Egerton, Federations and Unions within the British Empire, 8. 27  e.g. Egerton’s contribution to Lectures on British Colonization and Empire. First Series (1600–1783). ed. F. A. Kirkpatrick (London: J. Murray, 1906). 28  “Oxford and The Empire.” The Times, December 9, 1908, 11.

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being that he has possibly an exaggerated opinion of himself.”29 Even so, Namier’s appointment as Fellow of the Royal Colonial Institute in the spring of 1912—a position he attained after failing to win the more prestigious All Souls Prize Fellowship—could not have been made without Egerton’s blessing. Shortly thereafter Namier won the Beit Prize for an essay surveying “Proposals for Imperial Federation before 1887.” This extended essay, known to Namier scholars from reports in the local press, is nowhere to be found, and was presumably destroyed during the forties.30 We know, however, that the prize was divided between Namier and Alfred LeRoy Burt, a Canadian Rhodes scholar at Corpus Christi tutored by Egerton, who produced an exhausting survey of eighteenth and nineteenth-­ century proposals of closer imperial union and Imperial Federation schemes.31 Egerton’s preface to Burt’s study, stating that “the centripetal forces” pushing towards closer Imperial unity are stronger than ever before,” reflects the enormous optimism Egerton impressed upon his students. Given the context in which Namier’s essay was written and its intended audience, we have good reason to suspect the influence of Egerton here too. Most likely, the Beit professor encouraged both young scholars to dive into an ocean of past manuscripts in search of historical precedents that would guide future imperial federalist architects. As we shall see next, these three strands of prewar liberal thought—the internationalist, the corporatist and the federalist—found their way into Namier’s mature political and historiographical work. But before leaping forward into the 1920s and 1930s, we must take note of a fourth type of conversation about the role of “small states” to which Namier was exposed during the war.

29  Egerton to Philip H. Kerr, August 11, 1926, in NAM/1 Box/1a/1, Lewis B. Namier Papers, John Rylands University Library, Manchester. 30  Oxford University Gazette, October 16, 1912; Oxford University Gazette, January 29, 1913; The London Times, January 28, 1913. 31  Unlike Namier, Burt published his essay the following year under the title Imperial architects; being an account of proposals in the direction of a closer imperial union, made previous to the opening of the first Colonial conference of 1887 (Oxford: B.H.  Blackwell, 1913). Egerton contributed a flattering preface to the book.

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Meddling in the Middle In the summer of 1914, Namier returned to Britain after an unsuccessful attempt to find employment in the US just as war broke out. Patriotic zeal and an unrealistic sense of his own abilities drove him to volunteer for the Royal Flying Corps, from which he was quickly rejected for poor eyesight. Soon afterwards he and Toynbee were recruited by C. F. Masterman to work under him at the propaganda agency at Wellington House. The two Balliol scholars found themselves sharing an office. Their role changed in 1917 with the establishment of the Intelligence Bureau of the Department of Information, when they became expert advisers on Habsburg (Namier) and Ottoman (Toynbee) lands. The Bureau soon merged into the PID— Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office. Under these circumstances, Namier’s knowledge of the ethnic and national complexities that animated Central Europe, terra incognita for most Foreign Office men, became a valuable asset. As he studied Habsburg national minorities and the downfall of the Habsburg Empire, Namier felt that he was no longer simply writing about politics, but making it. Typically, he was to claim personal responsibility for the break-up of the Habsburg Empire: “I may say,” he confided to Isaiah Berlin years later, “that I pulled it to pieces with my own hands.”32 During these years Namier got to know the journalist and future historian Robert William Seton-Watson, who was put in charge of the East and Central European section. Oxford ties played a role here again—Seton-­ Watson was H. A. L. Fisher’s former student. Crucially, he was also a close friend of Eduard Beneš and Tomáš G. Masaryk. Like Namier, all three loathed the Habsburgs, and used The New Europe—a weekly magazine launched by Seton-Watson in October 1916—to express their views. Quickly, the weekly became famous for openly supporting the national liberation movements of Central Europe. Namier, alongside Zimmern, Toynbee, E. H. Carr, James Hedlman-Morley, were among its British contributors, adding the glow of highbrow journalism to wartime propaganda.33 32  Isaiah Berlin, “L. B. Namier: A Personal Impression,” 224. On the PID see Sanders and Taylor, British Propaganda During the First World War, 1914–18. 33  Correspondence and memoranda related to “The New Europe” and “The New Europe Society” are preserved as part of R.W. Seton-Watson Papers, SEW/2, School of Slavonic and East European Studies Library, University College London. See also Larry Wolff, Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe, chap. 2.

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The tone of Namier’s New Europe articles was bold and unapologetically combative. They advocated dismantling Austria-Hungary and expressed sympathy for the national self-determination demanded by national groups oppressed by the Habsburgs. These writings also showcased Namier’s perennialist understanding of nationalism. He presented all the Central and East European national movements he supported as quintessentially “non-modernist,” the products of long histories whose roots went back to the Middle Ages, entwining ethnic, religious, and cultural aspects of group identity. Predictably, he put much emphasis on the ways in which territoriality residing for extended periods in the same region—groomed an almost instinctive sense of nationality and homeland among Central Europeans suffering under the Habsburg yoke. The Czechoslovaks played a central role in these narratives. Dubbing them the “Slav bastion in the West,” Namier traced their origins back to the Hussite schism and Bohemian Wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, describing in great detail how a distinct spoken language, common religious identity, shared historical memory, and strong ties to territory combined over an extended period to create a distinctive cultural identity that resisted pressures to surrender to German cultural hegemony. Cultural struggles were equally important in Namier’s analysis. Citing Alfred de Musset, “L’homme est un apprenti, la douleur est son maître, Et nul ne se connaît tant qu’il n’a pas souffert” (“Man is an apprentice, pain is his master, and until he suffers, man doesn’t truly know himself”), Namier conveyed his own view that only through suffering could national groups truly come to know themselves.34 The Czechs were, in his words, a “peasant nation,” but their uncompromising identification with Protestantism which set them apart from the Catholic Habsburgs, and the fact they were deeply rooted in land, had forced the “small and isolated Slav nation” to struggle interminably against “dominant races” on all its fronts.35 Prussia’s militarist Junkerism was presented as the Czech’s mirror opposite: chauvinistic and irredentist, it did not evolve from a unique combination of religion, culture and territory but grew from the oppression of others. Already during the Great War, long before Hitler’s rise to power, Namier had reached his verdict: German nationalism was a product of an inflamed, imaginative conception of expansionist nationalism,

 L. B. Namier, The Czecho-Slovaks, an Oppressed Nationality, 6–7.  Ibid., p. 4. Compare with Seton-Watson, German, Slav, and Magyar.

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distinguishing Herrenvölker (“master nations”) from smaller nations, who were expected to remain subordinate for all eternity. Namier’s whole-hearted support of the Czechoslovak struggle is not only indicative of his perennialist view of nationality and profound “anti-­ Teutonic” convictions. It also reveals his understanding of the “small states” he witnessed emerging in post-imperial, rapidly nationalizing Central Europe. Namier was not exceptional at this point. Rather, he was expressing support for Masaryk, the exiled philosopher-king, who made himself the chief spokesman of Central Europe’s “small nations.” Masaryk’s preoccupation with what he defined as the “Problém Malého Národa” (problem of a small nation) can be traced back to a series of lectures and essays from the early 1900s that defended the Czechs’ right to foster a national spirit through education and cultural institutions, unceasingly repressed by the Austrian authorities. In those earlier lectures, Masaryk began developing a liberal nationalist agenda, predating the so-­ called “Wilsonian moment” that would ultimately would become his trademark. Notably, he did not hold out political independence as the ideal for small nations. Independence was not a worthwhile trophy for a small national minority that could not attain economic self-reliance. He insisted on national autonomy instead, proposed as a substitute to statist conceptions of politics.36 The appeal of Masaryk’s ideas for Namier is not surprising. Equally important, his nationalist message seemed to fit perfectly with the visions of postwar Europe being developed by Namier’s British counterparts. Masaryk’s appointment as professor at the newly formed School of Slavonic Studies in London—a position secured largely through the intervention of Seton-Watson and his group—gave him an opportunity to revisit these issues for a British audience. His inaugural October 1915 lecture, “The Problem of Small Nations in the European Crisis,” envisioned Central Europe as a mosaic of free nations, but imposed on “Great Nations”—a term used as a placeholder for Britain—the duty “to protect the smaller [nations’] borders or at least to help them to join and organize their federations.”37 The degree of autonomy these states would enjoy was left ambiguous. Masaryk returned to the subject in December 1916, in an 36  Masaryk, Kroměříž Lectures: Problem of a Small Nation. These lectures were the offshoot of a course taught by Masaryk in 1902 at the University of Chicago under the title “Philosophy of History of Small Nations.” 37  Masaryk, “The Problem of Small Nations in the European Crisis,” 32.

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article for Seton-Watson’s periodical. By that stage, he no longer concealed his belief that unlike “the subject-nations of Austria-Hungary and Prussia” some of the smaller “Central European” national groups— Estonians, Letts, Lithuanians—“would be content with national autonomy within a bigger state.”38 The new Czechoslovak republic and the Polish independent state, however, were to be the exception. By virtue of promoting national autonomies and creating new states, Central Europe would become “a peculiar zone of smaller, unfree or half free nations,” prearranged by “Great Nations.”39 Unsurprisingly, Masaryk’s talk was well received by its English audience. Even the language he used, including the distinction between “small” and “great” nations, recalled currents in Victorian political thought.40 Thus H. A. L. Fisher used the same vocabulary in 1914 when defending the Belgians and the Dutch, envisioning a line of small “buffer states” that would stand in the way of “Germania irredenta.”41 Clearly, the existence of small states advocated by Masaryk did not contradict the Oxford-trained liberal’s vision for maintaining future global stability through a supra-national, essentially imperial structure, which would provide the common framework for these small states. In these conversations, the sovereignty of small states was always defined in relation to imperial government. To members of the British delegation later sent to the Versailles Peace talks—an outsized delegation that included virtually the entire wartime Intelligence Bureau—it was obvious that the powers of the new European states should and would be circumscribed.42 As Mark Mazower and Susan Pedersen have reminded us, the League of Nations—to date, the boldest liberal experiment in crafting a mechanism for the maintenance of global order—was predicated upon a similar balancing act between national demands and indirect imperial world order.43 These negotiations did not have to wait for 1919 or the 38  Masaryk “Pangermanism and the Zone of Small Nations,” 271–7 on 275 (emphasis added). 39  Masaryk “At the Eleventh Hour” in Seton-Watson, Masaryk in England, 153–202 on 193 (emphasis added). 40  Varouxakis, “‘Great’ Versus ‘Small’ Nations”, 136–58. 41  Fisher, “The Value of Small States.”. The essay was later reprinted in Bryce’s The War of Democracy, the Allies’ Statement. 42  MacMillan, Paris 1919, 145. 43  Mazower, No Enchanted Palace; Susan Pedersen, The Guardians. The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire.

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establishment of the mandate systems in the early 1920s. They began during the Great War, and it was against this backdrop that much of Namier’s view of nationalism and the role of new states crystalized. Namier’s cry of Delanda est Austria reflected a desire to create a balance of power between a plurality of smaller, nationally controlled regions in Central Europe: a political constellation that would limit the ability of a major power like Austria-Hungary to become “subservient politically to German political ambitions.”44 Late Victorian conceptions of liberal imperialism, to borrow Theodore Koditschek’s term, still echoed here. They were adapted, nonetheless, to the exciting new international conditions forged by the war.45 These wartime circumstances gave rise to the distinction Namier’s drew between good and bad nationalism. Revisiting the subject in light of the centenary of 1848, against the backdrop of a Second World War and the Holocaust, Namier’s basic formula remained the same—although his implicit point of reference was no longer the bygone Habsburg empire with its “Tyrolese fanatics” but Nazi Germany.46 In both he identified the same irredentist and inflamed “Germanic” nationalism. Crucially, the historicist framework developed by Namier to read Central European affairs, was not divorced from his anglophile fable: Britain exemplified stability gained through a moderate gentry and parliament; it was, moreover, a “great nation” responsible for checking the excessive nationalist wave. Promoting the national independence of “small nations” and future allies at no point implied a rejection of this twentieth-century variant of Seeley’s vision of “Greater Britain.” It was the opportunity to transform liberal imperialist theory into liberal imperialist practice. We are left with the question of whether Namier deemed it legitimate for Britain to apply one political logic to Central Europe and a different one to the ex-Ottoman territories. This brings us to Namier’s view of Empire—and to the way in which he incorporated within it his idiosyncratic reading of Jewish nationality.

 Hugh and Christopher Seton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe, 210.  Varouxakis, “‘Great’ Versus ‘Small’ Nations”; Duncan Bell, “John Stuart Mill on Colonies,” 34–64; Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism and the Historical Imagination. 46  L. B. Namier, The Czecho-Slovaks, 19. 44 45

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Third Empire or Third Temple? Namier’s The Structure of Politics exploded on the scene in 1929, instantly gaining for its author prestige and acclaim. The book, which argues that understanding eighteenth century English politics rests on the recovery of supra-individual corporations and the way in which they function, allowed Namier to draw on the ideas of Maitland and Gierke to which he was exposed as a student. Abstract ideas and ideology had no room in Namier’s uncompromising, bottom-up analytic approach. The patriotic undertone of the book—which presented the parliamentary system as a genius of English invention—was unmistakable: [The parliament] was neither a doctrine nor an empty phrase; it expressed in natural and unavoidable concomitant of English gregarious existence. A House, just as a team, is a joint personality superior to that of individuals who compose it […] The principle established in France by the Great Revolution—“a fair field to ability”—was realized, without reasoning, in the eighteenth century British Parliament.47

John Brooke, Namier’s loyal assistant and one of his earliest commentators, understood this to be the essence of Namierism: “An institution has a life and personality of its own, transcending those of the individuals who compose it; but to re-create it as a living organism Namier had to go beyond the bare records of its corporate life and study the lives of its Members.”48 Quite so. Notably, Namier described the House of Commons as a “political nation.” The political nation guaranteed liberty precisely because it took the existence of intermediate groups, standing between the individual and the state, as the building blocks of politics. The modern state apparatus, by contrast, crushed these ancien régime associations. It flattened the human condition, erased the plurality built into society, and carried the risk of putting the individual in direct servitude to the central government. The notion of landedness imbued Namier’s reading of English politics with a singular (and undeniably conservative) flavor. For Namier, communal consciousness always coincided with territory. Landownership shaped the emergence of associations, and in England the gentry provided the main source of stability. It would be hard to overstate Namier’s  Ibid., 11.  John Brooke, “Namier and Namierism,” 335.

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fascination with the English gentry. This was rooted in his biography, as someone who had been brought up in a landowning family (uncommon among Jews). Among his remaining papers at Manchester University we find hundreds of press clippings dealing with the life of the English gentry. In his next book, England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930), he would make the connection between his analysis of English political history and the notorious Jewish question explicit: The relations of groups of men to plots of land, of organized communities to units of territory, form the basic content of political history; social stratifications and convulsions, primarily arising from the relationship of men to land, make the greater, not always fully conscious, part of the domestic history of nations-and even under urban and industrial conditions ownership of land counts for more than is usually supposed. To every man, as to Brutus, the native land is his life-giving Mother, and the State raised upon the land is his law-giving Father, and the days cannot be long of a nation which fails to honor either.... There is some well-nigh mystical power in the ownership of spaces.49

He continued: Only one nation has survived for two thousand years, though an orphan— my own people, the Jews. But then in the God-given Law we have enshrined the authority of a state, in the God-Promised Land the idea of a Mother-­ Country; through the centuries from Mount Sinai we have faced Eretz Israel, our Land. Take away either, and we cease to be a nation; let both live again, and we shall be ourselves once more.

Bold Zionist messages rarely drew on studies of English history because the historical trajectories of the two “political nations” are poles apart. Yet, Namier’s powerful crie de coeur explicitly linked landedness and the Jewish question. Countering the age-old images of Jews as nation of nomads, seafaring traders, and Luftmenschen, Namier’s Zionism first and foremost sought to restore the Jews to their land. This “landedness” became Namier’s trademark as a Zionist. Was Namier’s Zionism a parallel of his support of the Czechs and the small nations struggling for emancipation from the Habsburgs? In 1917 Namier had no problem comparing Central Europe to the Middle East.  L. B. Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution, 20.

49

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Suggestive, in this respect, was his use of the label “the European Middle East” to describe the vast geographical space inhabited by Slavs, Germans and Habsburgs, and his description of the Czechs as a precious “relic,” a miniature remnant of primeval times. But he consistently described Jews, unlike the Czechs or any other “peasant nations,” as a landless minority. Jews were not bound together by the “healthy,” normal feelings that characterize the organic communal Gemeinschaft existence, nor by the steady attachment to land and ongoing customs one finds in the English gentry, but by religion. He therefore saw territorialization—not the endorsement of Herzl’s calls for establishment of Der Judenstaat—as the key to solving the Jewish problem. When asked in December 1917 to compose a memorandum on behalf of the British Foreign Office defending its decision to support the Zionist movement and issue the Balfour Declaration, both Namier and Toynbee realized that, contrary to Zionist propaganda, Britain’s formal recognition was not to be interpreted as meaning Britain aimed to create a Jewish state. Referring to the “folly and absurdity” of forming an independent Albanian kingdom against the wishes of the local population, the NamierToynbee memo warned against establishing another Albania in Palestine and rejected even the suggestion that Palestine would become an autonomous state under foreign protection. Rather, since “Jewish nationality must be founded on and limited by the [Jewish] religion,” the very notion of a Jewish nation-state is an absurd anachronism, resting “on some loose and obscure principle of race and ethnographic peculiarity,” which, paradoxically, “would not be Jewish in any spiritual sense.”50 Shortly afterwards, Namier became involved in the later-­forgotten scheme of turning Palestine into the seventh Dominion of the British Commonwealth of Nations, a brainchild of Colonel Josiah C. Wedgwood, who Namier befriended in the late 1920s when they planned an ambitious project to record the history of the English parliament.51 Writing in November 1936, as a new wave of violence swept Palestine and threw the feasibility of maintaining the mandate open to question, Namier still believed Palestine’s future lay as a self-governing Dominion: 50  “Zionist movement” (December 5, 1917), BNA, FO371/3054/237630, 7 & 5. The memo was composed in response to a hostile dispatch on Zionism by US Vice-Consul Edelman in Geneva. For additional details see James Renton, “Flawed Foundations,” 15–39. 51  Dubnov, “Jewish Nationalism in the Wake of World War I” 5–35 [Hebrew]. On Namier’s contribution to the history of Parliament see Hayton, “Sir Lewis Namier, Sir John Neale and the Shaping of the History of Parliament,” 187–211.

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[A]t a later stage, when Palestine is fit to constitute a self-governing unit in a wider federation, the British Commonwealth offers to the Jews a suitable framework, such as no other European state or empire could offer…. British and Jewish interests in Palestine have by now become inseparable, and while the Jews require British protection and support, they can best defend British interests in that key position which Palestine forms in the Eastern Mediterranean.52

Dominionization—the formation of national entities under the Crown that were not fully independent nation-states—became an attractive formula. It was the closure of a circle opened with Zimmern at the eve of the Great War: instead of disintegrating, the Empire of the future, renamed the Commonwealth of Nations or simply the Third British Empire, would accommodate a moderate degree of nationalist sentiment. There was a clear connection between this optimistic conviction and the way Namier understood his own historiographical project. The key feature of the imperial problem in the eighteenth century was that Britain was ill-adapted to imperial expansion. With parliament unable to extend political rights to the settlers in the colonies, the American Revolution became unavoidable. The liberal imperialism of Namier’s age—the transformation of the British Empire into a Commonwealth—would show that Britishness was not confined to the British Isles, avoiding the breakup of the first Empire experienced in 1776.53 For Namier, supporting Jewish nationalism in Palestine became integral to this project. Turning Jews from unrooted Luftmenschen into colonial settlers was both about healing the Jews and about making them the vehicles of Greater Britain. Britain’s liberal Empire was assigned a meta-historical role—to provide the imperial umbrella overseeing immigration and protecting the restoration of Jews to their ancestral land. The  Lewis B. Namier, “Palestine and the British Empire,” 84–93, on 89 & 92.  In a letter sent to the Rhodes Trust, Namier explained that he considered The Structure of Politics to be a first volume in a trilogy that would analyze “The Imperial Problem during the American Revolution,” and would bear directly “on what I consider to have been the most fundamental factors in the American conflict: that the British Parliament was (and still remains) a territorial, and not a tribal constitution, and that therefore its authority could not extend to members of the race permanently settled in other territories.” During the eighteenth century, he explained, “the King was as yet a real factor in the British politics and could not be separated from the British Parliament, and that therefore the ‘tribal’ sovereignty of the Crown, now the bond of the Empire, was as yet impossible.” See Namier to Philip H. Kerr, 6-Feb-29, in NAM/1 Box/1a/2. 52 53

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Jewish nationalists must keep their side of the bargain: consenting to British authority and serving as its settler colonialists.54 Namier’s story did not end here. The war against Nazism and the postwar imperial disintegration shook many of his earlier beliefs. Nevertheless, at no stage did he consider resettling in Palestine. His writings from the mid-1940s on 1848 and the dangers of excessive nationalism stood in contrast with the prevailing mood in the Jewish world circa 1948, as the British mandate was coming to an end, replaced by bitter hostility and an exceptionally violent war of national independence. With his conversion to Anglicanism in 1947—a precondition for marriage imposed on him by Julia de Beausobre, later Lady Namier—the parting of ways was complete. Namier’s case demonstrates, however, some of the complexities of the liberal-cum-Jewish nexus of interwar years. Reassessing the different modes in which Jewish identity and liberalism intersected, one path we may choose is to treat liberalism in abstraction, as a logic or doctrine derived from seminal texts. Alternatively, we could reconstruct the worlds of meaning inhabited by determinate historical subjects and see how they defined and defended their liberalism. Namier’s liberal imperialist views, coupled with his conceptions of territory-based nationalism, provide a case for this latter approach.

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———. 1958a. 1848: Seed-Plot of History. In Namier, Vanished Supremacies, Vanished Supremacies: Essays on European History, 1812–1918, 21–30. London: H. Hamilton. ———. 1958b. Nationalitye and Liberty. In Namier, Vanished Supremacies: Essays on European History, 1812–1918, 31–53. London: H. Hamilton. ———. 1969. Palestine and the British Empire [Orig. 1936]. In Namier, In the Margin of History, 84–93. Freeport: Books for Libraries Press. Oxford University Gazette, October 16, 1912. Oxford University Gazette, January 29, 1913. Renton, James. 2010. Flawed Foundations: The Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate. In Britain, Palestine, and Empire: The Mandate Years, ed. Rory Miller, 15–19. Farnham: Ashgate. Rose, Norman. 1980. Lewis Namier and Zionism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sanders, Michael, and Philip M. Taylor. 1982. British Propaganda During the First World War, 1914–18. London: Macmillan. Scott, C.  P. index card, A/N2/3, at the Manchester Guardian Archive, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom. Seton-Watson, Hugh and Christopher. 1981. The Making of a New Europe: R. W. Seton- Watson and the Last Years of Austria-Hungary. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Seton-Watson, R., and W. German. 1916. Slav, and Magyar: A Study in the Origins of the Great War. London: Williams and Norgate. Smith, A. L. 1914. Dr. Figgis’s Churches in the Modern State. [Book review]. The Commonwealth: A Christian Social Magazine (February): 53–7 (Pt.1) and (March): 83–7 (Pt. 2). ———. 1918. To the Principal, Reading College, June 25, A. L. Smith Papers, N1, Balliol College Archive, University of Oxford, St. Cross Church, Holywell, Oxford. Smith, A.L. 1971. Frederic William Maitland: Two Lectures and a Bibliography. New York: B. Franklin. [orig. 1908]. Stapleton, Julia. 1994. Englishness and the Study of Politics: The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toynbee, Arnold J. 1967. Acquaintances. London: Oxford University Press. Varouxakis, Georgios. 2007. ‘Great’ Versus ‘Small’ Nations: Size and National Greatness in Victorian Political Thought. In Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Duncan Bell, 136–158. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolff, Larry. 2020. Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zimmern, Alfred Eckhard. 1911. The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth- Century Athens. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1926. The Third British Empire. London: H. Milford. ———. 1917. “Zionist Movement” (December 5). British National Archives, FO371/3054/237630, p. 7 & 5.

PART V

Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Liberalism

CHAPTER 14

1848 and Beyond: Jews in the National and International Politics of Secularism and Revolution Abigail Green

1848: Jews in the Politics of Liberal Revolution Liberalism and the Jews came together in 1848, or thereabouts. Historians of Jewish emancipation have traditionally seen the Berlin Enlightenment and the French revolution as points of departure; 1848 has received less attention. Yet the revolutions were a foundational moment in Jewish history. Not only did they “set on fire the whole structure of Jewish minority life … from the Atlantic to the Black Sea” as Salo Baron memorably remarked, but it was the revolutions that first brought Jews into the European political mainstream—defiant and unconverted.1 Liberalism is central to this story, just as it was to the revolutions themselves. For 1848 1  Baron, “The Impact of the Revolution of 1848 on Jewish Emancipation,” 204. See also Baron, “Church and State Debates in the Jewish Community of 1848,” in Mordecai M. Kaplan Jubilee Volume, 49–72.

A. Green (*) Brasenose College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_14

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did not merely represent the end of feudal Europe, the high-water mark of Mazzini’s democratic and cosmopolitan brand of liberal nationalism, the capitulation of the bourgeoisie before the threat of working class activism, and the birth-pangs of the modern, democratic state. It also marked the beginning of the end for the Christian state—a development in which Jewish liberals played a critical part. Historians have tended to explore both 1848 and Jewish emancipation through the prism of national histories. By contrast, this chapter foregrounds the transnational dimensions of Jewish and liberal activism with a view to bringing national and international narratives about liberalism and Jews together. In so doing, I draw our attention to those Jews who were elected to parliaments and constituent assemblies as leading exponents of a recognisably liberal politics, and to their journalistic counterparts. Some of these men figured in the revolutionary context as “radicals,” “democrats,” and “republicans,” but as Chris Bayly has argued these labels— which mattered so much to contemporaries—were by no means incompatible with a commitment to political liberalism broadly defined, which was always clearly distinct from conservatism and socialism.2 Thinking about these men brings 1848 into sharp relief as a liberal moment with a specifically Jewish dimension and underlines the extent to which “Jewish internationalism” was a form of specifically liberal politics, illuminating the relationship between liberalism and Jewish history in new ways. International Jewish activism emerged from the liberal politics of revolution and empire and represented in some sense a fusion between the two. Historians have foregrounded the latter, taking the Damascus Affair as a starting point and focusing on the interplay between Jewish internationalism and European imperialism.3 By contrast, the connection with the politics of liberal revolution has been understated. Yet the first international organisation dedicated to improving Jewish rights abroad was created in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1830, promoted by Polish exiles with Jewish antecedents, and headed by that symbol of liberal revolution General Lafayette.4 The “Philanthropic Society for the Acceleration of Jewish Emancipation throughout the World” (1833–4) proved shortlived, but the involvement of James de Rothschild and the up-and-coming 2  Bayly, “Liberalism at Large,” in Bayly and Biagini, eds., Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism 1830–1920, 358. Wallerstein, Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, takes a similar approach. 3  See Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews; Frankel, The Damascus Affair; Bar-Chen, Weder Asiaten noch Orientalen; Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity; Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore. 4  Duker, “The Lafayette Committee for Jewish Emancipation,” in Blau and Friedman, eds., Essays on Jewish Life and Thought, 169–82.

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lawyer Adolphe Crémieux suggests it was more than just a flash-in-thepan. For there were deep continuities between the cosmopolitan liberal nationalism of the 1830s, the events of 1840 in which both men played their part, and the establishment of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in 1860 by Crémieux and a group of prominent Parisian Jews. Jewish internationalism, then, was embedded not just in the politics of liberal imperialism but also in the transnational mobilisations around revolutionary nationalist causes of the 1830s and 40s.5 In both contexts, it was motivated and legitimated by liberal rhetoric and concerns: not just “civilisation” and the “claims of suffering humanity,” but “civil and religious liberty” and the conflict between law and “arbitrary power.”6 International Jewish activism was, moreover, eventually taken forward by a transnational alliance of liberal politicians and journalists, quite a number of whom first rose to national prominence during 1848. Such men—and they were men—sit uneasily within a historiography that has emphasized the Frenchness of the Alliance, and seen Jewish internationalism too readily as a staging post towards Jewish nationalism.7 For Crémieux was not the only 1848er to play a leading role in the Jewish internationalism of the 1860s and 1870s. Others with similarly revolutionary pedigrees include the Hungarian Eduard Horn, the Bohemian Ignaz Kuranda, the Alsatian Armand Lévy, the Rhinelander Ludwig Bamberger, Frankfurt-born Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim, and the Prussian Eduard Lasker. How did their willingness to engage in international Jewish activism relate to their trajectories as liberal revolutionaries and politicians of national stature? What does it tell us about the interplay between liberal and ­ Jewish causes? Debates about Jewish emancipation have focused on the relationship between Jewishness, citizenship and a variety of “national” cultures.8 This problematic was not a major concern for Jewish 1848ers. Some of the most prominent certainly started out as emancipation activists. Crémieux first made his name as the barrister who overturned the Jewish oath in the Midi; he broke through into parliamentary politics on the back of his 5   More generally, see Green, “Humanitarianism in Nineteenth Century Context,” 1157–75; Bass, Freedom’s Battle; also Rodogno, Against Massacre. 6  See the discussion in Green, Montefiore, 139–41. 7  Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews; Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France; Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity. Graetz connects the Alliance to a ‘national’ Jewish narrative as does Silber, “A Hebrew Heart Beats in Hungary,” 84–105. 8  Birnbaum and Katznelson, eds., Paths of Emancipation.

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mission to Damascus.9 Leading Jewish members of the Frankfurt Vorparlament were also emancipation campaigners. Johann Jacoby’s earliest political pamphlet was directed towards this cause; he pushed civil and religious equality hard in 1840s Königsberg.10 Ignaz Kuranda’s influential journal, Die Grenzboten, had early asserted its status as one of the few pro-­ emancipation German newspapers.11 Gabriel Riesser, was the most prominent Jewish proponent of emancipation in Vormärz Germany, while Moritz Veit had defended the 1812 Judenedikt against backtracking by Prussian officials.12 In 1848 their focus was on the liberal nation not its Jewish citizens. Yet their prominence and electability during the revolutionary caesura speaks to a historical moment when attacking the religious underpinnings of the old order was a key plank of the liberal agenda.13 This commitment to revolutionary change reminds us that dismantling the old order meant more than challenging monarchic authority, abolishing noble privilege and emancipating the peasants. Religion was hardwired into the ancien regime, and these Jews at least grasped that civil and religious liberty was a properly revolutionary premise—not a conventional liberal piety. The outbreak of anti-Jewish violence from Alsace to Hungary does not detract from the truth of this observation.14 Some revolutionary politicians like Ludwig Philippson and Leopold Zunz are now remembered primarily as Jewish figures. Many are not. The impact of men like Crémieux and Michel Goudchaux, who held ministerial office during the Second Republic, of the Venetian ministers Leone Pincherle and Isaaco Pesaro Maurognato, of Jacoby, Kuranda and Riesser in the Frankfurt parliament, of radical young democrats like Ludwig Bamberger and Moritz Hartmann, and of the Viennese leaders Adolf

 On Crémieux see Posener, Adolphe Crémieux; Amson, Adolphe Crémieux.  “Ueber das Verhältnis des Herrn v. Streckfuß zur Emancipation der Juden” (1833), reproduced in Jacoby, Gesammelte Schrifte und Reden, Erster Theil, 2nd. ed., 4–42. On Jacoby see Silberner, Johann Jacoby. 11  K, “Preußen und die Juden,” 301–7; I.K., “Notizen,” 1471. For context see Schmitt, “Ignaz Kuranda’s Die Grenzboten.” 12  Veit, Der Entwurf einer Verordnung über die Verhältnisse der Juden und das Edikt Vom 11. März 1812. 13  For context see Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen Leben, and Toury, Die Politische Orientierungen der Juden in Deutschland, A-B. 14  See Langewiesche, “Pogrom-Alltag im ‘Völkerfrühling’ 1848. Revolutionserfahrungen Europäischer Juden,” in Fenske, ed., Alltag als Politik - Politik im Alltag, 445–64. 9

10

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Fischhof and Josef Goldmark transcended Jewish politics.15 These were not parochial figures. They pushed broadly conceived agendas that were neither Jewish nor particular. To view their universalism as a strategy rather than conviction is to miss the point. We could conceive of this as a moment when Jews began to look beyond the traditional vertical alliance with the state towards forging horizontal alliances with other liberal activists.16 Yet this analytical framework does not do justice to the properly liberal agendas of men like Crémieux, Jacoby and Fischhof, nor to their place at the center of the revolutionary moment, nor to the ways in which active participation in mainstream politics changed their agendas and self-understanding. They were Jews, and they stood by this—notwithstanding their mostly secular and invariably unorthodox convictions. They were not, in 1848, Jewish leaders, nor did they understand themselves as engaged in Jewish politics. Indeed, their efforts as liberals were directed towards rendering their Jewishness an irrelevance—something that set them apart from most Jews in this period. And yet, by their very presence at the heart of revolutionary politics these men cemented the synergy between Jewish and liberal causes because they embodied the connection between the two. This connection was structured by two key dynamics, both of which are contained within the rallying cry “civil and religious liberty”: a drive to assert equality before the law and in the political sphere regardless of class or religious origin; a related drive towards the secularization of politics and the state that often went with a radical anti-clericalism. These dynamics were compatible with emancipation, but distinct from it, just as they were compatible with liberalism but not integral to it—although dissenters and members of other religious minorities were also pushing in this direction.17 Yet secularism proved fundamental to the thrust of the revolution because Christianity had been bound up with every aspect of the ancien regime. Above all perhaps, the sudden reality of Jews in prominent positions of public authority during 1848 packed a symbolic punch. The Venetian 15  On France see Philippe, “Les Juifs Français”; on Venice see Levis Sullam, “Gli Ebrei e il 1848–49 a Venezia,” in Cecchinato, et  al., eds., La Differenza Repubblicana, 75–84. On Germany see Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen Leben Deutschlands, III, 1. On Austria see Häusler, “Demokratie und Emanzipation 1848,” 92–111. 16  See for instance Sorkin, “Montefiore and the Politics of Emancipation,” 23–5. 17  See Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion, Chapter 2. More generally, see Isabella, “Citizens or Faithful?,” 555–78.

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Republican leader Daniele Manin—himself only two generations away from the ghetto—grasped this very well when he included a Jew among his first ministerial appointments “as a sign of emancipation.”18 Even in France, where Jews had long been emancipated, the revolution marked a new phase in the secularization of politics. It was one thing to have a Jew representing the provincial constituency of Chinon, quite another to distribute prints of Crémieux garlanded with laurel leaves as one of five members of the French Provisional Government. For men like Fischhof, Jacoby and Riesser, the transition from political exclusion to writing constitutions and shaping national politics was even more dramatic. Little wonder they saw the struggle for Jewish rights and the struggle to build a new society as two sides of the same coin. Fischhof did not need to speak out in the Kremsier parliament on Jewish emancipation, because his very presence in that parliament as an “unemancipated” Jew was a radical challenge to the old order. He refrained from voicing his distrust of Rome and the Jesuits, but simply by leading the Corpus Christi procession to the altar of Vienna Cathedral in his capacity as head of the Sicherheitsausschuss, Fischhof demonstrated the radically secularizing thrust of the revolution and the threat it posed to Catholic authority.19 Working in committee, he and Goldmark shaped the Kremsier constitution in subtle ways that reflected their personal commitment to civil and religious equality.20 Jacoby’s place at the heart of opposition to the Prussian state for over three decades ensured this commitment remained for a long time on the Prussian liberal agenda.21

At Home and Abroad: Jews in the Midcentury Politics of Liberal Interventionism Reframing emancipation in 1848 as one facet of the secularizing liberal attack on the old order was an essential precondition for the emergence of the Alliance Israélite. Crucially, the overwhelming and ultimately  Keates, The Siege of Venice, 122.  We find indications of Fischhof’s strident anti-Catholicism in a much later letter. See Adolf Fischhof, Emmersdorf, May 231,877, to Michael Etienne, Sehr verehrter Freund, H.I.N.-65,341, Wienbibliothek Handschriften. 20   Adolf Fischhof, Grundrechte  - annotated in Fischhof’s hand, H.I.N.-99,568/1, Wienbibliothek Handschriften. 21  See for instance Letter 165. Jacoby to Hermann Büttner, Königsberg 11/07/1861; Jacobys Antrag in der Königsberger Versammlung liberaler Urwähler vom 20 Mai 1870, Silberner, ed., Johann Jacoby Briefwechsel 1850–1877, 155, 509. 18 19

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devastating experience of revolution and exile forged a powerful bond between Jewish and non-Jewish 1848ers. This kept the former at the heart of things. Men like the Hungarian Eduard Horn and the German radical banker Ludwig Bamberger became pivotal figures in the world of Parisian political exiles.22 In a suggestive but obscure reference to the climate of political ferment c.1859–60 when events in Italy were reaching a climax, Bamberger tellingly described its ingredients as: “300 Jews - 250 Christian Jews - 49 telegraphic dispatches - 21 [?illegible] - 3 imperial manifestos 60 whole - 82 half - 159 quarter agents de change = 23249 Morning Evening newspapers - one Italian brother - one Bavarian brother-in-law with ditto single sister - millions of Kreuzdonnerwetter and other pious wishes for freedom and nationality repulsed…”23 The Alliance was a product of this time and place--a milieu and a moment in which specifically French preoccupations, traditions and rhetoric cross-fertilized with the internationally oriented liberal activism of exiled revolutionaries from all over Europe. Crémieux, to be sure, had always understood international Jewish activism as intimately connected with other liberal causes. His entanglement with the Lafayette committee stemmed from his involvement in the Comité Polonaise. In 1840 he combined meeting Anglo-Jewish leaders in London with addressing the General Anti-Slavery Convention. Making reference to both the Abbé Grégoire and Daniel O’Connell, Crémieux emphasized his Jewishness and the common cause between Jews and other oppressed groups be they slaves, or Irishmen: “All liberties are united, and all persecutions are associated. Persecute, and you will make slaves; proclaim the equality of all, and you will create citizens.”24 By 1848 Crémieux’s commitment to an interventionist liberal foreign policy on behalf of oppressed nationalities and religious groups was well established. He spoke up for Lebanese Christians in the Chambre in July 1847 and took foreign policy as a primary theme when addressing the banquets that precipitated the fall of the July Monarchy. In these speeches, he did not mention Jewish rights when elaborating the connection between liberalism at  On Eduard Horn, see Silber, ‘Einhorn, Ignác’, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/ article.aspx/Einhorn_Ignac. For Bamberger’s perception of the central role played by Horn and the converted Hungarian journalist Friedrich Szarvady in the world of Hungarian exiles in Paris see Bamberger, 18 May 1861, to Moritz Hartmann, H.I.N. 45.599, Wienbibliothek. 23  Ludwig Bamberger to Moritz Hartmann, undated, H.I.N.-45,990, Wienbibliothek. 24  Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention, 167. 22

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home and abroad—but perhaps he did not need to. They remained an important dimension of his persona and worldview, re-emerging as a central facet of his liberal political activism with the foundation of the Alliance in 1860. The catalyst for this development was the kidnapping in 1858 of Edgardo Mortara, a Jewish boy from Bologna, by the Papal authorities. Such incidents were by no means unheard of: Edgardo had reportedly been baptized by a family servant, and the Church wished to save his soul by raising him as a good Catholic. This particular episode coincided with the breaking of the reactionary dam and the dawn of the so-called “new era.” The Mortara Affair became an international cause célèbre in the fevered months leading up to the first war of Italian unification because it violated key liberal principles—freedom of conscience and the sanctity of the home—underlining the problematic nature of Papal government. The willingness of groups like the Evangelical Alliance to embrace the Mortara cause suggested that the time was ripe for an international body dedicated to the cause of Jewish rights in particular and freedom of conscience more generally. Tellingly, the first act of the Alliance was to launch a fundraising campaign on behalf of the Christian survivors of massacres in Lebanon and Syria. Crémieux had a longstanding interest in this cause (which otherwise represented the Catholic tradition in French foreign policy). Unquestionably, however, the Alliance’s campaign on behalf of Syrian Christians was intended to underline the universal dimensions of its mission in ways that echoed the Evangelical Alliance’s similarly counterintuitive decision to support Swedish converts to Catholicism. That Sir Moses Montefiore launched a British campaign on behalf of the Syrian Christians at exactly this juncture speaks to a historical moment peculiarly propitious for transnational mobilizations around quasi-religious causes. In short, the ease with which liberal public opinion coalesced in 1858–59 around a Jewish grievance suggested the potential of Jewish rights—much like Polish, Italian or Protestant ones—as a focus for international liberal activism.25 This was a cause that could and did intersect with campaigns led by other, no less parochial, liberal lobbies. The Evangelical Alliance sent 25  See Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (London: Picador, 1997). Green, Montefiore, Chapters 12–13 explores the broader nexus of mobilisation around civil and religious liberty c.1858–1861. Specifically, on the Syrian initiatives see Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 151–3; Green, Montefiore, 289–92

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delegates to early meetings of the Alliance, while there was considerable crossover between Jewish and Polish activists in Paris and London. In France, the Alliance’s initiative failed to win over Catholic opinion, but outside France it helped insinuate international Jewish activism within a broader nexus of liberal causes. Demokrata Polski, for instance, gave details of the Alliance’s Syrian initiative in a brief article that stressed the founders’ desire to set up permanent committees in defense of people persecuted for religious reasons, and to establish funds to “help victims of fanaticism whatever their religion.”26 Later, both the insurrectionary authorities and emigré activists in Paris and London sought to mobilize Jewish opinion by contrasting the Polish rebels’ commitment to civil equality and religious liberty with the oppressive religious policies of the Russian government. The Alliance itself was unresponsive, but leading members of its central committee joined the Alliance Polonaise de toutes les croyances réligieuses. In London, meanwhile, Sir Francis Goldsmid, a liberal MP who headed the British branch of the Alliance Israélite, established a Jewish committee to promote Polish independence. These were critical years that marked the transition from the reactionary and apparently stagnant 1850s to the transformational and ultimately liberal 1860s. Pius IX’s illiberal turn and the ensuing alliance between Catholicism and the forces of reaction in France, Italy and the Habsburg lands ensured secularism, anti-clericalism and the cause of civil and religious liberty a central place in the liberal politics of this new era.27 The British dimensions of this activity complicate attempts to draw too straight a line between 1848 and 1859–63. There were longstanding ties between traditions of cosmopolitan liberal activism on behalf of oppressed nationalities and the more religiously inflected mobilization around explicitly humanitarian causes associated with Evangelical anti-slavery activism. Here too 1848 had an impact. The British reaction to the Mortara Affair reflected a climate in which anti-Catholicism had been stoked not just by the “Papal Aggression” of 1850, but also by the influx of Italian (and other) political refugees. Foreign policy issues were a key driver in British politics during this mid-Victorian hiatus in the party system. The twin 26  Eisenbach, The Emancipation of the Jews in Poland, 431–2. Chapter 10 provides the best internationally conceived account of the relationship between Jewish rights and Polish nationalism. 27  See Clark and Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars; Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism; Joskowicz, The Modernity of Others.

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concerns that most galvanized the British public were their enthusiasm for oppressed nations like the Poles, Hungarians and Italians, and their concern for civil and religious liberty at home and abroad. Lecture tours by prominent 1848ers like Lajos Kossuth further reinforced the connection between British and continental liberal politics. The popular association made in Britain between authoritarian rule and theocracy in its Russian and Catholic variants provided plenty of common ground.28 This synergy between Jewish and liberal causes—established at the national level in 1848 and renewed in the more international context of 1859—was part and parcel of the mid-nineteenth century liberal moment. It remained intact through the 1860s and into the 1870s. These years saw the return of liberal 1848ers to politics, parliament, and often power. A handful of well-connected Jews re-emerged as key figures. The Mazzinian David Levi returned to Turin, where he was elected to Italy’s first parliament and played a formative role in nationalizing Italian freemasonry as Grand Secretary of the Grand Orient.29 Veit and Oppenheim were prime movers in the German Nationalverein.30 Kuranda was elected to the Austrian Landtag in 1861, became a leading Liberal deputy and helped draft the 1866 February constitution. Fischhof re-entered politics with an influential pamphlet on Hungary, which he co-wrote with a former revolutionary comrade, future liberal minister Josef Unger—now converted and comfortably established as a professor of Jurisprudence in Vienna.31 Fischhof, who famously refused both conversion and ministerial office, remained a critical reference point in the liberal politics of the late 1870s and early 1880s. Bamberger, meanwhile, returned to Germany where he became one of the leaders of the National Liberal Party alongside another Jewish 1848er, Eduard Lasker. Horn likewise returned to Hungary to pursue a political career first as a liberal deputy, then as a government minister. As for Crémieux, he became a central pillar of the Government of National Defense after the collapse of the Second Empire. 28  On British support for Italy see Beales, England and Italy 1859–1860. More generally Brown, Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy 1846–55. On the anti-Catholic dimension see Lohrli, “The Madiai,” 29–50. 29  Alessandro Grazi, “David Levi. A Child of the Nineteenth Century,” Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History 8 (November 2015): http://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/focus. php?id=363 30  Na’aman, “Jüdische Aspekte des deutschen Nationalvereins (1859–1867),” 285–308. 31  On Fischhof’s see Reifowitz, Imagining an Austrian Nation, Chapter 2; Charmatz, Adolf Fischhof, also Kwan, Liberalism and the Habsburg Monarchy.

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Unger spoke for many, though not all, of these men when he wrote: “I was born in the year 1828, but first saw the light of the world in the year 1848.”32 Even those like Crémieux whose careers predated 1848 were powerfully marked by the experience. They were not typical of Jews or even politically active Jews in this period. Yet their importance as liberal politicians and as Jews in positions of public authority was such that they deserve to be considered as a phenomenon in their own right. Surprisingly perhaps, almost all these men played a prominent part in international Jewish relief campaigns during the 1860s and 1870s. Many remembered they had been revolutionary comrades, sharing good times and bad in Berlin, Frankfurt and Vienna, London, Paris, and Brussels. Of course, they were integrated in other liberal networks: Fischhof and Lasker were involved in international pacifism, for example.33 Yet their willingness to collaborate over Jewish causes suggests this was a particular bond. The relationship of these men to their Jewishness is elusive. They struck different attitudes in different contexts and the inconsistencies are hard to read. Most sources relate to their public life, where Jewishness had a performative quality. Take Ignaz Kuranda, the most overtly Jewish of these figures. He combined liberal parliamentary activism with decades at the helm of the Viennese Jewish community, eventually joining the Wiener Allianz as vice-president and lobbying for Romanian Jews in the Reichsrat in 1878. Yet back in the 1840s, Kuranda deliberately avoided covering specific Jewish issues in Die Grenzboten, except insofar as they raised broader questions of religious toleration.34 Crémieux, in contrast, spoke often of God, yet was known as a secularist and Freemason whose wife and children converted to Catholicism. He framed his public Jewish activism in the language of French liberal republicanism, but invited Lasker to join the Alliance in the name of the “holy cause of Judaism”—a phrase he would never have used in a courtroom or the Chambre.35 Bamberger, meanwhile, was the only Jewish deputy in the Reichstag to omit the declaration of religious allegiance in his parliamentary manual, but his letters  Unger, Bunte Betrachtungen und Bemerkungen, 20.  See Laqua, “Pacifism in Fin-de-Siècle Austria,” 199–224; Laqua, “Pacifism in Fin-deSiècle Austria”; Harris, A Study in the Theory and Practice of German Liberalism, 31. 34  Ignaz Kuranda, Leipzig, August 101,847, to Ludwig August Frankl, H.I.N.-98,696, Wienbibliothek. 35  Adolphe Crémieux, Comité Central, Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1868, to Eduard Lasker, Member of the Chamber of Deputies, Berlin, National Library of Israel. My thanks to Andreas Pfuetzner for sharing this document. 32 33

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to Hartmann reveal him to have been acutely aware of his, and others’, Jewishness.36 His friend Anna von Helmholtz thought that: “no longer a Jew, he could never become a Christian--all religion signified the church and as such was incomprehensible.”37 There was clearly more to it than that, for Bamberger demonstrated his sense of connection to the Berlin Jewish community in 1870 by inscribing his name in the list of donors to the Gesellschaft Hachnassath-Kallah.38 Intriguingly, it was Bamberger not Lasker, who spoke up most forcefully on behalf of Romanian Jews in the Reichstag in 1872. And yet Lasker, later a leading member of the Freethought Association Lessing, has been seen as the more instinctively Jewish.39 The mismatch between private convictions and public positioning is perhaps most glaring in the case of Oppenheim. This was a man for whom Jewishness and national liberalism were so intimately connected that he decried to Bamberger the “Lokalgeist and Kneipen Patriotismus felt by every German goy” that he saw as the principal obstacle to “our plans.”40 Mostly, he kept quiet about Jewish issues. Yet even after falling foul of anti-Jewish prejudice during his unsuccessful election campaign in rural Hessen, Oppenheim joined the Berlin Romanian Committee and went so far as to publish a pamphlet on the subject.41 These inconsistencies suggest that rather than interrogating what their Jewishness meant to these men, it could be more productive to consider how liberalism shaped the ways in which they were able to be publicly Jewish—in a context where their Jewishness was inevitably a political talking point and often laid them open to antisemitic attacks. Here, the relationship between the domestic politics of liberal secularism and the international liberal politics of Jewish activism merits further reflection. That emancipation, constitutional government and national unification 36  See his correspondence with Moritz Hartmann in the Wienbibliothek and his correspondence with Oppenheim, Ludwig Bamberger Nachlass N 2008, folders 155 and 156. On Bamberger see Koehler, Ludwig Bamberger and Zucker, Ludwig Bamberger. Zucker, “Ludwig Bamberger and the Rise of Anti-Semitism in Germany, 1848–1893,” 332–52. 37  Ibid, 334. 38  Namen-Verzeichniss sämmtlicher Mitglieder der Gesellschaft Hachnassath-Kallah. 39  See Weir, Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany, 318, 227. 40  Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim, Berlin, October 6 to Ludwig Bamberger, Lieber Freund, N2008/156 (116) Photo 109, Bundesarchiv, Berlin. 41  Berliner Rumänen Comité Protokolle 1872–1874 (Abschriften), P83 J26, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem (1872–1804). Thanks to Andreas Pfuetzner for sharing this document. See also Heinrich Oppenheim, Die Judenverfolgungen in Rumänien.

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went hand-in-hand in Italy, the Habsburg lands, and Germany is well known. That this liberal era was defined among other things by aggressively secular, anti-Catholic politics is also well understood. This created opportunities for Jews in domestic politics, but it also imposed constraints. Secularist politics, was always at some level about religious toleration, church-state relations and disestablishment. It was framed by national considerations even if secularists themselves had international connections and commitments that reflected universalist aspirations. Jews might embrace these causes, but they usually did so in ways that underplayed their Jewishness. In this age of expanding suffrage, Jewish liberals needed in any case to transcend their Jewishness to make it as liberal politicians on a national stage. Some succeeded better than others. On one level, this reflected their liberalism: in theory all citizens are equal in a liberal democracy where religious belief is left to the individual conscience. On another level, it testified to the paradigm of Jewish emancipation described by Clermont-­ Tonerre: “we must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals.” While these men could and did embrace secularism and religious toleration, both as Jews and as liberals, they always framed the case for a secular state in general terms. For instance, Lasker asserted in 1880 that: “more than for any other country, for Germany denominational and religious freedom is the foundation of domestic peace. This must be guaranteed and structured by independent law making. Its execution may not be made dependent on political interests.”42 Internationally, however, liberal politics followed different conventions and this created different openings. Transnational liberal mobilizations, which invoked general principles like “humanity” and “civilization,” regularly focused on the plight of specific national and religious groups, usually oppressed Christian nations. Thus particularism was hardwired into liberal universalism—a tension explicit in the naming of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Traditions of liberal interventionism and liberal humanitarianism were secular in the sense that they did not focus on conversion or salvation. Yet the “Christian” language of brotherhood and religious confraternity was a regular feature of liberal appeals on behalf not just of slaves and Eastern Christians but also Italians and Poles. Both this language of brotherhood and the liberal concern with promoting civil and religious

 Cited after Weir, Secularism and Religion, 228.

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liberty abroad served to legitimize international religious identities and solidarities—Christian, but Jewish too. In practice this meant that prominent Jewish liberals who resisted being seen as narrowly Jewish politicians—and were often disconnected from Judaism—found they could help Jews out and act as members of a Jewish collective, when that collective was constructed outside the state and in the international arena. In 1858, Cavour’s Jewish secretary, the Italian 1848er Isacco Artom remained silent during the Mortara Affair which touched directly on the power of the Pope on Italian soil. Four years later, he did not hesitate to intervene on behalf of Moroccan Jews, negotiating between the Alliance and the Italian foreign minister.43 Even in Germany, the values of Kultur and civilization which so often proved problematic for Jews in a national context could be deployed by Jewish liberals internationally. Speaking in the 1872 Reichstag debate over German policy towards Romania, Lasker argued that “because the Jews are everywhere, where they lack the support of law and culture, an easy target as a native minority, it is they who must pay for the difficulties experienced by individual foreigners in those countries, and therefore I believe that just for this reason we are called upon to express our sympathies as warmly as possible.” Both he and Bamberger argued the German government should demonstrate its support for Romanian Jews “in the interests of humanity.”44 Neither the rise of Stöcker nor the Berlin Antisemitismusstreit deterred Lasker from international Jewish activism: he eventually joined the Alliance in 1880.45 This suggests that conventions applying to liberal political activism in the international arena undercut the classic opposition between man/Jew or public/private spheres that Jewish historians have tended to take for granted. Interestingly, this pattern of behavior excluded Jewish women, who were strikingly absent from the Alliance, its offshoots and the realm of “Jewish diplomacy.” Those women who were internationally active in a Jewish key--women like the British Judith Montefiore and the Triestine Flora Randegger, both of whom founded short-lived girls’ schools in Jerusalem—combined an agenda that could be socially radical with a deep engagement with traditional forms of Jewish spirituality.46 By contrast,  Levi D’Ancona, “Paths of Jewish Integration, 244–5.  Steinsdorfer, Die Liberale Reichspartei (LRP) von 1871, 223–6. 45  Harris, Theory and Practice of German Liberalism, 14. 46  Green, “Spirituality, Tradition and Gender,” 747–60. 43 44

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women like Sara Levi Nathan and the pioneering German feminist Fanny Lewald, both of whom lived at the heart of revolutionary politics, rejected Judaism more or less completely. Nathan embraced the Mazzinian cult in all its spirituality, as Luisa Levi D’Ancona Modena reminds us in her contribution to this volume. Lewald was influenced by Christian dissent and converted, although in her writing she embraced a certain kind of Jewish identity.47 Fully integrated in the international liberal networks of the 1848ers, both embraced early feminist causes, but neither showed any interest in the international Jewish causes that engaged male members of this milieu—many of whom were equally distant from Jewish practice. These women and others like them made a virtue of necessity. In practice they were as excluded from the male world of international Jewish organizations as they were from the male world of parliamentary politics. That this was so underlines the connection between the two and the extent to which Jewish internationalism was embedded in the politics of liberal revolution, narrowly conceived.

The fin-de-siècle: Jewish Liberals and the Revolutionary Legacy For male members of the revolutionary generation, however, liberalism generated a particular kind of international Jewish activism that was sufficiently in tune with liberal sensibilities to be compatible with the constraints imposed on religious activism by the mid-century culture wars fought between liberals and Catholics. How far did this synergy between Jewish and liberal politics remain in place after the revolutionary generation died, once the networks they created began to lose traction? Here, it may be helpful to contrast the situation at mid-century, which I have examined at some length, with the interplay between Jewish and liberal activism around 1900: a historical moment when the politics of revolution and humanitarianism re-emerged as a force to be reckoned with on the international scene. Historians have generally seen the fin-de-siècle as a period when the relationship between liberalism and “the Jews” came under pressure from antisemitism. During the last third of the nineteenth century, figures as divergent as Matthew Arnold, Georg von Schönerer and Heinrich von 47   Notably in her autobiographical work, Fanny Lewald, Meine Lebensgeschichte, Volumes I-III.

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Treitschke played an important role in popularizing and legitimizing antisemitic attitudes within liberal political parties and milieux. The process was most extreme in German Central Europe, where a younger generation of Jewish liberals that included men like Heinrich Friedjung, Hugo Preuss and Paul Nathan effectively abandoned their political ambitions. Yet in Britain, Italy, and the US a new generation of Jewish liberals came to power and assumed high-profile public office. Foremost among them were Luigi Luzzatti, long-serving government minister and briefly Prime Minister of Italy; the British New Liberal Herbert Samuel, who served repeatedly as a high-ranking cabinet minister between 1909 and 1931 alongside his fellow Jews Edwin Montagu and Rufus Isaacs; and Oscar Straus, who became the first Jewish member of a US cabinet in 1906 and served three times as US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1887 and 1910. Like the 1848ers, these men were essentially secular politicians who refrained from engaging in narrowly Jewish politics. Yet the careers of Straus, Luzzatti and Samuel suggest that different considerations still governed liberal politics at home and abroad. Only Luzzatti was operating in a country that had experienced 1848 at first-hand, yet all three were active as Jews not nationally but internationally: Straus on behalf of Eastern European Jews in the 1890s and 1900s; Luzzatti on behalf of the Jews of Romania; and Samuel through his support for the Balfour Declaration and emergence as a very public Zionist. All three combined this activity with support for other humanitarian causes: indentured Chinese labour in the Transvaal in the case of Samuel, persecuted Ottoman Armenians in the case of Luzzatti and Straus. Even in the twentieth century the conventions of transnational liberal politics continued to make it easier for secular Jewish liberals like these to act as Jews in the international arena--particularly perhaps in contexts like Britain, Italy, and the USA where political liberalism remained dominant. This tells us something not just about Jewish politics but about the way in which liberalism functioned.48 Unsurprisingly, their female counterparts continued to be excluded from the male realms of high politics and international Jewish activism. Yet they were increasingly active as progressive social activists and in 48  On Luzzatti see Capuzzo, “Luigi Luzzatti, gli Ebrie e gli Armeni,” in Ballini, ed., Luigi Luzzatti e la Grande Guerra, 189–226; on Samuel see Wasserstein, Herbert Samuel. On Strauss see Cohen, A Dual Heritage. On the persistence of this pattern in the twentieth century see Loeffler, “Nationalism Without a Nation?,” 367–98.

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“secular” women’s causes--at local, national and even international level-as the careers of Alice Hallgarten Franchetti, Constance Battersea, Lily Montagu and the American Goldmark sisters attest.49 Tellingly, when women like Bertha Pappenheim eventually ventured into the world of explicitly Jewish international activism, they did so from within the women’s movement. What then of the revolutionary legacy? There are obvious parallels between the central place of the Mortara Affair in the liberal politics of Italian unification, which inevitably targeted the Vatican, and the international appeal of the Dreyfusard cause to liberal secularists and anti-clericals forty years later. Over thirty years after the fall of Rome, a “Jewish” cause once again reaffirmed the dividing line between secularist anti-clericals on the one hand, and the illiberal-Catholic nexus on the other--albeit in radically different circumstances. This synergy between Jewish and liberal causes owed much to the politics of 1848, although in France the culture wars dated back to the 1790s. Yet we might also think about the long-­ term impact of patterns of liberal politics established in 1848 on Jewish internationalism in terms of personnel and political networks. The role of conservative Jewish bankers like Jacob Schiff in these networks has tended to obscure the specifically liberal dimensions of Jewish internationalism in the 1900s. But two of the most important international Jewish activists-Paul Nathan, founder of the Hilfsverein deutscher Juden, and Lucien Wolf, the archetypal turn-of-the-century Jewish diplomat--were influential liberal journalists whose politics owed much to 1848.50 Each in his own way cultivated the memory of that revolutionary synthesis and sought to remake it anew. In this, they exemplified a whole generation of Jewish political activists--from Mayor of Rome Ernesto Nathan and the social reformer Josephine Goldmark to the more explicitly socialist Ludo Hartmann and Victor Basch--who were steeped in the memory of 1848. For such figures, the activism of the fin-de-siècle with its properly democratic and social dimensions often represented the continuation of a family tradition.51 49  For some initial reflections on this issue see Luisa Levi D’Ancona Modena “Baronnesses and Revolutionaries: the Activism of Foreign-born Jewish Women in Liberal Italy”, forthcoming in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, November 2021. 50  On Wolf see Levene, War, Jews and the New Europe. On Nathan see Feder, Politik und Humanität. 51  Goldmark, Pilgrims of ‘48, engages very explicitly with this theme.

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Wolf’s father, in fact, was a former 1848er, and as Wolf described in an article published to mark the jubilee of Ignaz Kuranda’s Die Grenzboten: “It was the enthusiasm with which he spoke of the revolution of 1848 which made me a Liberal in politics before I knew what politics or Liberalism meant.”52 Likewise, Paul Nathan’s career as deputy editor of the leading liberal weekly, Die Nation, as a Berlin municipal councilor, and as one of the founders of the Deutsche Demokratische Partei in 1918 owed much to the influence of his mentor Ludwig Bamberger. Bamberger, together with Lasker, had persuaded Nathan to abandon his academic pretensions for a career in political journalism, introducing him to key members of his own network--in particular the staff of Die Nation. Bamberger eventually left Nathan his library and papers, a sign that he saw Nathan as his intellectual and political heir. Neither Wolf nor Nathan were political figures of the first order: had they been, they would have devoted less time to Jewish causes. They were nonetheless able to promote an international agenda that spoke both to their concerns as Jewish activists and to their liberal political outlook. Wolf’s writings in the mainstream English press between 1896 and 1914 made him, in Chimen Abramsky’s view, “the sharpest opponent of Russia in Britain.”53 In this capacity he brought out first the Russian Correspondence (produced in collaboration with the Friends of Russian Freedom), then its better known successor Darkest Russia. Both addressed the Jewish question in Russia as one aspect of a broader attack on the illiberal and repressive Tsarist regime. Nathan, meanwhile, was Die Nation’s principal commentator on Russian affairs during 1904–7 and brought out a publication very similar to Wolf’s: the Russische Korrespondenz. In other words, both men played a leading role ­disseminating anti-Russian propaganda to the European public, and both produced special interest magazines in Britain and Germany in collaboration with Russian dissidents. They corresponded about pogroms and blood libel accusations, as they attempted to establish a Pan-European anti-­Russian news network. In short, they persisted with the liberal strategy of presenting Jewish civil and political rights as part of a broader civilizational struggle in ways that would have resonated in both 1848 and 1859–61. Yet the synergy between Jews and liberalism in the international arena was less consistent than these resonances imply.  Wolf, “The ‘Grenzboten’ Jubilee,” 51–3.  Abramsky, “Lucien Wolf’s Efforts,” 283.

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First, the liberal center of gravity had shifted decisively away from continental Europe and its culture wars towards the Anglo-American world. There was space for Jewish politicians within the humanitarian coalition that underpinned liberal politics from the anti-slavery movement to the Congo relief campaign, but in the aftermath of the Bulgarian atrocities this space was smaller than it had been. Liberals like Straus and Luzzatti could deploy the rhetoric of “humanity” and “civilization” on behalf of Russian Jews and Ottoman Armenians, but the implicit parallel between these causes was undermined by the reality that the Ottoman Empire had proved a far more benign environment for Jews than Orthodox Christian states like Russia and Romania. Without the glue of anti-Catholicism to bind them, Jewish and Protestant concerns began to diverge. Second, liberalism itself was in trouble. Wolf, the Englishman, retained his faith in progress. As his secretary David Mowschowitsch put it: “Liberty of religious conscience and equal citizenship rights were the only planks in his [Wolf’s] programme and almost all his literary and publicistic work, insofar as it concerned Jews, was devoted to showing that his program was not only consonant with the best ideals of civilized humanity but also sufficient for the interests of the Jews themselves.”54 This was still recognizably the agenda of 1848. By contrast, as a German liberal depressed and oppressed by life in what Theodor Mommsen described as a “pseudo-­ constitutional regime,” Nathan was losing faith in purely liberal solutions - not just in Germany but in Russia as well.55 Revolution, in Nathan’s view, was not a natural evolution but a catastrophe.56 However, his experience in Germany taught him that liberal institutions were not enough to contain the violent forces of reaction: he feared these would emerge ­triumphant in the short term and believed the survival of the Russian dynasty was consequently in doubt. By 1905 Nathan was in any case seeking international allies outside his liberal comfort zone among Bundists and Zionists--a tacit recognition that the journalistic, financial and political networks underpinning international Jewish activism were no longer exclusively liberal. Even so, the synergy between liberal and Jewish causes remained a precondition of international Jewish activism in the early years of the twentieth century. Where this synergy existed--as for Dreyfus or Russia in  Abramsky, “Lucien Wolf’s Efforts,” 282.  Cited after Feder, Politik und Humanität, 63. 56  Nathan, “Revolution, Reaktion, Anarchie,” 165–7. 54 55

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1905--Jewish relief campaigns gained traction. Where it was absent--as for Romania after 1878--they never really caught fire. The transformational events of 1917 and the birth of a new kind of Jewish revolutionary did not alter this paradigm. International politics remained an elite activity in this period. The aftermath of the Great War marked the dawn of a new world order, but one that was imbricated with liberal imperialism and inspired by a certain kind of liberal internationalism not dissimilar to the cosmopolitan ideals voiced by nationalist revolutionaries back in 1848.57 The legacy of the Jewish 1848ers had faded, but the Balfour Declaration and the Minorities Treaties suggest that Jewish internationalism and liberal politics remained inextricably entwined.

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CHAPTER 15

“A Certain Type of Liberalism”: Minority Rights in Jewish Liberal Discourse, 1848–1948 James Loeffler

Why has the world abandoned the Jews in the face of Nazi “extermination”? This was the question Reinhold Niebuhr posed in 1942. The American Protestant theologian’s answer was simple. He blamed not fascism, not nationalism, not antisemitism, but liberalism. “The liberal world has sought to dissolve the prejudice between Jews and Gentiles by preaching tolerance and good-will,” Niebuhr wrote. But that tolerance was entirely conditional. Modern liberalism denied Jews “the simple right … to survive as a people.” Western liberalism premised itself on a “curious, partly unconscious, cultural imperialism in theories of tolerance which look For comments and critique, I am grateful to Jacob Abolafia, Julie Cooper, Arie M. Dubnov, William Forbath, Jaclyn Granick, Abigail Green, Nathan Kurz, Lisa Moses Leff, Charles Lesch, Simon Levis Sullam, Samuel Moyn, Michael Silber, and Eliyahu Stern. J. Loeffler (*) University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_15

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forward to a complete destruction of all racial distinctions,” Niebuhr added, archly noting, “The majority group expects to devour the minority group by way of assimilation. This is a painless death, but it is death nevertheless.”1 Assailing liberalism in the context of the Holocaust may seem like an idiosyncratic exercise in faulty logic. Yet Niebuhr was hardly alone in his views at the time. A chorus of American Jewish writers registered their own critiques of liberalism’s faults. “European liberalism was never liberal enough to recognize rights for Jews without wishing to see their assimilation,” lamented Yiddish journalist Gedaliah Bublick, since “Jews were granted equal rights as individual persons with the intention, that they would therefore relinquish their own Jewish peoplehood.”2 Now the end-­ game of that scenario was finally made plain for all to see. American Zionist leader Hayim Greenberg echoed this plaint in his famous 1944 essay, “Notes on the Melting Pot.” It was not only in Europe that Jews faced the danger of destruction, he warned American Jews: “The greatest ideal which a certain type of liberalism holds out for us is still one of painless death.”3 What led these American Jewish thinkers to fixate on the putative sins of liberalism? One answer might be that the prospect of the total eradication of European Jewry simply highlighted the basic paradox at the heart of Western liberalism. After all, from the dawn of emancipation in the late eighteenth century, Jewish acceptance into Western society was predicated on the destruction of Jewish collective difference. “There can be no equality where there are differences,” wrote one French Jew in the revolutionary moment of 1789.4 Thereafter in the modern world, Jewish group-ness had to be submerged, suppressed, or shrunken into the acceptable categories of modernity. It had to be Protestant-ized as a religion or ethnicized as a voluntarist cultural affiliation. Jewishness, in other words, had to change to conform to the liberal model of politics premised on  Reinhold Niebuhr, “Jews after the War,” The Nation, Feb. 21, 1942, 215.  Gedaliah Bublick, “Vi azoy der yidisher natsionalizm iz anderzh fun goyishe natsionalizm,” Morgn-zhurnal, July 29, 1945, 6. 3  Hayim Greenberg, “Notes on the Melting-Pot,” Jewish Frontier, April 1944, 26–28, reprinted in Mark A.  Raider, ed., The Essential Hayim Greenberg: Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism & Zionism, 230. 4   Aaron Revel, “Observation on Behalf of the Jews of Avignon for the National Convention,” quoted in translation in Shmuel Trigano, The Democratic Ideal and the Shoah: The Unthought in Political Modernity, 16. 1 2

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individual citizenship. As long as Jews remained somehow apart, they constituted a challenge to Western liberalism.5 Present from the start, this logic implied that liberalism’s tolerance preordained endpoint was the disappearance of Jews from Western civilization. Greenberg suggested as much in his 1944 essay. Alongside the antisemitic physical extermination “in the European fashion,” Jews faced the “philosemitic” liberal ideal of ending the “Jewish problem” via the path of “assimilation.” The point of the “melting pot” was to melt: “Let Americans desist from discriminating against Jews and the Jews will of themselves dissolve as an ethnic group, leaving no traces behind.”6 It would be easy to dismiss Greenberg’s wartime account as another instance of the lachrymose conception of Jewish history. Yet upon further consideration, his words hint at a more sophisticated understanding of the master narrative of Jews and Western politics, one very much in tune with the contemporary historiography of liberalism. For Greenberg indicts not “liberalism,” but “a certain type of liberalism.”7 This subtle, curious choice of phrase points to a larger story that fits our emerging awareness that we do better to speak not of a single liberalism but liberalisms. Read in this light, Greenberg’s attack on American “Melting-Pot” liberalism really signifies a lament over the wartime eclipse of another strain of Jewish liberalism in which he and many other Jewish intellectuals of East European origin had long been deeply invested. This particular tradition of Jewish liberalism rejected the idea of the Jewish individual as the sole locus for modern politics or the disappearance of Jews as a group as the inevitable outcome of Western modernity. Its progenitors took the fabled emancipation contract of 1789 not as a fixed offer but merely as the starting point for an evolving effort to rebalance group autonomy and individual liberty inside the framework of the modern state. They viewed Jewish difference not as a structural impediment to political integration in Western societies but as a unique opportunity to fulfil the deeper promise of modern politics. And they sought concrete expression for their views in the specific Jewish political project of minority rights. 5  Nomi Maya Stolzenberg and David N. Myers, “Community, Constitution, and Culture: The Case of the Jewish Kehillah,” University of Michigan Journal of Legal Reform 25, nos. 3–4 (1992): 635, 669; Wendy Brown, “Rights and Identity in Late Modernity: Revisiting the ‘Jewish Question,’” in Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns, eds., Identities, Politics, and Rights, 88–93. 6  Greenberg, “Notes on the Melting-Pot,” 230. 7  Duncan Bell, “What Is Liberalism?” Political Theory 42, no. 6 (2014): 682–715.

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Today, the topic of minority rights is considered by most a diversion from the main story of Jews and liberalism. This is not to say there is no interest in the subject of minority rights per se. Indeed, the past two decades have witnessed a veritable boom in the study of Jewish political movements that historically embraced minority rights, like Diaspora Nationalism, Bundism, Autonomism, and Yiddishism.8 A related body of work has looked at the impact of these ideologies on ideas of cultural pluralism and multiculturalism in the American context.9 Recently this trend has even led to a wholesale reassessment of Zionist attitudes towards minority rights in Europe and Palestine.10 Yet hardly any of this scholarship links the topic of minority rights to the core questions of Jewish political thought and action vis-à-vis liberalism. Indeed, most accounts present minority rights as the bastard child of nationalism and socialism, a coldly strategic by-product of Austro-Marxist thought on the nation and the state, or a more palatable, if quixotic alternative to Zionism’s brand of territorial nationalism. “What’s the difference between a Bundist and a Zionist?” asks an old joke attributed to Lenin. The answer: “A Bundist is a Zionist with seasickness.” This dismissive view of minority rights is exacerbated by the ambiguities that attend the very phrase. Its meanings and usage vary considerably over time and place. Even among some of its most fervent ideological architects, there existed a great divergence of opinion over whether minority rights should be considered identical to national-cultural autonomy, possibly including public legal institutions of communal self-government and self-taxation within sovereign democratic states, collective linguistic and 8  For a recent survey of this burgeoning literature, see David Myers, “Rethinking Sovereignty and Autonomy: New Currents in the History of Jewish Nationalism,” Transversal 13 (2015): 44–51. 9   James Loeffler, “Between Zionism and Liberalism: Oscar Janowsky and Diaspora Nationalism in America,” AJS Review 34, no. 2 (2010): 289–308; Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 2010); Daniel Greene, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity; Daniel Katz, All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism. 10  Joshua Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); James Loeffler, “‘The Famous Trinity of 1917′: Zionist Internationalism in Historical Perspective,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016): 211–238; Gil Rubin, “The Future of the Jews: Planning for the Postwar Jewish World, 1939–1946,” Columbia University Ph.D.  Dissertation, 2017; Dmitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-State.

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other group cultural rights, or simply positive group protections from discrimination.11 A further conceptual challenge is the deep, exclusive association of Jewish minority rights with the interwar period in Eastern Europe. This has the effect of circumscribing minority rights in a discrete temporal and geographic zone of contingency. Most scholars recognize a certain prehistory in the late nineteenth century era, when West European Jewish elites advocated on behalf of their imperiled brethren in Europe’s backwards southern and eastern borderlands. This imperial humanitarian intervention and religious internationalism certainly promoted new ideas about group rights and minorities protection. But few link this humanitarian activism practiced from afar to the rich local stories of Jewish liberalism in Eastern Europe. Nor have the specialists in Russian, Hungarian, and Polish Jewish history engaged deeply with the growing body of literature that highlights the dynamic interplay between the domestic and international currents of liberalist politics.12 Rewriting the history of minority rights in East European Jewish political thought allows us to re-assess more broadly the larger master narratives of Jews and liberalism and Jewish liberalism. This alternative tradition of Jewish collectivist liberalism still exists only in a state of partial excavation. Already, though, its rough outlines have begun to come into focus. What follows is an attempt to identify some key features and turning points in its distinctive history that stretches from 1848 to 1948. Over the course of that century, a vigorous Jewish political discourse developed in and out of Eastern Europe about the nature of group rights, individual rights, and the character and possibilities for modern liberalism. This discourse also reflected a running debate with the predominantly Western Jewish proponents of individualist liberalism at odds with the group-ist postulates of these liberal minority rights advocates. By recovering that overlooked tradition, we can not only unearth an important intellectual legacy for the history of Jewish political thought, but reframe the intertwined histories of Jewish politics and modern liberalism. 11   On the problem of nomenclature, see Kai Struve, “‘Nationale Minderheit’: Begriffgeschichtliches zu Gleichheit und Differenz,” Leipziger Beitrage zur juedischen Geschichte und Kultur 2, no. 2 (2004): 233–58. 12  See the important new contribution of Jaclyn Granick, “Humanitarian Responses to Jewish Suffering Abroad by American Jewish Organizations, 1914–1929,” Ph.D.  Thesis, Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva, 2015.

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The Birth of Minority Rights in 1848 Where and when did minority rights begin? Most historians focus their attention on Eastern Europe in the three decades before World War I.  After all, it was then and there that various socialist and nationalist movements proposed autonomist rights-schemes as solutions to the challenge of accommodating multi-national, multi-confessional populations in the crowded space of late imperial Eastern Europe. After a generation of gestation, so the conventional narrative runs, these ideas sprang to life at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 in the form of the system of Minorities’ Treaties for the newly independent states created on the ruins of empire. If this story of minority rights in Eastern Europe has any connection to liberalism, then, it is understood only as a facet of the work of American liberal internationalism and British liberal imperialism at Paris. As the Wilsonian appeal to democratic self-determination collided with the realities of a heterogenous map in Central and Eastern Europe, competing claims and conflicting promises to various small power leaders, and the enduring imperatives of imperialism, a new policy solution was needed to handle the primordial force of nationalism. Granting virtual self-­ determination to national minorities via minority rights provided an artful way to head off irredentism, the challenge of Bolshevik socialism, and anticolonial energies in one fell swoop.13 This narrative of political conjunction between Western liberalism and Eastern nationalism obscures the fact that a European liberal discourse of minority rights first appeared two generations earlier. It first arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century as part and parcel of the liberal national revolutions of 1848. This moment witnessed a repeat of the questions of the French Revolution regarding the terms of Jewish emancipation now framed in the context of local national movements seeking exit from the clutch of empire. The term “national minority” first appeared in Austrian parliamentary debates in 1848 and 1849 concerning the right of each national group, or “volkstamm” to “the preservation and maintenance of their nationality.”14 One of its foremost champions was the Austro-German Jewish liberal Adolf Fischhof, who proposed a “nationalities law” to combine individual and group rights for nationalities in the Austrian Empire. That he never explicitly included Jews in his program points has led  James Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans, 3–31.  Quoted in Struve, “‘Nationale Minderheit’,” 242.

13 14

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historians to differ sharply over whether to apply the label “Jewish” to his liberalism. Some see a fully Germanized Jew whose liberalism required no acknowledgement of Jewish group-ist claims. Others see a striking instance of Jewish liberalism in action, with perhaps strategic silence on the question of Jewish rights claims.15 What is undisputed is that Fischoff’s ideas passed directly into the next generation of Habsburg Jewish liberals, chiefly through his disciples Hermann Kadisch, Jacob Kohn, and Benno Straucher. These publicists and politicians argued that Austrian liberalism required the management of the national identities of Jews and others through group rights schemes. This led to the rise of various efforts to promote Jewish minority rights as a liberal project in the late Habsburg context.16 Across the border from the Habsburg Empire in 1848, a similar strain of Jewish collectivist liberalism also emerged in the Russian context. We can see it already in the work of nineteenth-century Russian Jewish thinker Leon Pinsker, famous as the creator of the term “auto-emancipation.” Conventional wisdom paints Pinsker as an “assimilationist” liberal who moved from pre-1881 liberalism to post-1881 Zionism because of a painful confrontation with antisemitic violence in the Russian Empire. But new work by scholars of Russian Jewish history has shown that already in the 1850s and 1860s Pinsker critiqued European liberalism for making emancipation conditional on “assimilation” and resisting cultural “diversity.” Even in 1881, as he called for Jews to nationalize themselves and reacquire a national homeland in Palestine, Pinsker also insisted that Jews in Europe should possess individual and national group rights. “The legal 15  See Ian Reifowitz, “Threads Intertwined: German National Egoism and Liberalism in Adolf Fischhof’s Vision for Austria,” Nationalities Papers 29, no. 3 (2001): 452–453; Ian Reifowitz, Imagining an Austrian Nation, 37–88; Mikhael Gratz, “Me-liberalizm le-torah le’umit-‘otonomistit: Adolf Fishhof, 1816–1893,” in Shmuel Almog, et  al. eds., Temurot be-historiyah ha-yehudit he-hadashah, 133–34; and Arieh Manchur, “Hagdarah ‘atsmit ve-otonomiyah le’umit be’meah ha-19 - Torato shel Adolf Fishhof,” Kivunim 10 (1981): 93–105; Kai Struve, Bauern und Nation in Galizien: über Zugehörigkeit und soziale Emanzipation im 19. Jahrhundert, 265–309. 16  David Rechter, “A Nationalism of Small Things: Jewish Autonomy in Late Habsburg Austria,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 52 (2007): 90, 96–100; Marsha Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 122–24; Marcos Silber, “The Metamorphosis of PreDubnovian Autonomism into Diaspora Jewish Nationalism,” in Minna Rozen, ed., Homelands and Diasporas, 235–55; Joshua Shanes, “Fort mit den Hausjuden! Jewish Nationalists Engage Mass Politics,” in Michael Berkowitz, ed., Nationalism, Zionism and Ethnic Mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and Beyond, 174–78.

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emancipation of the Jews is the culminating achievement of our century,” he wrote in Auto-Emancipation. It should not be abandoned but rather supplemented by what he called “social emancipation,” which meant collective legal identity for Jews within both the Russian and Austro-­ Hungarian empires without losing individual citizenship.17 Pinsker’s Russian Jewish liberalism passed on in the generation after him to the intellectual and politician Simon Dubnov. For Dubnov, minority rights were not a rejection of 1789 but a belated Jewish renegotiation and improvement of this contract.18 Combining ideas from Russian liberalism with Polish and Jewish nationalism, across the closing years of the nineteenth century and opening ones of the twentieth, Dubnov preached an expansive ideal of individual civil and political liberties combined with complete national-cultural autonomy, including self-government and self-­ taxation, all within the realm of the larger state, “Every nation has to be protected from the intrusion of a strange will into its inner life, and the main state law must recognize the droits de la nation [national rights] on a par with the droits de l’homme [the rights of man].”19 The moment of actualization for Dubnov’s ideas arrived with the 1905 Russian Revolution. There they surfaced at the very heart of Russian Jewish liberalism. The newly formed Union for the Attainment of Full Equality for the Jewish People in Russia, which Dubnov co-founded with Maksim Vinaver and other leading Jewish liberals, combined individual and group rights in its platform of “the civil and political emancipation of the Jews and the right of the Jewish people for national-cultural self-­ determination.”20 Even as this alliance of self-styled nationalists and liberals fractured in the years after 1906, the liberal wing continued to hold onto minority rights in its program. Strikingly, this formula was repeated even in the discourse of Russian Jewish liberals who rejected any association 17  Dmitry Shumsky, “Leon Pinsker and ‘Autoemancipation!’: A Reevaluation,” Jewish Social Studies 18, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 33–62; Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-State, 24–49; Bella Vernikova, “Atributsiia statei L’va Pinskera v Russko-Evreiskoi pechati, 1860–1880,” Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta 26 (2003): 41–94; Marc Volovici, “Leon Pinsker’s Autoemancipation! and the Emergence of German as a Language of Jewish Nationalism,” Central European History 50, no. 1 (March 2017): 34–58. 18  Simon Rabinovitch, Jewish Rights, National Rites, 52–78. 19  Quoted in Gassenschmidt, Jewish Liberals in Russia, 1900–1914, 21–22; Rabinovitch, Jewish Rights, 52–61. 20  Quoted in Brian Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia, 182.

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with Jewish nationalism. Hence the leadership of the St. Petersburg branch of the Society for the Propagation of Enlightenment among the Jews, which called in 1905 for “the civil equality of the Jews,” insisted as well on “the creation of institutions that guarantee freedom for the national and cultural development of the Jewish people” and “the right to receive education in one’s native language.” This same rhetorical trope continued in Russian Jewish liberal discourse up to and through the 1917 Revolution.21

In Search of “True Liberalism”: The Postwar Paradigm The advent of the World War I dramatically transformed both the Austrian and Russian Jewish models of group-ist liberalism. The partial collapse of the both empires, an upsurge in Polish wartime diplomacy, and the German military presence on the Eastern Front led to various experimental schemes for realizing minority rights within the provisional Polish state.22 More broadly, the prospect of a post-imperial order in Europe sparked a feverish round of global Jewish thinking about the meaning of liberalism, nationalism, and citizenship. Between 1914 and 1919, some thirty Jewish national congresses were spontaneously held across the world. In South Africa, Russia, Canada, Switzerland, Poland, Lithuania, and the US, Jews debated and enunciated minority rights demands for the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and parts of the Middle East. In Eastern Europe, the Jewish national convocations, often led by Zionists, consistently called for a tri-partite system of rights: (a) “recognition of Palestine as the national home of the Jewish people”; (b) complete equal rights for Jews in all countries; and (c) “national autonomy in cultural, social, and political spheres in the countries where Jews live in compact masses and in lands where the Jewish communities seek these rights.” Individual, collective, and territorial rights thus commingled in the visions of a postwar liberal global order.23

 Quoted in Brian Horowitz, Empire Jews, 3.  See the discussions in Marcos Silber, Leʼumiyut shonah, ezrahut shavah! Ha-maʼamats le-hasagat ‘otonomyah li-Yehude Polin be-milhemet ha-ʻolam ha-rishonah, and David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War. 23  Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans, 28. 21

22

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Yet this “famous trinity of 1917,” as it was sometimes called, contained within it an unavoidable philosophical tension. The strange proviso of limiting minority rights to “the countries where Jews live in compact masses and in lands where the Jewish communities seek these rights” reflected the core question at the heart of collectivist liberalism. Did Jews everywhere require minority rights? Or only those communities with a certain level of political consciousness and a critical demographic mass such that majority-­minority relations were required? Were claims about Jewish collectivity contingent or axiomatic? Those questions surfaced dramatically in the extended discussions that took place within the leadership of American Jews during and after World War I. In 1915 Judge Louis Brandeis was among the first to make the case for minority rights as part of his bridge between the ideological movements of political Zionism and American Progressivism: Why is it that liberalism has failed to eliminate the anti-Jewish prejudice? It is because the liberal movement has not yet brought full liberty. Enlightened countries grant to the individual equality before the law; but they fail still to recognize the equality of whole peoples or nationalities. We seek to protect as individuals those constituting a minority; but we fail to realize that protection cannot be complete unless group equality also is recognized.24

He continued: For us the Jewish Problem … has two aspects: That of the individual Jew-­ and that of Jews collectively. Obviously, no individual should be subjected anywhere, by reason of the fact that he is a Jew, to a denial of any common right or opportunity enjoyed by non-Jews. But Jews collectively should likewise enjoy the same right and opportunity to live and develop as do other groups of people. This right of development on the part of the group is essential to the full enjoyment of rights by the individual. For the individual is dependent for his development (and his happiness) in large part upon the development of the group of which he forms a part.25

Collective rights for Brandeis dovetailed neatly with his interest in labor rights as a necessary component of modern democracy. Based on this 24  Louis Brandeis, “The Jewish Problem, and How to Solve It [1915], reprinted in Brandeis on Zionism: A Collection of Addresses and Statements by Louis D. Brandeis, 17. 25  Brandeis, “The Jewish Problem,” 13.

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capacious notion of group rights within liberalism, Brandeis and other American Zionist leaders promoted the concept of minority rights as a key constituent part of the postwar liberal democratic order to President Woodrow Wilson. They formulated their vision in terms of a postwar Bill of Jewish Rights that would consecrate individual and group rights as the basis for Jewish freedom in the postwar states of the world. Not all American Jews agreed with the easy equation of group rights and liberal individualism. Asserting a Jewish body politic in some Western liberal contexts was seen as a dangerous move that might undermine the security or well-integrated Jewish populations. That view was particularly held by American and British Jewish liberals who rejected minority rights along with Zionism as intertwined collectivist threats to Jewish individualist emancipation. In one notable public exchange, the American Jewish philosopher Morris Cohen charged in 1919 that the choice was between racial tribalism and modern liberalism, “Zionism rests on a nationalist philosophy which is a direct challenge to liberalism,” and so did any idea of group rights.26 Both were based on a specious notion of Jewish nationhood, which violated the first principle of egalitarian liberalism. In reply, Cohen’s fellow philosopher Horace Kallen, a prominent American Zionist leader and architect of the idea of cultural pluralism, emphasized that collectivist rights schemes were a logical and necessary move: “The nationalist philosophy of Zionism is an extension of the assumptions of liberalism from the individual to the group. Democracy and nationalism made up a single engine of liberalism.”27 Strikingly, nationalist and anti-nationalist American Jewish liberals reached an agreement to promote minority rights in the postwar prescriptions for East European Jewry. They arrived at this consensus via a compromise solution: minority rights would be outsourced to Jewish Eastern Europe while Jews at home in American society would refrain from any such demands for themselves.28 Hence the critical disclaimer about the application of minority rights to Western states. The ironic move of 26  Morris Cohen, “Zionism: Tribalism or Liberalism?,” The New Republic, March 8, 1919, 182. 27  Horace Kallen, “Zionism and Liberalism,” (1919) reprinted in Kallen, Judaism at Bay (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1932), 112–113. See also Noam Pianko, “‘The True Liberalism of Zionism’: Horace Kallen, Jewish Nationalism, and the Limits of American Pluralism,” American Jewish History 94, no. 4 (2008): 317. 28  James Loeffler, “Nationalism without a Nation? On the Invisibility of American Jewish Politics,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 105, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 367–398; William Forbath,

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demanding rights abroad in the name of a universal liberalism while declining to pursue any such claims at home was not only born of tactical considerations. It also reflected a complicated interplay of international and domestic spheres in American Jewish political culture that would remain a staple of liberal politics for the remainder of the twentieth century.29 Despite the great fanfare of the immediate postwar moment, Jews managed to realize relatively little of the promise of minority rights throughout interwar Eastern Europe. Part of this failure stemmed from the weakness of the Jewish political position and the general absence of stable liberal regimes in the region. Still the group-ist strain of Jewish liberalism remained undeniably central to interwar Jewish politics across Poland, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Lithuania, Hungary, and Latvia.30 Seeking to compensate for these problems, Jewish parliamentarians from these countries forged an alliance between themselves and other national minority groups through Congress of European National Minorities. Again, this effort was widely understood as a conscious effort to expand the boundaries of liberalism. In a speech to the inaugural European Minorities Congress in Geneva in 1925, Lithuanian Jewish parliamentarian and Zionist leader Jacob Robinson called for minority rights premised on the model of the premodern Jewish kehile (autonomous community) as a new paradigm for the structure of the modern, decentralized state. He intended this not as a substitute for classic liberal conceptions of formal political and civil equality, but as a vital supplement.31 The Czech Jewish political leader Emil Margulies echoed the same sentiment in another speech to the same body a few years later: “Just as in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of more than a 100 years ago the human rights of individuals were proclaimed, now after another enormous world rupture that the World War has brought us, so too a new concept of the rights of individual groups of national minorities has been proclaimed.”32

“Constitutionalism, Human Rights, and the Genealogy of Jewish American Liberalism: A Comment,” in James Loeffler and Moria Paz, eds., The Law of Strangers, 118–140. 29  Michael N. Barnett, The Star and the Stripes. 30  Rebecca Klein-Pejšová, Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar; Tatjana Lichtenstein, Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia; 32–57; Shlomo Netzer, Maʼavak Yehude Polin ʻal zekhuyotehem ha-ezrahiyot veha-leʼumiyot (1918–1922). 31  Loeffler, “‘Famous Trinity,’” 224. 32  Quoted in Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans, 2.

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From Minority Rights to Human Rights The outbreak of World War II cast into doubt the entire larger fate of minority rights in European liberal politics. Yet the crisis in the world order also produced a moment of opportunity in which to reimagine the features of global politics in the postwar era. For self-described liberal thinkers, the conversation centered on the question of how to conceptualize the relationship between the national and the international in global politics. For many American liberal internationalists, nationalism was considered the prime culprit for the outbreak of war and racial antisemitism. Seeking a more specific target, they charged minority rights as an accomplice to the irredentist forms of European nationalism. Jewish separatism, real and imagined, now also joined the list of enemies for an individualist Anglo-American liberalism.33 For many individualist Jewish liberals, the obvious antidote to this dangerous nationalism was the rising doctrine of individual international human rights. “The concept of minority group and majority group must be obliterated,” wrote Judge Joseph Proskauer, head of the American Jewish Committee, of the prospects for international human rights law in 1944, “The rights which must be guaranteed are the rights of every individual, and not of men as mere parts of a segregated minority.”34 This view was echoed by his colleague and successor, Jacob Blaustein, who subsequently became the most prominent booster for human rights in American foreign policy, “Individualism is the cornerstone of the societies created by our revolutions -- French and American. And our experience everywhere in the world, ever since the walls of the ghetto came tumbling down, has proved that where individualism prevails, Jews need not fear.”35 For group-ist Jewish liberals, both those Eastern European transplants and their American Zionist compatriots, the new 1940s doctrine of human rights offered a pernicious threat to their dream of a different kind of Jewish liberalism. This, then, was the context in which many began to 33  Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans, 93. For insightful discussion of liberal ambivalence towards Jewish collective difference during the Holocaust, see Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, 201, 207. 34  Quoted in James Loeffler, “The Particularist Pursuit of American Universalism: The American Jewish Committee’s 1944 ‘Declaration on Human Rights,’” Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 2 (2014): 277. 35  Speech by Jacob Blaustein, 1950, Jacob Blaustein Papers, Johns Hopkins University Archives, Folder VV-1-31.

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denigrate tolerance and individualist liberalism as the functional equivalent of Nazi race murder. Even absent the heated rhetoric of Hayim Greenberg, the critique of individualist liberalism was often narrated as a story of its insufficiency, if not impotence in the face of the real demands of modern politics. As American Zionist scholar Oscar Janowsky wrote in 1940: The failure of nineteenth-century liberalism to eliminate prejudice and discrimination despite “Jewish Emancipation,” has established it as a fact that the “rights of man,” while necessary, are not sufficient to solve the problems of a minority. When protection is accorded to the individuals who compose a minority, only partial “emancipation” is achieved. Full equality can be realized only when group rights are likewise guaranteed. If Jews are to enjoy full liberty, the opportunity must be theirs to live an untrammeled group life and to develop their national and cultural peculiarities equally with other peoples.36

Much of this critique was fueled by anxiety over the prospect of new human rights proposals delegitimizing the entire concept of group rights. “Under the pressure of ten years of the Hitler regime a trend has developed among its opponents to seek equal rights for the individual at the expense of the rights of the community,” wrote former Latvian Jewish politician Max Laserson in a 1944 editorial, but, he added, “Jews cannot exist as isolated atoms”: When serious non-Jewish political thinkers consider the Atlantic Charter or other international Bills of Rights, they do not forget that besides the rights of the individual, there are rights which ought to be accorded to peoples, communities or groups. But our own followers of the Bill of Rights are ready to give up our collective rights entirely or to reduce them to a ­negligible minimum… After this Second World War, the proper synthesis of individual and collective rights will have to be found.37

Over the final years of the war, this call for blending individual and group rights together yielded to angrier attacks on the hypocrisies of Western liberalism vis-à-vis Jewish victimhood. Writing in 1945, Russian/Italian  Oscar Janowsky, “Introduction,” in Brandeis, The Jewish Problem, 3.  Max Laserson, “The Legal Rehabilitation of European Jews,” The Reconstructionist, March 31, 1944, 10. 36 37

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Jewish lawyer Alexander Pekelis, now of the American Jewish Congress, denounced modern law itself: “[I]n the eyes of the law the Jews do not exist as a group. They may be murdered as a group, but they may not complain about it as a group.”38 Pekelis went on to lay out a broader, more optimistic view of postwar liberalism in his seminal 1945 essay, “Full Equality in a Free Society: A Program for Jewish Action.” There he stressed that Jewish liberalism had to move beyond conceptualizing liberty strictly in negative terms for autonomous individuals, “Modern liberalism has been blind to this [group] aspect of human existence because its individualist and universalist presuppositions and illusions have prevented it from seeing.” The solution would be to stretch out its theoretical fabric to encompass a broader vision of political organization: We do not intend to define our task as that of a Jewish “defense agency” or to confine it to the attempt of painless integration of individuals of Jewish faith or descent into the society in which they live. Ours is a much more complex, delicate, and difficult task… Jewish equality and Jewish distinctiveness, the integrity of the Jews as a people and their dignity as individuals comprise the twofold but indivisible aim of [the] Congress. We would reject individual equality if its price were renunciation of our collective individuality.39

Pekelis’s vision was not to be. Instead, the war’s end brought a stunning new reality to digest. Massive Jewish demographic losses sapped away much of the practical arguments for Jewish minority rights in Eastern Europe. Added to that, international diplomats of all stripes exhibited a determined resistance to any talk of minority rights. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1946 the very word “minority” itself proved taboo. The future Israeli historian Jacob Talmon described the situation as a conspiracy between Western ignorance and Eastern realpolitik, “The Western countries, with their tradition of individualistic liberalism, found it difficult to understand and to sympathize with what seemed to them to be a wish for a special position for the Jews as a group, as distinct from the non-Jewish citizens in any state, whereas the Eastern countries were apprehensive that the demand for certain group rights for Jews run counter to 38  Alexander Pekelis, “Group Sanctions against Racism,” reprinted in Milton Konvitz, ed., Law and Social Action, 188. 39  Alexander Pekelis, “Full Equality in a Free Society: A Program for Jewish Action,” reprinted in Konvitz, Law and Social Action, 219.

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their monolithic and centralizing tendencies.”40 Talmon’s American Zionist colleagues framed the situation even more starkly. Across the continent, the editors of the journal New Palestine wrote, the remaining European Jews had been presented with “only the choice of Jewish nationality within an independent Jewish State, or complete and full assimilation.” “It is one of the ironies of history,” they continued, that “liberals today embrace the view of the extreme Zionists who long ago proclaimed and foretold this either-or, this quite rigid dichotomy.”41

Latter-Day Legacies 1948 brought twin developments that further diminished the prospects for Jewish collectivist liberalism: the creation of the State of Israel and the issuance of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The first provided a new statist framework for Jewish collective identity, while the latter enshrined individualism as the key feature of international law. Between the sovereign state and the individual citizen, little space remained for alternative visions of liberalism with groups, at least not in the liberal West. In fact, it was precisely this point that liberalism began to acquire its more specific, canonical connotations as a paradigm of exclusively individual liberty against the collectivist ideals of Communism in the context of the emerging Cold War. Still, echoes of the collectivist strain remained alive in some pockets of Jewish political thought and legal activism, particularly in regards to international human rights at the UN.  One such site was the UN SubCommission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities, a subsidiary body of the UN Commission on Human Rights, charged with exploring the question of minority protection in international law. The World Jewish Congress, a group still largely comprised of East European Zionist liberals at the time, repeatedly tried to raise the idea of specific protections against antisemitism that would recognize Jews as a group.42 In response, Moses Moskowitz of the American Jewish Committee 40  J. F. Flaiszer [Jacob Talmon], “The Jewish Case at the Paris Peace Conference,” Oct. 20, 1946, American Jewish Archives, World Jewish Congress Collection, MS-361, Series B, Box 64, Folder 16. See also Nathan Kurz, “In the Shadow of Versailles: Jewish Minority Rights at the 1946 Paris Peace Conference,” JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016): 187–210. 41  “Liberal Europe,” New Palestine, July 13, 1945, 235. 42  “Resolutions adopted by the WJC,” Congress Weekly, Aug. 20, 1948, 15.

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attacked group rights as an affront to liberalism. “The Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities must be separated,” he wrote in 1948, since “the former task drives at equality, [while] the latter must drive at inequality… We do not want a system that will perpetuate differences.”43 Another World Jewish Congress parallel effort took place in the drafting process surrounding the UN Genocide Convention, a legal project that also owed its origins to interwar Jewish group-ist thought. To prevent genocide from occurring to Jewish communities in the future, wrote Robert Marcus in 1948, required expanding the boundaries of international legal protection to include the rights of groups: What is needed is the creation of machinery which would effectively preserve the lives and secure the existence of human groups against possible attacks by stronger groups. This aim could be achieved by establishing an international criminal law which would make it an offense against humanity to destroy or weaken any racial, religious or other group by unilateral action of their fellow citizens, the authorities of their home country or by an aggressor.44

Once again, these efforts yielded no results. They represented faint afterechoes of a venerable tradition that had all but vanished by 1948. Reinhold Niebuhr concluded his 1942 lamentation about liberalism’s blindness to the Jewish question with a call for American liberals to recognize that “a collective survival impulse is as legitimate a ‘right’ as an individual one. Justice, in history, is concerned with collective, as well as with individual, rights.” In the half-century after World War II, it sufficed for Jews, philosemites, and antisemites alike to view the State of Israel as the primary vehicle and locus for Jewish collective survival. Jewish communal and political life might have continued as before in Western democracies. Jewish communities may have struggled for their security and existence in other parts of the world, notably the Communist Bloc and the Middle East. None of this, however, substituted or competed with the prerogatives of sovereignty. The formal public address for Jewish collective survival, as well as the agent self-empowered to exercise claims in the name of 43  Letter from Moses Moskowitz to Edward Lawson, Jacob Blaustein Papers, Box 2.90, Folder L-2-11. 44  “The Case against Genocide,” Congress Weekly, April 16, 1948, 13; Robert Marcus, Memo, April 6, 1948, AJA, MS-361, Series B, Box 84, Folder F7.

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the Jews as a body politic, was the State of Israel. Since the 1990s, however, questions have continually surfaced about the liberal character of the Israeli polity itself. Many of these have to do with precisely the thorny challenges of defining the collective rights and identity of a non-Jewish Arab minority in a Jewish majoritarian state, as well as the legal boundaries between Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza. At the same time, the more recent uptick in global antisemitism has led to questions about how to protect Jews outside of Israel in liberal democracies using the tools of anti-discrimination laws that rely in some cases on the premise of group rights. All of this points to a new era of reckoning with the very character of liberalism and its Jewish variants. Where this will ultimately lead remains unknowable of course. There is no doubt, however, that one question will continue to animate debates over Jews and liberalism: Is the basic unit of Jewish politics the individual or the group?

Bibliography Archives Jacob Blaustein Papers, Johns Hopkins University Archives. World Jewish Congress Collection, MS-361, American Jewish Archives.

Bibliography Almog, Shmuel, et  al. 1987. eds. Temurot be-historiyah ha-yehudit he-hadashah. Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press. Barnett, Michael N. 2016. The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bell, Duncan. 2014. What Is Liberalism? Political Theory 42 (6): 682–715. Berkowitz, Michael, ed. 2004. Nationalism, Zionism and Ethnic Mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and Beyond. Leiden: Brill. Brandeis, Louis. 1942. Brandeis on Zionism: A Collection of Addresses and Statements by Louis D. Brandeis. New York: Hadassah. Bublick, Gedaliah. 1945. Vi azoy der yidisher natsionalizm iz anderzh fun goyishe natsionalizm. Morgn-zhurnal, July 29. Cohen, Morris. 1919. Zionism: Tribalism or Liberalism? The New Republic, March 8. Gassenschmidt, Christoph. 2002. Jewish Liberals in Russia, 1900–1914. New York: NYU Press.

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Granick, Jaclyn. 2015. Humanitarian Responses to Jewish Suffering Abroad by American Jewish Organizations, 1914–1929. Ph.D. Thesis, Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva. Greene, Daniel. 2014. The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Horowitz, Brian. 2009a. Empire Jews: Jewish Nationalism and Acculturation in 19th- and Early 20th Century Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2009b. Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Kallen, Horace. 1932. Judaism at Bay. New York: Bloch Publishing. Katz, Daniel. 2015. All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism. New York: NYU Press. Klein-Pejsova, Rebecca. 2015. Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Konvitz, Milton, ed. 1950. Law and Social Action: Selected Essay of Alexander H. Pekelis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kurz, Nathan. 2016. In the Shadow of Versailles: Jewish Minority Rights at the 1946 Paris Peace Conference. JBDI/DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15: 187–210. Kushner, Tony. 1994. The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Laserson, Max. 1944. The Legal Rehabilitation of European Jews. The Reconstructionist, March 31. Liberal Europe. 1945. New Palestine, July 13. Lichtenstein, Tatjana. 2016. Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia: Minority Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Loeffler, James. 2010. Between Zionism and Liberalism: Oscar Janowsky and Diaspora Nationalism in America. AJS Review 34 (2): 289–308. ———. 2014. The Particularist Pursuit of American Universalism: The American Jewish Committee’s 1944 ‘Declaration on Human Rights. Journal of Contemporary History 50 (2): 274–295. ———. 2015. Nationalism without a Nation? On the Invisibility of American Jewish Politics. Jewish Quarterly Review 105 (3): 367–398. ———. 2016. The Famous Trinity of 1917’: Zionist Internationalism in Historical Perspective. Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15: 211–238. ———. 2018. Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. Loeffler, James, and Moria Paz, eds. 2019. The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manchur, Arieh. 1981. Hagdarah ‘atsmit ve-otonomiyah le’umit be’meah ha-19 Torato shel Adolf Fishhof. Kivunim 10: 93–105.

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Myers, David. 2015. Rethinking Sovereignty and Autonomy: New Currents in the History of Jewish Nationalism. Transversal 13: 44–51. Netzer, Shlomo. 1980. Maʼavak Yehude Polin ʻal zekhuyotehem ha-ezrahiyot veha-­ leʼumiyot (1918–1922). Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Press. Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1942. Jews after the War. The Nation, February 21. Pianko, Noam. 2008. The True Liberalism of Zionism: Horace Kallen, Jewish Nationalism, and the Limits of American Pluralism. American Jewish History 94 (4): 299–329. ———. 2010. Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Rabinovitch, Simon. 2014. Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Raider, Mark A., ed. 2017. The Essential Hayim Greenberg: Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism & Zionism. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Rechter, David. 2001. The Jews of Vienna and the First World War. Manchester: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. ———. 2007. A Nationalism of Small Things: Jewish Autonomy in Late Habsburg Austria. Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 52: 87–109. Reifowitz, Ian. 2001. Threads Intertwined: German National Egoism and Liberalism in Adolf Fischhof’s Vision for Austria. Nationalities Papers 29 (3): 452–453. ———. 2003. Imagining an Austrian Nation: Joseph Samuel Bloch and the Search for a Multiethnic Austrian Identity, 1846–1919. New  York: Columbia University Press. Resolutions adopted by the WJC. 1948. Congress Weekly, August 20. Rozen, Minna, ed. 2008. Homelands and Diasporas: Greeks, Jews and Their Migrations. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Rozenblit, Marsha. 2004. Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rubin, Gil. 2017. The Future of the Jews: Planning for the Postwar Jewish World, 1939–1946, Ph.D. Dissertation. Columbia University. Sarat, Austin, and Thomas Kearns, eds. 1995. Identities, Politics, and Rights. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shanes, Joshua. 2013. Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shumsky, Dmitry. 2011. Leon Pinsker and ‘Autoemancipation!’: A Reevaluation. Jewish Social Studies 18 (1 Fall): 33–62. ———. 2018. Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Silber, Marcos. 2014. Leʼumiyut shonah, ezrahut shavah! Ha-maʼamats le-hasagat otonomyah li- Yehude Polin be-Milhemet ha-ʻolam ha-rishonah. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Press. Stolzenberg, Nomi Maya., and David N. Myers. 1992. Community, Constitution, and Culture: The Case of the Jewish Kehillah. University of Michigan Journal of Legal Reform 25 (3–4): 633–670. Struve, Kai. 2004. ‘Nationale Minderheit’: Begriffgeschichtliches zu Gleichheit und Differenz. Leipziger Beitrage zur juedischen Geschichte und Kultur 2 (2): 233–258. ———. 2005. Bauern und Nation in Galizien: über Zugehörigkeit und soziale Emanzipation im 19. Jahrhundert. Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. The Case Against Genocide. 1948. Congress Weekly, April 16. Trigano, Shmuel. 2009. The Democratic Ideal and the Shoah: The Unthought in Political Modernity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Vernikova, Bella. 2003. Atributsiya statei L’va Pinskera v russko-evreiskoi pechati, 1860– 1880. Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta 26: 41–94. Volovici, Marc. 2017. Leon Pinsker’s Autoemancipation! and the Emergence of German as a Language of Jewish Nationalism. Central European History 50 (1): 34–58.

CHAPTER 16

The Jewishness of Cold War Liberalism Malachi Haim Hacohen

The Jewish profile of Cold War liberalism is striking. The trans-Atlantic intellectual networks at its core represented a collaboration between émigrés from Nazi Europe, remigrés to postwar Europe, and the New York intellectuals. All three groups were heavily Jewish. They included famous figures like Raymond Aron, Daniel Bell, Isaiah Berlin, Sydney Hook, Karl Popper, and Manès Sperber. Unlike their nineteenth-century forbearers, the Cold War Jewish liberals were public intellectuals more than political leaders. Most were active in the Congress for Cultural Freedom (henceforth CCF), a major international anticommunist organization, with its headquarters in Paris. Clandestinely supported by CIA funds, CCF coordinated a global network of sophisticated politico-cultural magazines and an international seminar and conference program. Cold War liberalism signaled the advent of postwar trans-Atlantic culture. The Cold War liberals represented a generation formed in the struggles against Nazism and Stalinism. They were determined to halt the slide toward “totalitarianism,” and advocated a “liberalism of fear”: antiutopian, anticommunist, and supportive of liberal democracy and the welfare

M. H. Hacohen (*) Duke University, Durham, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_16

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state.1 A decidedly secular intelligentsia, they decried communism as a “political religion” and, until the 1970s, rarely spoke of their own Jewishness. Cognizant, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, of the irresolvable character of the Jewish Question in the Europe, they tried to reconcile their growing support for the State of Israel with their advocacy of Jewish integration and cosmopolitanism. In the aftermath of 1968, some of them, especially in the US, rediscovered their Jewishness and began underlining religion’s importance in liberal culture. The modern public sphere, they reasoned, needed support from premodern institutions and traditions, and liberal politics required a foundation in the affective bonds of family and community. Their secularism, however, came back to haunt them: Their detachment from Jewish traditions made their religious turn appear instrumental and inauthentic. They could not engage the traditions and institutions, which they declared crucial for liberalism. The Cold War liberals confronted a series of traditional liberal dilemmas relating to the management of democracy and nationalism, and these dilemmas define best their place in the history of liberalism. The variety of liberalism admit of no theoretical coherence. “Liberals” have taken contradictory positions on virtually all historical questions. The more extensive the liberal core that scholars endeavor to establish, the more “liberals” they find themselves excluding. Conversely, including all liberals renders liberalism meaningless. A midway position, which would retain coherence without excluding too many “liberals,” would be to look for historical patterns of liberal dilemmas. Volatile management of democracy and nationalism, and an inability to commit to or deny either, are liberalism’s historical trademarks. Unlike some of their nineteenth-century predecessors, the Cold War liberals could not imagine withdrawing universal suffrage or denying national self-determination, but the antisemitic mobs, the totalitarian parties’ electoral successes, and the murderous ethnonational conflicts they had experienced in Central and Eastern Europe filled them with terror. They blessed their luck for living, in the post-­World War II world, in orderly polities where governments enjoyed public support and ethnic conflicts had been settled, but they could think of few effective remedies, should lawfulness be disrupted or ethnic strife develop. Their pragmatic politics and piecemeal reforms were ineffective in managing crises. They acknowledged as much by consigning international relations to Realpolitik that was exempted from constitutional constraints. They 1

 Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear” [1989], in Hoffmann, ed., Political Thought, pp. 3–20.

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lived on edge between commitment and betrayal of liberal values, always negotiating conflicting aims. The Cold War liberals’ Jewishness was equally elusive. Their Jewish politics ranged from integrationist to Zionist, but ethnonationalism and the Holocaust racialized Jewish identity and disabused most liberals of the view of Jewishness as singly religious. A few, like Popper, persisted in disavowing their Jewishness, but the majority accepted it with equanimity, as an irrevocable, if regrettable, fact. They recognized that “collective identities are products of histories; and our engagement with them invokes capacities that are not under our control.”2 With the years, they became aware that their liberalism may be implicated in their Jewishness. They showed growing consciousness of Jewish ethnicity, and, already in the 1950s and 1960s, some began developing a “multicultural” view of the polity that would facilitate integration without assimilation. All the same, as historians have been apprehensive about ascribing Jewish identity to secular intellectuals, the European liberals’ Jewishness has been sidelined. This essay foregrounds it, making the Jewish experience crucial to Cold War liberalism. The postwar global realignment reshaped liberal Jewish politics. Until the end of World War I, the majority of world Jewry lived in three continental empires: Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. Ethnically and culturally diverse, these empires offered the Jews variable measures of autonomy, and provided a countermodel to integration in the nation state, which Western Jews pursued. When these empires collapsed, the interwar ethnonationalizing states that inherited them made Jewish national integration impossible. In the course of World War II, the Holocaust destroyed most of European Jewry, and, in its aftermath, rapidly advancing decolonization ended the French and British overseas empires, sealing the decline of European hegemony, and completing the transition from imperial to national states. Empire was gone, as either a legitimate form of government or as a solution to the Jewish Question. The ethnonational state emerged triumphant, appearing as the sole tenable form of government. Most liberals remained wedded to Jewish national integration, but they recognized that its European prospects were tenuous. The Jewish nation-state, Israel, appeared increasingly attractive and so did also the US, a multiethnic imperial nation, where Jews were making advances in the academy and in social life. In the Soviet Union, in 2

 Appiah, “Liberalism, Individuality, and Identity,” 326.

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contrast, Jewry suffered from the dual liability of forced assimilation and growing Russian nationalism and antisemitism. Just as the US emerged as the bulwark against totalitarianism, so it became also the great refuge for Jewish life. The Jewish origins of liberal anticommunism are palpable in the works of Berlin, Sperber, and a host of New York intellectuals, especially Lucy Dawidowicz, but historians have missed them. They have levied attention on postwar integration politics, and civil rights, and failed to notice the early emergence of Jewish ethnicity and “multicultural” politics. The historians are not to blame, however: Their protagonists misled them. Most liberals carefully concealed the Jewish anxieties underlying their anticommunism and grounded their liberalism in universal fears. Moreover, postwar liberals were genuinely confused about their Jewishness. They endorsed the Weberian model of modernization, and thought they were living it. The world was becoming irrevocably disenchanted and religion was a matter of the past, a residual marker of their ethnic identity. Arguing for liberalism on ethnic or religious grounds was manifestly illiberal. When their confusion began to clear, ethnicity resurged as a form of Jewish politics, but it was denuded of Jewish intellectual traditions. Theirs was a rich liberalism but a poor Jewish one. Recognizing as much may be first step to a future reconstruction of Jewish liberalism.

The Liberal Networks Trans-Atlantic Cold War liberalism was largely the creation of emergent international networks that were moving from the margins of European and American cultures into the mainstream. The émigrés, a remnant of the European Jewish intelligentsia who had survived the Holocaust, became icons of European culture by the 1980s. The New York Jewish intelligentsia, the first generation of college-educated children of Jewish immigrants, entered journalism and the academy en masse in the shadow of the Great Depression and the Cold War. By the 1960s, they were leading US public intellectuals. The émigrés’ international networks put them in an advantageous position to build trans-Atlantic cultural relations. They comprised of Jewish intellectuals, like novelists Arthur Koestler and Friedrich Torberg, and political scientists Franz Borkenau and Ernst Fraenkel, who joined non-­ Jews, commonly anti-fascists married to Jews, like historian Hajo Holborn and novelist Thomas Mann. Many émigrés participated in the war effort

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against Germany, and a few continued their US government service into the postwar period, and played crucial roles in shaping Cold War strategy.3 With the exception of the Catholic networks, they had few transnational competitors. The Holocaust and postwar “ethnic cleansing”--the expulsion of Germans and other minorities “back to their homeland”--turned Central Europe into a conglomerate of ethnonational states as it had never before been in history. The Cold War divided Europe. As US agencies, including the emergent CIA, were looking for intellectuals who might help them rebuild a pro-western Europe, they found in the émigré networks a major recruiting ground. The preponderantly Jewish New  York intellectuals grew up socialist, and a predilection for Marxism and European modernism, along with ethnocultural memories of their parents’ Eastern Europe, prepared the grounds for their trans-Atlantic engagement. Throughout the war years, they were moving from their 1930s heterodox but radical Marxism to social democracy and liberalism, becoming Cold War liberals. Jewish intellectuals, like sociologist Daniel Bell, philosopher Sidney Hook, journalist Irving Kristol, and literary critics Irving Howe and Lionel Trilling, were joined by non-Jewish internationalists, like social critic Dwight Macdonald, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. They congregated around a series of politicocultural magazines from Partisan Review to The New Leader to Commentary to the socialist Dissent, and, after 1965, the neoconservative, The Public Interest. These magazines set the model for CCF. In their early years, the New York intellectuals combined literary modernism with heterodox Marxism, and American Pragmatism with European culture and anticommunism. In their later years, as public figures, they began addressing also policy issues. Among them, Bell, Hook and Trilling may exemplify the Jewish intelligentsia’s journey from Marxism to liberalism; Howe those who held onto democratic socialist hopes in the postwar years; and Irving Kristol those who turned neoconservative in the 1970s and 1980s. While the New York Intellectuals had only a small contingent of die-­ hard communists, the émigrés and remigrés were more evenly split among pro-western, neutralist and communist camps, with the last two being much stronger among remigrés to Europe than among the émigrés remaining in the US. The pro-western émigrés, or the “Atlanticists,” like Koestler and Popper, regarded the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe 3

 Bessner, Democracy in Exile; Greenberg, The Weimar Century.

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as a tragedy and feared that further Soviet expansion west would put an end to liberal democracy. They sought the formation of a US-European alliance as a protection against Soviet expansion. Communist remigrés, like philosopher Georg Lukàcs and composer Hanns Eisler, whether they hailed back from Moscow, where they had weathered war and purges, or the US, where the anticommunist hysteria forced them out, retained the single international network that was capable of breaking through the Iron Curtain. Communist repression prevented, however, genuine east-­ west dialogue, at least until the mid-1960s. Neutralists, like Austrian antinuclear activist, Günther Anders, wanted to prevent at all cost military confrontation in Europe between the two blocs. They opposed NATO and endeavored to build bridges to the east. They were the major target for western and communist propaganda, which each sought to draw neutralist intellectuals to its camp. On both sides of the Atlantic, internationally minded prowestern intellectuals were seeking to counter Soviet propaganda, expose communism as totalitarian, and shape a pro-American European consensus. Many found their way to CCF, the hub of Cold War liberal culture. Jewish intellectuals were prominent among CCF activists, editors and magazine contributors.4 American Irving Kristol joined British Stephen Spender in editing CCF flagship magazine Encounter. Melvin Lasky, serving with the US Occupation Authorities, edited the German Der Monat, and, in 1958, took over Kristol’s place in Encounter. The Swiss François Bondy edited Preuves; Nicola Chiaromonte, returning from the US, edited the Italian Tempo Presente; and Friedrich Torberg, returning from the US, edited the Austrian Forum. Sperber oversaw the entire network of magazines from the Paris headquarters and edited book series for the publisher CalmannLévy. CCF drew also on Catholic networks: Waldemar Gurian and Eugen Kogon (both of Jewish origins) in Germany, and the Personalist circle around Jacques Maritain in France. Of the latter circle, Denis de Rougemont, a leading advocate of European Federalism (and a Swiss Protestant), had the highest profile. Yet, as a rule, CCF was a sideshow to the Catholic networks, and a prime one for the secular liberal Jewish ones.5 CCF executive director, Michael Josselson, was a gifted, multilingual and cosmopolitan European Jewish businessman who emigrated to the 4  Hacohen, “Kongress für kulturelle Freiheit,” Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture, 2: 22–28. 5  Chappel, Catholic Modern.

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US. He first served as an American psychological warfare agent during the War, then as a US Army Cultural Affairs Officer in Berlin. Joining the fledgling CIA in 1948, he facilitated the founding of CCF, and, as its main CIA link, orchestrated its administration. When the CIA’s role in supporting CCF became public in 1966, a scandal erupted, discrediting CCF. For the Left, and for many liberals, in Europe and the US alike, CCF has become an emblem of Cold War liberal duplicity, CIA conspiracy, and the US menace.6 Yet, historiography has produced a more balanced view that underscores the agency of CCF intellectuals.7 CCF depended on the initiative of preexisting émigré networks and had to accommodate itself to what the intellectuals, allegedly under its control, wanted and were willing to do. Where a network of solidarity, solidified by exile and international experience, did not exist, CCF had difficulty making progress, and no amount of CIA resources could help. Shared experience and goals – cosmopolitan background, immigration and exile – were crucial. CCF was the Jewish liberals’ main organization but not the only one. Liberal émigrés, like Ernst Fraenkel and Karl Loewenstein, and New York intellectual, Melvin Lasky, served in diverse US government offices, from the counterintelligence agency during the War years (OSS) to the occupation governments in Germany and Korea after to diplomatic missions around the world throughout the Cold War. They endeavored to shape liberal policies and a prowestern social democratic consensus. Other liberals, like Aron, Bell, and Berlin, worked with international philanthropic organizations, above all, The Ford Foundation, to promote similar goals.8 Yet others frequented The Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, a summer school established by Austrian émigré, Clement Heller, in 1947, under Harvard University’s auspices, to familiarize Europeans with American culture and encourage exchange between European and American students.9 As the New York Intellectuals rose in the US academy, university networks began forming from Columbia to Harvard to Chicago to Berkeley to Oxford, where Isaiah Berlin proved pivotal. 6  Lasch, “The Cultural Cold War,” in The Agony of the American Left; Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?. 7  Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy; Grémion, Intelligence de l’anticommunisme; Hochgeschwender, Freiheit in der Offensive?; Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture; Warner, “Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949–50,” 89–98. 8  Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe. 9  Schmidt, “No Innocents Abroad,” in Wagnleitner and Tyler Mary, eds., The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture, 64–79.

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The liberal networks interlocked: Money flew from the Ford Foundation to CCF, and intellectuals moved among the networks. Bell and Lasky, for example, who were both educated at City College and Columbia University (Lasky also at the University of Michigan), worked first as editors for the New Leader and published in Partisan Review and Commentary. Bell organized CCF international seminar program, worked with the Ford Foundation, visited the Salzburg Seminar, and, later, taught at Columbia and Harvard. Lasky served in the US army in Germany, then in the occupation government, founded Der Monat and helped found CCF, and then edited Encounter. A New York Intellectual who “returned” to Europe and married German, he used US resources to build up a trans-Atlantic partnership that reflected a convergent vision of European and American liberalism, informed by Social Democracy and City College disenchanted Marxism. The liberal networks diverged in the roles played by women. The New York Intellectuals had a contingent of women writers, literary critics, journalists, and historians: Lucy Dawidowicz, Midge Decter, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Mary McCarthy, and Diana Trilling. Hannah Arendt was associated with the group, too, while at variance with liberalism. Biographies of Dawidowicz and Trilling make it clear that women were expected to be brilliant, but lack of feminine appeal or social grace could diminish their prospects, in ways that physical looks and brusque behavior would not hinder men.10 Married women, like Diana Trilling, accepted sole responsibility for domestic duties and raising children, and dedicated themselves to promoting their spouse’s work. Women émigrés suffered even greater marginalization, virtually never obtaining academic positions equivalent to their husbands or achieving public renown (with the notable anomaly of Arendt).11 They were also marginal in CCF. Arendt and McCarthy were invited to the Milan Conference in 1955, but, with the exception of Margarethe Buber-Neumann, European Cold War liberalism had no comparable women participants to the New  York Intellectuals. Cold War liberalism remained largely the world of men.

 Sinkoff, From Left to Right; Robins, The Untold Journey.  Krohn et  al., eds., Frauen und Exil, Exilforschung; Quack, ed., Between Sorrow and Strength. 10 11

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Intellectual Profile Born during the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Jewish Cold War liberals were ardent antifascists in the 1930s, and advocated national mobilization and international cooperation against Germany. Virtually all had either political or scholarly engagement with Marxism, most had strong socialist sympathies, and many had a brush with communism. A few – Koestler, political scientist Richard Löwenthal, and Sperber – collaborated in Die Zukunft, 1938–1940, an independent leftist magazine that communist political activist, Willi Münzenberg, founded after his break with Stalin. By 1939, however, virtually all became critics of Soviet “totalitarianism,” a concept they developed, comparing the Nazi and Stalinist dictatorships. They rendered military, diplomatic and journalistic service to the Allies during World War II. With the Cold War, they became staunch anticommunists, supporters of NATO and containment. Their works, which had earlier focused on the fascist challenge, now turned to communism, but, for the Americans, McCarthyism resurrected fears of populist nationalism, and led to a major rethinking of US history.12 Many remained social democrats. In contrast with the libertarian Mont Pèlerin Society, inspired by Friedrich Hayek, virtually all Cold War liberals supported the welfare state. The student revolutions of the late 1960s caught the liberals by surprise. Responding to generational and cultural rifts, the welfare state crisis, and détente, their politics grew more conservative in the 1970s. The French “re-discovery” of the Gulags and the Cold War’s rekindling during the early 1980s seemed to restore life to their anticommunism, but, while some liberals welcomed the Reagan-Thatcher era, many felt uncomfortable with the new virulent anticommunist rhetoric, and most remained committed to a moderate version of the welfare state. With the collapse of communism, their liberalism, long morbid, reached its end. Anti-utopianism was the hallmark of Cold War liberal politics. Judith Shklar dubbed it, “the liberalism of fear”: It was modest in its expectations of politics and human life and focused on averting catastrophes rather than on realizing grand visions.13 The Cold War liberals viewed politics as pragmatic, a matter of trial-and-error, and advocated gradual reform, or, to use Popper’s rubric, “piecemeal social engineering.” They were anxious,  Bell, ed., The Radical Right; Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.  Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear.”

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above all, to safeguard constitutional protections and prevent the concentration of power, which was bound to lead to abuse. Checks and balances were their favorite safeguard. They framed revolutionary politics as messianic, and exposed the millenarianism of the Marxist vision of history. “Political religion” was a pejorative term, and the putative affinities between religious messianism and totalitarian ideology delegitimized radical politics.14 They were hostile to political theology. “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” argued political philosopher Carl Schmitt. Not so, said the secular Jewish liberals, severing the link tying theology and politics. Their counterpoint was Western liberal democracy – secular, pluralist, pragmatic, deliberative. Yet, they could find no alternative to “political religion” that would generate comparable intellectual and emotional commitment. They remained unsure how to cultivate commitment to liberalism, and, at crucial moments, such as the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, they were at a loss as to how they may forge a consensus to sustain liberal democracy. They faced Benjamin Constant’s problem: How can liberals forge a liberal public without risking a mob, mobilize without endangering liberty? National Socialism and McCarthyism raised the specter of the mob just as the crowds of the French Revolution did for Constant. Like him, they were suspicious of direct democracy, civic republicanism, and populist nationalism. They insisted on representative government, mediating bodies governed by constitutional procedures, and the rule of educated elites, democratically elected. They were not sanguine about religion, and remained apprehensive lest “education for democracy” turn into indoctrination. To use Berlin’s term, they were skeptical of any “positive aim” of liberalism, any vision of ideal citizenship, any consensus beyond civil rights and welfare.15 They were aware of the unique conditions enabling liberal democracy in the west, and pessimistic about its prospects elsewhere. Content with postwar modernization, economic growth, and the relative stability of the US and western Europe, they were delighted to pronounce around 1960 the “end of ideology.”16 Within a few years, they witnessed Marxist ideology and political radicalism reemerging in the civil 14  Hacohen, “The Liberal Critique of Political Theology,” in Schwarz and Zechner, eds., Die helle und die dunkle Seite der Moderne, 38–50. 15  Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty.” 16  Aron, Kennan, Oppenheimer, et al., Colloqus de Rheinfelden; Bell, The End of Ideology.

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rights movement in the US and the antinuclear movement in Europe, and culminating in their nightmare: the 1968 student and worker revolutions, and the violent global protests against the Vietnam War (a war which most of them opposed). Yet, their liberalism also collapsed from within. Cold War exigencies gave rise to the national security state, with an apparatus of experts who were not subject to public review. The liberals remained either oblivious to its growth, or gave their assent, reasoning that expert rule was an inescapable reality of the nuclear age.17 Taking solace in economic growth and, until the late 1970s, widening welfare networks, they discounted mounting evidence that corporations and markets continued to constrain democratic ideals. Throughout the postwar years, they found themselves compelled to relegate major domestic crises, as in France in 1958 and 1968, to Schmitt’s “state of the exception,” emergencies requiring that liberal rules be relaxed. This threatened to diminish liberalism’s relevancy to politics.

The Jewishness of Cold War Liberalism Jewish culture and Zionism seemed ill suited to Cold War liberalism. The Jewish liberals were as secular as any generation had been. Most had no Jewish education, and all feared radical nationalism. They represented a wide spectrum of views on the Jewish Question, from assimilation (Bondy, Fraenkel, Josselson, and Popper) to integration (Aron, Bell and Hook) to affirmation of Jewish nationality (Berlin and Dawidowicz) to Zionism (historian Jacob Talmon and Torberg). For most of them, however, Jewishness remained subdued. They believed that only a liberal pluralist society would allow for integration and Jewish life, but, rhetorically, they rejected communism and promoted liberalism on universal and not on Jewish grounds. They demanded civil rights, freedom of worship, and national self-determination for all, and not particular rights for the Jews. They assailed Soviet repression of nationality and religion in Russia and Eastern Europe, but with little reference to the Jews. They exposed the antisemitism behind the communist campaigns against cosmopolitanism and Zionism in the 1950s, and were alert to neo-Nazi revivals, but these remained aside. They focused instead on totalitarianism as a misguided response to the crises of modernity. They confronted communism in its

 Bessner, Democracy in Exile; Kornhauser, The American State.

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grandeur--the utopian cosmopolitan vision--and not in its perversity, populist antisemitism. Yet, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the premises of Jewish integration had suffered a disastrous blow, and neither outright denial of one’s Jewish identity nor hostility to Zionism seemed dignified. National integration remained unquestioned only because there seemed to be no viable alternative. The liberals feared nationalism but accepted it almost as a natural force. Pluralist empires were a matter of the past, and postmodern diasporas of the future: The nation-state seemed the only game in town. They disliked nationalism of First, Second, or Third World vintage, but they witnessed Europe reordered along ethnonational lines, with unimaginable terror. They suspected that Jews would never be accepted qua Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. Some of them remained apprehensive that, eventually, the US would not prove any different. “America is no more immune than any other nationalistic, professedly Christian society from the contagion of anti-Semitism,” wrote George Steiner as late as 1965.18 Israel began appearing as the only possible solution.19 To be sure, the fledgling state touched every raw liberal nerve: It was the end result of a revolutionary ethnonational movement that made short shrift of both liberal cosmopolitanism and patriotism, and claimed Jews everywhere for the national project in Palestine. It also triggered a prolonged bloody conflict that destabilized the Middle East and gave the Soviets opportunities to expand their influence. Some liberals never warmed up to Israel, and most did so only gradually. For most of CCF leadership, who were avowed assimilationists steeped in western culture, Israel was mere annoyance. Popper, unique in upholding the ideal of imperial cosmopolitanism in the age of ethnonationalism, poured his wrath on Zionism and Israel, denouncing them as racist.20 Most assimilationists simply ignored Israel. Probably acting in line with instructions from Washington, DC, Josselson kept Israel at arm’s length, and CCF retained the fiction of Jewish integration as a basic and unproblematic right of citizenship. Many liberals, however, shared the Zionist view about the normalcy of national life and the perils of diaspora and concluded that the Jews must have a nation state. Progressively, they increased their support of Israel.  “A Kind of Survivor,” in his: George Steiner: A Reader, 224.  Hacohen, “The Strange Fact That the State of Israel Exists,” 37–81. 20  Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies; Hacohen, Karl Popper, 299–309. 18 19

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For many, the 1967 War, when they first feared that Israel was in mortal danger then witnessed its spectacular triumph, represented a turning point: Thereafter, they made the Jewish state’s fortunes their own. This represented a sea change in the liberal intelligentsia’s Jewish politics, and it began a transformation of its identity that would only be complete with the next generation of Jewish intellectuals in the 1980s and 1990s. Israel exposed the tensions between liberalism and Jewishness, national integration and Zionism. Aron captured the liberals’ dilemma in 1960 by stating that “the existence of the state of Israel, far from resolving the Jewish problem … has added a dimension to it…. Each of us has a homeland and a religion, but no one can have two homelands.”21 The antisemitic ruse of Jewish “dual loyalty” now became a real problem. Awkwardly, and surreptitiously, the Cold War liberals began negotiating between Jewish nationalism, their European and American homelands, and their cosmopolitanism. The tensions that Israel brought out became the source of theoretical innovation, and out of Jewish dilemmas emerged novel visions of liberal multiculturalism that accommodated Jewish ethnicity.

Jewish Ethnicity and Multiculturalism Isaiah Berlin’s liberal pluralism resolved, unwittingly, the dilemmas of diaspora Zionism.22 Berlin saw the Zionist project emerging naturally from Jewish history, an effort to “normalize” the Jews by endowing them with a nation state. Like historian L. B. Namier, he was convinced that the absence of a homeland was deforming for the Jews. He marveled at the Israelis, healthy neue Menschen (newly formed men) who were growing of the land. “Israelis have developed a normal life,” he wrote in 1975. “They … do not suffer from the particular neuroses, which the Zionist movement was intended to cure.”23 He never doubted that there existed “national character”--Jewish, Russian, or English--and a primordial ethnicity was crucial in delineating it.24 In the 1970s, he insisted that “race” 21  “Les Juifs,” in his: Essais sur la condition juive contemporaine: Textes réunis et annotés par Perrine Simon-Nahum, 197–8. Emphasis in the original. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 22  The term diaspora Zionism belongs to Arie M. Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin, 187–200. 23   Berlin, “The Achievement of Zionism,” (1975); Berlin’s “Jewish Slavery and Emancipation” [1952], in his: Hardy, ed., The Power of Ideas, 162–85 portrayed the deformity of diasporic Jewish life. 24  Berlin & Ben-Gurion, “An Exchange,” 23–8.

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ought not to be censored, either.25 He drew attention to the Eastern-­ European utopian socialist origins of the Zionist welfare state, and his warm sympathy for its “otherness,” as contrasted with western liberalism, reflected also a projection of his own imagined self--the Russian Jew.26 Identifying his own discomfort in Oxford with Jewish diasporic existence, he staged himself, in 1930s antibourgeois Oxford, as the Other, a Jewish émigré, a bearer of Russian high culture, and a fugitive of an admired foreign intelligentsia. Berlin’s ethnically accented nationalism exacerbated the tensions between his liberalism and Zionism. As a liberal, he regarded nationalism as dangerous, the source of great tragedies, yet, he himself was a Jewish nationalist. In Herder’s Humanität, however, he found the balance between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Herder’s “nation” was not a political but a cultural community, and he despised the absolutist state. His insistence on communal belonging, and his critique of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism in the name of a diversity of national cultures, expressed Berlin’s convictions. Herder’s multicultural world--a wonderful mosaic of ethnolinguistic communities that were native to their historical and geographic environment--appealed to Berlin. He interpreted Herder’s equivocation on Jewish emancipation as resistance to forced assimilation, and made Herder the liberal pluralist par-excellence (and a crypto-Zionist).27 Diaspora Zionism found its defender in Herder. Berlin undermined the priority of the nation-state to the ethnocultural community and made the nation state’s demand for assimilation, the melting pot, appear illegitimate. The nation state must remain culturally pluralistic, or, in contemporary parlance, multicultural. He now had a criterion for distinguishing between benevolent and dangerous nationalism. Herder’s nation was compatible with liberal pluralism but nationalism was not. National communities were indisputable historical fact, and their claims for protection and autonomy were incontrovertible, but claims of national exclusivity or superiority were dangerous, and, when adjoined by state power, the source of modernity’s greatest tragedies.28 Diaspora Zionism, an Herderian national culture, found its space in a pluralistic nation-state. Berlin could  Berlin, “The Problem of Nationalism,” 16–19.  Berlin, “The Origins of Israel,” in his: The Power of Ideas, 143–61. 27  Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in his: Three Critics of the Enlightenment, 168–242. 28  Berlin, “The Problem of Nationalism”; “Nationalism: The Melting Pot Myth.” 25 26

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now live, almost comfortably, as an Oxford Don, a Russian Jew, a Zionist and British citizen all at the same time. While Berlin was maneuvering to square Jewish ethnicity with European nationalism, his American colleagues, the New  York Intellectuals, innovated in a multiethnic setting. The influx of US Jewish intellectuals into the academy in the postwar years seemed evidence enough that White nationalism was on the retreat. Among the first generation of New York Intellectuals and US-educated young émigrés, from Trilling to historian Fritz Stern, conscious cultivation of WASP manners and repression of Jewishness were common, but, by the mid-1960s, they felt freer to engage with Israel and Jewish issues. The American Jewish Committee (AJC), the oldest and largest US Jewish advocacy organization, remained apprehensive about “dual loyalty,” and, until 1967, kept its distance from Israel, but since Supreme Court Judge, Louis Brandeis, American identity and Zionism seemed compatible. Philosopher Horace Kallen had already rejected the melting-pot during World War I, and envisioned the US as culturally pluralist. America was different, and it facilitated Jewish ethnic consciousness, and made the Jewishness of Cold War liberalism more palpable. By the postwar years, Judaism was recognized as part of American religious life. US liberals had no taste for Judeo-Christian visions of the West, or for conservative denunciations of communist atheism, and the AJC insisted on the separation of church and state. But the AJC also encouraged Christian–Jewish dialogue and welcomed interreligious collaboration in ways not seen in Europe. Like the Europeans, American Jewish liberals couched their anticommunism in universal and not in Jewish terms, but, unlike them, they supported an active civil rights agenda. They used the discourse of individual rights to expand minority rights, their own first and foremost, but also those of African Americans. Seeking to dispel the notion of the Jews’ Marxist proclivities and win over, or purge, communist intellectuals, the AJC orchestrated a campaign highlighting Soviet persecution of Jewish culture and antisemitism in communist Eastern Europe. Dawidowicz, who had spent a year at YIVO in pre-WWII Vilnius, did much of the research for articles, published in the early 1950s in Commentary and The New Leader, tracking, among others, the Soviet destruction of Yiddish culture. Her AJC confidants were sociographer Milton Himmelfarb and the young Norman Podhoretz. While most New York intellectuals had no Jewish education and distanced themselves from religious traditions, Himmelfarb and Podhoretz were

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different: The first was an observant Jew, committed to Israel, and unabashedly particularist; the second spent a year at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and wrote on Yiddish literature for Commentary. All three thought of the Jews as a people. The Jewish origins of Cold War liberalism, oblique in Europe, were evident at the AJC.29 American liberals still had no vocabulary for Jewish peoplehood. The AJC insisted that the Jews were a religious community and not a nationality, but there was little religion left in the AJC, and virtually none among the New York Intellectuals. Already in 1949, immigration historian Oscar Handlin suggested that ethnic groups had “a recognized place in American life [and] a recognized function to serve”: As long as “the individual retains his freedom of access and resignation [and] the aims and actions of the group are open,” ethnic associations were quintessentially American and a bulwark against totalitarianism.30 In a 1963 classic, Beyond the Melting Pot, sociologists Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan settled the issue: The Jews were an ethnicity. Having studied the Black, Jewish, Irish, Italian, and Puerto-Rican communities in New York City, they concluded that, contrary to conventional wisdom, ethnicities did not dissolve within a few generations of the immigrants’ arrival but were transformed into interest groups, vying for the political pie.31 Multiethnic growth made NYC history and politics what they were. Their excitement at the new terrain of ethnic politics and their delight at having found ethnicity more crucial than class were both evident. American ethnicity was open, escaping racialization, capacious enough to include secular Jews and Irish, and selectively welcome newcomers. Over the next decade, ethnicity emerged as a major social science concept, defining group identity in diverse global contexts through varied combinations of kinship (real or imagined), shared memory, common culture (language, religion, and customs), a homeland link, and communal solidarity.32 Yet, ethnicity triumphed against the background of deteriorating US urban ethnic relations, rising Black–Jewish tensions, and a multicultural politics, demanding that, in allocating resources, the state recognize the historical and cultural liabilities incurred by ethnic  Sinkoff. From Left to Right.  “Group Life within the American Pattern,” 411–17. Quotation is on p. 414. I owe this reference, and an informative conversation, to Nancy Sinkoff of Rutgers University. 31  Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, esp. 16–17. 32  Izenberg, Identity, 205–6. 29 30

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minorities. Liberal political theory had already accepted interest groups as mediators between states and individuals but making ethnic attribution a factor in allocating resources seemed to violate the liberal ethos of individual rights and merit. Glazer was among the first to warn that Jews would lose in a political shift from individual to group rights. Growing conservative, the liberals became apprehensive about multiculturalism and the ethnic turn. The 1968 campus uprisings and urban violence scared the New York Intellectuals. The violence evoked their anxieties about mobs, and could not but remind them of the antisemitic pogroms. As both liberals and Jews, they suddenly felt insecure in America. They now avowed Jewish ethnicity, increased their support of Israel, and nostalgically explored their ancestral Eastern European Jewish culture. At the same time, they wished for politics to remain liberal and individualist without regard for ethnicity. Surveying New York schools curricula in the mid-1990s, Glazer acknowledged the triumph of multiculturalism and bemoaned the loss of universalism.33 Ethnicity resolved the old tensions between liberalism and Jewishness and now appeared thoroughly American, but it created new tensions. The liberals wished to keep ethnicity and politics apart. Jewish “multiculturalism” was ridden with ambivalence. Glazer and Moynihan believed that “ethnicity” reflected a new global shift in defining group identity.34 Unknowingly, however, they restaged nineteenth-century emancipation debates that deployed the German concept of Volksstamm (translated as “ethnicity”). German Jews imagined themselves as an ethnicity that, along with others, would merge into the German nation, or be accorded nationality rights in multiethnic Austria-­ Hungary.35 Like Berlin’s national culture, Volksstamm accentuated lineage, intimated closeness, and was not voluntary  – a softer version of race. American ethnicity emerged as an alternative: culturally constructed and changing, voluntary, and welcoming of ethnic crossovers. Liberal Jewish anxieties gave rise to innovative social concepts, advancing Jewish integration politics. All the same, the Cold War liberals could not answer the fundamental question that Glazer and Moynihan posed about ethnicity: Why would one wish to be a member of an ethnic group?36 Why be a Jew?  Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now.  Glazer and Moynihan, eds., Ethnicity, 1. Ethnicity emerged as an English term in the 1940s. Handlin was among the first to develop it conceptually. 35  Stoetzler, The State, the Nation, and the Jews; Hacohen, Jacob & Esau, Chapters 7, 9. 36  Glazer and Moynihan, eds., Ethnicity, 19. 33 34

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Religion and Modernity: The Jewish Limits of Cold War Liberalism The Cold War liberals turned neoconservative in the late 1960s in both the US and Europe. Their anticommunism stiffened, their resistance to welfare expansion and support of the market increased, and their critique of contemporary culture became sharp. Their cultural conservatism reflected renewed appreciation for traditional values and institutions and disenchantment with what they regarded as the negative social consequences of modern culture. They hoped that they could relieve the state of the burden of welfare policies that seemed to be going nowhere by strengthening family, church and social associations, and bolstering communal responsibility and self-help. Many US neoconservatives considered a return of religion crucial to their program. Religion was to answer existential questions that secular culture left unresolved and reinforce restraints that modernism removed. Surprisingly, Judaism played no role in their return to religion. Indeed, they seemed to reach a stalemate whenever they reflected on their own Jewishness. In “The Return of the Sacred?” Daniel Bell challenged the Weberian view that scientific rationality irrevocably disenchanted the world and relegated religion to the magical past.37 Secularization, opined Bell, removed religious authority but did not put an end to religious belief, which responded to humanity’s existential quest. Messianic political religions and aesthetic modernism first filled the space of the sacred, but both were presently exhausted. Emergent new religions would turn to the past in search for resources. They would be either “moralizing,” seeking, like contemporary evangelists, to reinforce traditional restraints, or “redemptive,” endeavoring to transcend human finitude by recovering belief and discharging communal caritas, or “mythical,” like New Age religions, seeking to reenchant nature. Bell mentioned no future prospect for Judaism. Bell’s earlier “Reflections on Jewish Identity” may explain biographically the Jewish absence.38 He described the modern Jewish intelligentsia’s flight from Judaism and break with the Jewish past. He could not accept, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Orthodox theodicy, or ethical Judaism’s universal mission. All that remained for him was bonds formed  Bell, “The Return of the Sacred?.”  Bell, “Reflections on Jewish Identity,” 471–8.

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through commemoration, reflected in the Yizkor prayer for the deceased. Alas, memory itself was ambivalent, as “the past … come[s] back in the form of self-hate” of the parochial culture that one sought to escape. “The alienated Jew … is homeless”: He witnesses Jewish tradition waning among the youth, haunted by guilt for not discharging his responsibilities. Psychotherapy was the alienated Jew’s only recourse. Watching his Christian colleagues reforming their bonds to tradition and community, Bell could not do the same for Judaism. He solved his own Jewish problem by becoming a sociologist, observing religion but not participating, but this was not, he conceded, a happy solution. He could not negotiate between religion and liberalism. Manès Sperber broke, like Bell, with traditional Judaism, and, like him, reconstructed bridges to the Jewish past through commemoration, but he made Jewish cosmopolitanism integral to Cold War liberalism. Sperber’s political journey took him through Zionism, communism and liberalism. He was looking for a secular equivalent to Jewish messianism that would be appropriate for a world that had lost its belief in God.39 Born in 1905 in a poor Ḥ assidic Jewish shtetl in Austrian East Galicia, Sperber migrated in the interwar years between the European capitals of Vienna, Berlin and Paris, and, in the postwar years, settled in Paris, immersing himself in European cultural life and working for CCF. His deepening anticommunism reflected, above all, sorrow and outrage at the Soviet destruction of Yiddish culture, with the 1952 execution of the leading Yiddish writers.40 Israel’s founding evoked in him deep emotion, and he believed that it saved Jewry in the aftermath of the Holocaust.41 Still, Israel did not appear Jewish: A world apart from the shtetl, it was cut off from the Diaspora and Jewish history, disengaged from two millennia of messianic expectation. Jerusalem was not Yerushalayim, the Israeli capital was not the craved Civitas Dei.42 Israel could not solve the Jewish problem because it did not speak to the Diaspora. 39  Sperber, All das Vergangene…, 3 vols.; Corbin-Schuffels, Manès Sperber; Patka and Stančić, eds., Die Analyse der Tyrannis. 40  Sperber, “Petit mémorial” [1952], “Tué, je vivrai” [1956], “Hourban ou l’inconcevable certitude” [1964], “Destin d’une littérature” [1967], in his: Être Juif, 113–26, 177–80, 59–84, 181–91, respectively. 41  Sperber, “Hourban” [1964], esp. pp.  78–80; “Mein Judesein” [1978], in Sperber, Churban oder Die unfaßbare Gewißheit, 43–64, esp. 59–60. 42  Sperber, “Le voyage tardif” [1958], in: Être Juif, 155–7; “Israelisches Tagesbuch” [1958], “In tiefer Bangnis…” [1967], “Mein Judesein,” in: Sperber, Churban, 117–47, 149–60, 43–64, respectively.

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The Jewish Diaspora survived for millennia as a community of suffering, united by the memory of Ḥ urban (destruction), martyrology and the craving for messianic restoration. The prophetic vision of a peaceful world, united in worshipping God, was the Jewish core, sustaining disparate communities over the ages. The Prophets’ monotheism prohibited deification. Jews anticipated a messianic restoration, but refused messiahs from Jesus to Shabbetai Ẓ evi to Stalin.43 Jewish cosmopolitanism, messianic craving that refused false messiahs, was Judaism’s contribution to humanity, the source of hope and progress. It was also the modus vivendi that Sperber found most compatible with the Cold War: Jewish cosmopolitanism’s secret was in its suspense – Europe (and Israel) hoped for peace but had to arm, if they wished to survive.44 In grasping the grandeur of Jewish life in waiting and hope, Sperber overthrew Weber, who had ridiculed such life as incompatible with modern dignity. Yet, his diaspora cosmopolitanism embodied the tensions between Realpolitik and liberalism, and he could offer no tangible project for Jewish life. Like Bell, Sperber was paralyzed both as a Jew and as a liberal. Postmodern views have since then relativized modernity, and made it possible for contemporary scholars to reformulate intellectual and affective attachments to religious traditions. They have thereby reopened prospects of negotiation between liberalism and Judaism, transcending the Jewish limits of Cold War liberalism. A generation has passed since the Soviet Union’s collapse rendered Cold War liberalism obsolete, and its youngest representatives have departed to the Elysian fields. Much has changed in a generation for liberals and Jews. Rapid globalization and the European Union first seemed to tame the nation state and provide room for federalist government, then xenophobic nationalism returned en force, vindicating every fear the Cold War liberals had had. Religion’s powerful return has put secular modernity in question. With almost universal acceptance of Jewish rights, Jewish intellectuals have become European cultural icons and Jewish holidays are celebrated in the White House. Triumphalism has replaced liberal fears about the Jewish future, and Israel’s power abuses have drawn sharp 43  Sperber, “La Bible tissée dans la vie quotidienne” [1975], in Être Juif, 33–58; “Mein Judesein,” 43–64. 44  Sperber, “Leben im Jahrhundert der Weltkriege,” in: Licharz, Kauffeldt, and Schießer eds., Die Herausforderung Manès Sperber, 238–49.

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critique, the like of which the postwar liberals shunned. The Cold War liberals had difficulty reconciling their Jewishness with liberalism because ethnonationalism made Zionism seem the only solution to the Jewish Question. There was no place for the Jewish Diaspora in a world of ethnonational states, and, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, diaspora appeared dangerous and hopeless. Such a place for the Jewish Diaspora now exists. World Jewry’s novel situation requires renegotiation of liberalism and Jewishness. Such has not occurred, and it is urgent. Even if the global resurgence of populist nationalism subsides, there is no assurance that long-term trends of Jewish history will not reemerge, and the anomaly of the present – Jewish power and acceptance – will not come to an end. The Cold War liberals took good enough care of the world, outlining the only reasonable combination of political and economic measures that could protect a free domestic sphere, but they knew not how to take care of the Jews. They offered support for Israel, reinvented Jewish ethnicity to facilitate integration, but, having left Judaism behind, their ethnicity was empty of cultural content, and they could only remain agnostic about the Jewish future. To explore a way out, liberals will need to reengage Jewish traditions with the same creative spirit as the Cold War liberals engaged Marxism and literary modernism, and come out with better Jewish liberal syntheses.

Bibliography Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2001. “Liberalism, Individuality, and Identity.” Critical Inquiry 27: 305–332. Aron, Raymond, George Kennan, Robert Oppenheimer, et al. 1960. Colloqus dee Rheinfelden. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Bell, Daniel. 1961. “Reflections on Jewish Identity.” Commentary 31: 471–478. ———. 1962. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. New York: Free Press. ———, ed. 1964. The Radical Right. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ———. 1977. “The Return of the Sacred? The Argument on the Future of Religion.” The British Journal of Sociology 28 (4): 419–449. Berghahn, Volker R. 2001. America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Berlin, Isaiah. 2000a. “Jewish Slavery and Emancipation” [1952]; “The Origins of Israel” [1953]. In The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2000b. “Herder and the Enlightenment” [1965]. In Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry Hardy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. n.d. “The Problem of Nationalism: A Dialogue with Stuart Hampshire, Chaired by Bryan Magee” [1972]; “The Achievement of Zionism” [1975]; “Nationalism: The Melting Pot Myth” [1992], The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library. http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/nachlass/ Berlin, Isaiah, and David Ben-Gurion. 2007. “An Exchange. Religion, Identity, and the State.” The New Republic (January 1): 23–28. Bessner, Daniel. 2018. Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Chappel, James. 2018. Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coleman, Peter. 1989. The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe. New York: Free Press. Corbin-Schuffels, Anne-Marie. 2001. Manès Sperber: Un combat contre la tyrannie (1934–1960). Bern: Peter Lang. Dubnov, Arie. 2012. Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Glazer, Nathan. 1997. We Are All Multiculturalists Now. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. 1963. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press. ———. eds. 1975. Ethnicity: Theory and Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Greenberg, Udi. 2015. The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Grémion, Peter Pierre. 1995. Intelligence de l’anticommunisme: Le Congrès pour la liberté de la culture à Paris (1950–1975). Paris: Fayard. Hacohen, Malachi. 2000. Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009. “The Strange Fact That the State of Israel Exists: The Cold War Liberals Between Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism.” Jewish Social Studies 15 (2): 37–81. ———. 2012. Kongress für kulturelle Freiheit. Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture 2: 22–28. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung.

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———. 2014. “The Liberal Critique of Political Theology: Political Messianism and the Cold War.” In Die helle und die dunkle Seite der Moderne, ed. Werner Michael Schwarz and Ingo Zechner. Vienna: Turia and Kant. ———. 2019. Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History Between Nation and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Handlin, Oscar. 1949. “Group Life within the American Pattern: Its Scope and Limits.” Commentary 8: 411–417. Hochgeschwender, Michael. 1998. Freiheit in der Offensive? Der Kongress für Kulturelle Freiheit und die Deutschen. Munich: Oldenbourg. Hofstadter, Richard. 1963. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New  York: Vintage Books. Izenberg, Gerald. 2016. Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Concept. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Kornhauser, Anne. 2015. The American State: Liberal Anxieties and the New Leviathan, 1930–1970. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Krohn, Claus-Dieter, et al., eds. 1993. Frauen und Exil. Exilforschung 1. Munich: Text and Kritik. Lasch, Christopher. 1968. “The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.” In The Agony of the American Left. New York: Vintage. Patka, Marcus G., and Mirjana Stančić, eds. 2005. Die Analyse der Tyrannis: Manès Sperber, 1905–1984. Vienna: Holzhausen Verlag. Quack, Sibylle, ed. 1995. Between Sorrow and Strength: Women Refugees of the Nazi Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robins, Natalie. 2017. The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling. New York: Columbia University Press. Saunders, Frances Stonor. 1999. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granata. Schmidt, Oliver. 2000. “No Innocents Abroad: The Salzburg Impetus and American Studies in Europe.” In “Here, There, and Everywhere”: The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture, ed. Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler Mary, 64–79. Hanover: University of New England Press. Scott-Smith, Giles. 2002. The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and Post-War American Hegemony. London: Routledge. Shklar, Judith. 1998. “The Liberalism of Fear” [1989]. In Political Thought and Political Thinkers, ed. Stanley Hoffmann, 3–20. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sinkoff, Nancy. 2020. From Left to Right: Lucy Dawidowicz, the New  York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History. Detroit: Wayne University Press. Sperber, Manès. 1974–77. All das Vergangene…. 3 vols. Vienna: Europaverlag.

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———. 1979. “Israelisches Tagesbuch” [1958]; “In tiefer Bangnis…” [1967]; “Mein Judesein ” [1978]. In Churban oder Die unfaßbare Gewißheit: Essays. Vienna: Europaverlag. ———. 1988. “Leben im Jahrhundert der Weltkriege.” In Die Herausforderung Manès Sperber, ed. Werner Licharz, Leo Kauffeldt, and Hans-Rudolf Schießer. Frankfurt: Haag und Herchen. ———. 1994. “Petit mémorial” [1952]; “Tué, je vivrai” [1956]; “Le voyage tardif” [1958]; “Hourban ou l’inconcevable certitude” [1964]; “Destin d’une littérature” [1967]; “La Bible tissée dans la vie quotidienne” [1975]. In Être Juif. Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob. Stoetzler, Marcel. 2008. The State, the Nation, and the Jews: Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck’s Germany. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Warner, Michael. 1995. “Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949–50.” Studies in Intelligence 38 (5): 89–98.

CHAPTER 17

Afterword Samuel Moyn

In their introduction to this excellent volume, Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam record the three major transformations that allow for—or even require—a reexamination of the classic theme of Jews and liberalism. Europe has been provincialized and “global history” has taken on an altogether unexpected prestige. Europe itself has become more and more studied for its imperial past and postcolonial present. And as the example of the Holocaust became canonized in the moral consciousness of so many, sensitivity to the fate of others in Europe and outside it since has sometimes increased: there has never been one European hatred, or a single genocide. As a result, rewriting the history of the relationship of Jews and liberalism is required. A familiar comparison of “paths to emancipation” of Jews in increasingly liberal states—paradigmatically, in France and Germany— may have neglected far-flung Jewries, of North Africa, and Ottoman empire, and beyond. A story of north Atlantic emancipation may look picayune today compared to how Jewish emancipation under the sign of

S. Moyn (*) Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_17

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liberalism occurred in tandem with imperial control of the globe. And notwithstanding recognition of the victimization that befell Jews in the twentieth century, the racialization they suffered at the hands of European majorities, like discrimination and hatred generally, were hardly their unique plight and are certainly not so today. All these topics are approached in the fascinating and various essays that make up this book. In addition to the main novelties in our understanding of the intersection of Jewish history and liberalism around which the editors have organized the enterprise, a fourth emergent but major transformation is equally likely to reorient scholarship in the coming years. It concerns the conceptual instability of the concept of “liberalism” itself and the way that twentieth-century observers often distorted the very nature of liberal politics before their time. It seems interesting, beyond discussing the success of the essays in this volume, to begin with this last point, to see how it bears on its collective initiative. * * * Recent scholarship in only the past few years has proved the need to be much more attentive than before to the retroactive construction of liberalism—an argument that bears so strongly on any reconsideration of Jews and liberalism that it is an almost necessary starting point. Duncan Bell and Helena Rosenblatt have recently argued that the middle of the twentieth century changed prevailing opinion about what liberalism was and where it had come from.1 Bell focused more on the trajectory of English liberalism, while Rosenblatt, beginning with close study of French writers, has recently completed a major reassessment of the lineages—including the false lineages—of liberalism generally. If students of Jewish history have been the heirs of a mid-twentieth century set of mistaken impressions about liberalism, it is only fair then to ask what effect it may have had on their own historiography. According to Bell and Rosenblatt, liberals in the twentieth century made freedom for the protection of private interests and rights far more central to liberalism than it had ever been, and neglected the emphasis on collective progress, moral duties, and religious questions that had 1  Bell, “What Is Liberalism?”; Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. See also Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, 4, who says “liberty is the wrong place to begin” for thinking about what liberalism was about.

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prevailed among liberals before. In contrast to the nineteenth century, in the early twentieth century it became important to shift the geography of liberal origins far west; and Cold War liberalism redefined liberalism as a pessimistic doctrine centered on the potentially encroaching and wayward state and the economic liberties and political rights enjoyed in private that John Locke had supposedly made the foundation stone of a centuries-long campaign of protection. Right or wrong as a liberal doctrine, such events distorted the liberal past. It follows that an overemphasis in Jewish history on the basic perquisites of citizenship—especially liberal rights—won in 1789 or far more slowly across German lands and eventually eastwards will miss what the encounter of the Jewish people on an increasingly liberal continent involved. Liberalism was a philosophy of progressive social freedom for the community, not solely or so much the liberties of individuals in private. It was consistent with, rather than a departure from, the liberal spirit to think in terms of collective interdependence rather than individual atoms. Nor is it going to be very plausible to misrepresent early communal solidarity of Jews beyond borders as paving the road to the contemporary ideal of “saving strangers.” The link is not altogether false, but the truth is that Jews were much more likely—much in the vein of their time and place—to emphasize global projects of extending collective freedom, which were often the apologetic rationale for imperial expansion, with Jewish involvement and support. What it meant to be liberal in the nineteenth century was not only or so much to argue for humanitarian intervention when necessary because minorities suffered, but to dream of an increasingly interdependent world of collective welfare through the propagation of liberal nationalism among whites and liberal empire to the ends of the earth. Liberalism sat comfortably with group identity at home and it was part of its fusion or proximity with nationalism that Jews in various states could pursue group rights—since many liberals were open to group rights and national renaissances in various places around the globe, assuming their beneficiaries were civilized enough. If not, they were candidates for direct rule by Europeans, including by Jews serving European states. * * * The authors in this collection amply demonstrate how much insight is to be gained by taking on new perspectives on liberalism. Ari Joskowicz, Michal Rose Friedman, Julia Phillips Cohen, Julia Phillips Cohen, Laura Arnold Leibman, Lisa Moses Leff, and Simon Levis Sullam explore, in

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different ways for different places, how liberalism instigated its own forms of conformism and exclusion, or even new models of antisemitic hatred. Some of these discussions fit with recent argumentation to the effect that liberal secularism is latently Christian, and several authors, from Leibmann to Luisa Levi D’Ancona Modena and M. M. Silver, perceptively explore the balance of benefits and costs of self-transformation to live in a new liberal world. The Middle East under Ottoman rule and its Western successors, Cohen, Arie M. Dubnov, Ozan Ozavci, and Yaron Tsur demonstrate, offers the main laboratory in which Western Jews could or did not separate liberalism and imperialism—but then, few non-Jews did either— while Ottoman Jews experienced unique attempts to square liberalism with Jewish particularity. Ironically, some Ottoman Jewish liberals could break through to anti-imperialist insight into European diplomacy in the era of the “Eastern question” and beyond, but only at the price of enthusiasm for Ottoman imperialism. But it is in the last section of the volume that one finds the arguments most germane to that most recent historiographical transformation that identifies liberalism as an ideology of collectivist progress, reinvented belatedly as a doctrine of private rights against public authority. 1848 consisted primarily of a series of liberal bids for national stewardship for the sake of the reconstruction of citizenship. It would be difficult to say, in retrospect, whether 1848 was more significant as an event in the history of liberalism or of nationalism, as Adolf Hitler’s later celebration of that year somewhat disturbingly suggests. (Lewis Namier, whom Dubnov discusses in this volume, observed that 1848 and 1933 were not so different dates as twentieth-century liberal opponents of fascism and totalitarianism liked to imagine.)2 Yet as Abigail Green argues in her superb chapter in this book, Jews fought for a version of liberalism that allowed secularism to advance not solely Christian and national values but also to square Jewish interests with them. And Jews frequently led the way in overflowing the boundaries of an enthusiastic patriotism and imperialism to allow for a version of global concern approximating a more contemporary liberal internationalism. Confirming the truth about all liberals everywhere for a long time, James Loeffler emphasizes in this volume that Jews were collectivists in their commitment to liberalism. As Loeffler insists, this commitment persisted even and especially when they shifted from protecting groups under the signs of minority rights to defending individuals in the name of 2

 See Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, 14–16.

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“human rights”—and founding their own national state in the same year the United Nations propounded human rights. And then Cold War liberalism came, with Jews once more in the lead, now reinventing liberalism in a new key, with one of its consequences to make prior liberalism—and Jewish investment in it—harder to read. Malachi Haim Hacohen’s brilliant exploration of Cold War liberalism is germane here. His essay interestingly concludes by faulting Cold War liberalism, forged principally by Jews, for failing to engage frontally or seriously with the Jewish religious tradition itself—a task he sets for the future liberals. Notwithstanding that suggestion, however, one might worry that Cold War liberals failed to engage frontally or seriously with their own liberal tradition. What if the most important fact about Cold War liberalism—including how centrally Jews were involved in its contribution—was how it distorted prior liberalism? Cold War liberalism, after all, was a strange formation. It emerged at the time of an unprecedented expansion of the liberal state. Beset by injury, Jews volunteered to theorize a “liberalism of fear” even as the Cold War left no theorists in the canon who explained that state’s stirring attempt to institutionalize freedom and equality like no liberal project before, however flawed and truncated its agenda in fulfilling the aspirations of the new liberalism as well as liberal socialism born in the nineteenth century. In the face of a “totalitarian” enemy that purported to stand in the vanguard of progress, Jews helped usher liberal theory in a different direction from liberal practice—until the current era led the liberal state to face crisis. Cold War liberalism placed the risk of hypertrophy of the state closer to the core of its outlook than it did justification of the powerful and redistributive liberal welfare state that in fact was built at the same time. And even though decolonization of the same time period involved an unprecedented expansion of the search for political freedom and social justice to the ends of the earth, Cold War liberalism also failed to theorize the end of West European empire, except to worry quickly that the same European deviations of modern despotism and tyranny it hated were now sweeping the global south. But then, as time passed few Jews remained in imperial or post-imperial hinterlands—unless one counts the new State of Israel embattled amidst the ruins of the Ottoman empire. Cold War liberals, including the Jews among them, could easily look out beyond the liberal metropole and see nothing but misrule.

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Understandable as it may have been in context, this “bleak liberalism” has haunted liberal theory since.3 But the Jewish invention of Cold War liberalism was faithful to the Jewish encounter with liberalism in one major respect. In practically all of its modes, from 1848 to the Cold War and into our time, liberalism was not merely joined but often led by Jews, which is one of the most important insights of this book, on which future scholarship will have to capitalize. It is not enough, after this volume, to inquire how liberalism affected Jews without, in turn, asking how Jews affected liberalism. Cold War liberalism is an extraordinary case in point. The role of émigré Jewish intellectuals explaining the genius of Anglophone liberalism—which, as Rosenblatt has argued, effaced the actual descent of liberal ideas and practices—was not merely dominant; it was almost exclusive. * * * What this means for the role of Jews bringing liberalism into a new, post-­ Cold War form is, of course, anyone’s guess. It raises the question whether liberalism’s past—including how Jews helped power its earlier phases—is germane to thinking about its future beyond a Cold War situation that is now increasingly a distant memory. But it also raises the question whether Jews are particularly well situated not merely to enjoy or suffer the vicissitudes of liberalism, but to take responsibility for its next steps. There is reason to doubt it, in a moment that Edward Luce has identified as one of “the retreat of Western liberalism.”4 After the Holocaust and the inception of the Jewish state, the climactic events of the mass migration of North African and later Soviet and post-Soviet Jewry to Israel and the United States have created a new situation. In Israel and the United States—trailed far behind by a handful of other states—Jews are provided with unprecedently safe liberal citizenship, yet little incentive to reinvent liberalism. Domestically, like their European avatars in pushing liberalism to be a collectivist ideology of social progress, Jews were once as central to social democratic (and indeed communist and socialist) history as they were to other forms of liberal thought and practice. Yet for a variety of reasons, Jews do not seem especially well positioned to play this role once again in our time. They do not find themselves, any longer, among the most 3 4

 Anderson, Bleak Liberalism.  Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism.

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excluded and poor elements of their societies. And insofar as contemporary populism stems from inequality and stagnation rather than poverty, it does not seem as if Jews have been central to defining any response to what some take to be the crisis of liberalism—other than a defensive or reactive responses, whether in more cosmopolitan versions of standing up for human rights against democratic collapse and crisis or more nationalist ones (like many American neoconservatives) projecting a Weimar syndrome on their country’s affairs. Internationally, there are too few Jews aiming, as liberals did in the nineteenth century, to reconcile national order and justice with international order and justice. For various reasons, Israelis and their advocates view international politics as a forum of danger and threat, not one of opportunity for either “minority rights” or “human rights” globally. And the sense of a beleaguered Jewish people that once led many Jews to work for empires or international organizations to defend humanity far away from the metropole is too weak, leaving only those few who do so out of some other set of concerns. This is not to say that the relationship between Jews and liberalism, at home or abroad, is dead. But one suspects that, insofar as Jews played a leading role intellectually and practically in enjoying the fruits of the past chapters of liberalism and working to write them in their own ways, a critical turning point is indeed at hand. Ironically, perhaps the most important audience for the past of Jewish liberalism, before its canonical Cold War form, is other groups.

Bibliography Anderson, Amanda. 2016. Bleak Liberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bell, Duncan. 2014. What Is Liberalism? Political Theory 42 (6): 682–715. Fawcett, Edmund. 2018. Liberalism: The Life of an Idea. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Luce, Edward. 2017. The Retreat of Western Liberalism. Boston: Little Brown. Mazower, Mark. 2008. Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. New York: Penguin. Rosenblatt, Helena. 2018. The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Index1

A Abdülhamid II (Sultan), 210n3, 216, 224n30, 291 Abraham Rodriguez Brandon, 56, 119 Abramsky, Chimen, 358 Abulafia, Mushon, 271 Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 317 Adorno, Theodor W., 1, 5, 26 Africa (North), 72, 190, 195, 197n38, 198n40, 201, 221n28, 300, 411 Aghayeff, Ahmet, 290, 300–302, 302n57, 304, 310, 311 Aleppo, 265–267, 274, 276, 277, 283 Alexander II, czar, 49, 59 Alexandria, 275, 278–283 Alfandari, Yitzhak, 277, 278 Alfonso X, 190 Alfonso XIII, 199, 200, 202n56 Algeria, 8, 27, 33, 34, 36–38, 40, 41, 71, 396

Algiers (département), 33, 36 Ali Bey al-Kabir, 270 Ali, Muhammad, 269–272, 277–282 Alighieri, Dante, 317 Alsace, 344 Altaras, Jacques Isaac, 277, 282 Amador de los Ríos, José, 191–194, 191n20, 191n22, 192n24, 193n26 Amara, Ibrahim, 270, 270n20 America (North), 72, 102, 125, 187, 228, 237, 252 Amsterdam, 125, 265, 277 Anatolia, 49, 210, 266 Anders, Günther, 392 Antebi, Ya’akov, 271–273, 273n22, 276 Arabia, 56 Arendt, Hannah, 3, 13, 80, 138n35, 394 Armenia, 56

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Green, S. Levis Sullam (eds.), Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4

419

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INDEX

Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 316 Arnim, Adolf Henirich von, 53 Arnold, Matthew, 355 Aron, Raymond, 387, 393, 397, 399 Artom, Isacco, 354 Aschheim, Steven, 77 Asquith, Herbert Henry, 318 Assad, Talal, 154 Assens, Cansinos, 199 Athens, 100n14, 319 Auersperg, Anton, 134 Auspitz, Lazar, 134 Ayrton, Edith, 249 Aziz, Abdul, 49n5, 50, 56n28, 66 B Bahri, Hannah, 269 Balkans, 49, 199n42, 266, 306, 373 Bamberger, Ludwig, 343, 344, 347, 347n22, 350–352, 352n36, 354, 358, 75 Barbados, 101, 109, 110, 119 Barker, Ernest, 322 Baron, Salo W., 200n46, 341 Barrès, Maurice, 24 Basch, Victor, 357 Basel, 47 Basra, 15, 264, 268 Battersea, Constance, 357 Battini, Michele, 8 Bauman, Zygmunt, 26 Bayle, Henri, 55n24 Bayly, Chris, 342 Belgium, 174 Belisario, Isaac Mendes, 115–117 Bell, Duncan, 7, 26, 412 Belmont, August, 53 Beneš, Eduard, 326 Benoit, Pierre Jacques, 107, 108, 111–113, 115, 117, 120, 122–124

Bentham, Jeremy, 59 Berger, Johann Nepomuk, 134, 140 Berlin, 159, 351, 354, 358, 390, 393, 396, 399–401, 403, 405 Berlin, Isaiah, 326, 387, 393, 397, 399 Beyfuss, Hermann, 132 Beyfuss, Louise, 132 Biale, David, 76–78, 254n56 Bidiane, Paul, 35, 38 Blaustein, Jacob, 377 Bloch, Joseph Samuel, 142 Bohemia, 71, 131n1, 149 Bologna, 348 Bondy, Francois, 392, 397 Borkenau, Franz, 390 Borochov, Ber, 250, 252–254, 252n49 Borutta, Michael, 155 Bournand, François, 64, 64n61 Brǎtianu, Wallachian, 30 Brandeis, Louis, 12, 255, 256, 374, 375, 401 Brandon, Isaac Lopez, 119–121 Britain, 14, 31, 53, 55, 58, 108, 162, 270, 272, 301, 308, 315, 316, 318, 319, 326, 328, 330, 333, 334, 350, 356, 358 British Empire, 10, 319, 320, 334 Brodkin, Karen, 78, 228n38 Brooke, John, 331 Brown, Victoria, 32 Brummel, Beau, 102, 111, 122, 125, 126n84 Brussels, 351 Brutus (Marcus Iunius), 99, 332 Buber-Neumann, Margarethe, 394 Bublick, Gedaliah, 366 Bucarest, 48 Buckridge, Steeve, 115 Bulgaria, 168

 INDEX 

Burt, Alfred LeRoy, 325, 325n31 Butler, Josephine, 163 Byron, George, 49, 122 C Cádiz, 185, 185n1, 186, 204, 7 Caesar (Gaius Julius), 99 Cairo, 271, 272, 283 Cambrai, 63 Canada, 72, 373 Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio, 195, 195n31 Capuzzo, Ester, 170 Carasso, Emmanuel, 294, 309 Caribbean, 8, 14, 97–126 Carr, Edward Hallett, 326 Cassin, René, 12 Cavid Bey, Mehmed, 291, 309, 310 Chadwick, Edwin, 12 Charles X (king of France), 99 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 55n24 Chiaromonte, Nicola, 392 Chinon, 346 Cincinnati, 237–242 Clermont-Tonnerre, Stanislas le comte de, 353 Cleveland, 239 Cochelet, Adrian Louis, 275 Cohen (Jewish notable of Istanbul), 14, 15, 276 Cohen, Julia Phillips, 212n7, 413, 414 Cohen, Moiz, 290, 300 Cohen, Morris, 375 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 60n47 Cologne, 296n32, 298, 306, 308, 310 Congo, 359 Conklin, Alice, 38 Conorti (Jewish notable of Istanbul), 276

421

Constant, Benjamin, 58, 396 Constantine (département), 33 Constantinople, see Istanbul Cracow, 48, 53, 64 Crémieux, Adolphe, 28, 48, 53, 62, 264, 265, 272, 277, 281, 282, 343–348, 350, 351 Crete, 51, 300, 306 Curaçao, 101, 108 Curtis, Lionel George, 320 Cuza, Alecandru, 28 Czech lands, 71 Czechoslovakia, 71, 376 D D’Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, 59 Damascus, 8, 15, 53, 54n21, 263–283, 342, 344 Darwin, Charles, 60n49 Dawidowicz, Lucy, 390, 394, 397, 401 Decter, Midge, 394 Dejean, Marie, 49 Delacroix, Eugène, 99, 100 Della Vida, Adele, 174 Disraeli, Benjamin, 106, 106n31, 48, 53, 57, 57n35, 58, 62 Dollinger, Marc, 234 Dreyfus, Alfred, 35–37, 47, 54n21, 199, 359 Drumont, Edouard, 36, 37, 47, 48, 48n3, 50, 57, 64, 8 Dubnov, Arie, 6, 15, 414 Dubnov, Simon, 372, 399n22 E Egerton, Hugh Edward, 323–325, 324n25 Egypt, 15, 163, 173, 268–270, 277, 278, 280, 282

422 

INDEX

Eisler, Hanns, 392 Eliot, George, 244, 244n30 England, 62, 109, 117, 118, 125, 148n82, 189, 194, 315, 317, 318, 321, 322, 331 Estonia, 376 Europe, 4, 5, 8–10, 12–16, 23, 27, 28, 37, 47–50, 52–54, 80, 86, 100, 108, 109, 124, 125, 135, 149, 155, 173, 185–205, 209, 210, 227, 228, 236, 238, 247, 250, 263–267, 270, 272, 274, 276, 278, 280–282, 281n46, 304, 311, 316, 319, 328, 342, 347, 359, 366, 368, 371, 373, 387, 388, 391–394, 396–398, 401, 402, 404, 406, 411

Ford, Henry, 250 Fraenkel, Ernst, 390, 393, 397 France, 14, 24, 27, 28, 31, 33–38, 40–42, 50, 52–55, 61–63, 72, 99, 101, 108, 109, 148n82, 168, 173, 189, 194, 204n60, 247, 263, 270, 271, 277, 279, 301, 331, 346, 349, 357, 397, 411 Franchetti, Alice Hallgarten, 357 Franco, Francisco, 203, 203n59, 276 Frankel, Jonathan, 6n19, 265, 274, 278, 280 Frankfurt, 344, 351 Freeden, Michael, 12 Freytag, Gustav, 63 Friedjung, Heinrich, 356 Friedman, Michael, 8, 14 Funkenstein, Amos, 2

F Faraj, ‘Abdallah, 268 Farhi, Aslan, 273, 274 Farhi, Joseph, 280 Farhi, Meir, 273 Farhi, Raphael, 273, 276 Fawcett, Edmund, 12 Feingold, Henry, 234 Ferdinand VII, 189 Fernández y González, Francisco, 196, 197 Figgis, John Neville, 322 Fischhof, Adolf, 143, 344–346, 346n19, 350, 351, 370 Fisher, Herbert Albert Laurens, 321, 323, 326, 329 Fita, Fidel, 196, 200 Florence, 158–160, 173, 175 Foa, Benedetto, 160 Fogerty, Joseph, 142

G Galicia, 131n1, 149, 322, 405 Gaza, 382 Geiger, Abraham, 84, 85 Geneva, 50, 376 Gepstein, Shlomo, 305 Gerber, Jane, 125 Germany, 7, 11, 23, 24, 27, 31, 40–42, 52, 62, 72, 75, 79, 84, 85, 87, 136, 137, 350, 353, 354, 358, 359, 391–395, 411 Ghica, Ion, 28 Gierke, Otto Friedrich von, 322, 323, 331 Gill, Sarah Esther, 119 Giolitti, Giovanni, 11 Glazer, Nathan, 402, 403 Gnocchi-Viani, Osvaldo, 165 Godley, Nat, 38 Goedsche, Herrmann, 64n60

 INDEX 

Goldmark, Josef, 345, 346, 357 Goldmark, Josephine, 357 Goldschmidt, Theodor, 142 Goldsmid, Sir Francis, 349 Gomperz, Theodor, 134, 135, 149 Gordon, Jehuda Leib, 73n19 Goudchaux, Michel, 344 Graz, 147 Greece, 49, 218, 222, 224 Green, Abigail, 15, 30, 414 Greenberg, Hayim, 366, 367, 378 Grégoire, Henri, 347 Grübl, Raimund, 132, 135, 144 Gunesch, Rudolph, 142 Gurian, Waldemar, 392 H Habsburg Empire, 4, 326, 330, 371 Hacohen, Malachi, 5, 8, 15, 415 Hadley, Elaine, 132 Hallgarten, Alice, 174, 357 Handlin, Oscar, 402 Hannover, 134 Harari, David, 271 Hartmann, Moritz, 344, 352 Hartmann, Ludo, 357 Hartz, Louis, 12 Haulman, Kate, 102 Hayek, Friedrich, 305, 395 Hedlman-Morley, James, 326 Heller, Clement, 393 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien, 59 Helmholtz, Anna von, 352 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 400 Herzl, Theodor, 149, 249, 293, 333 Heschel, Susannah, 84 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 394 Himmelfarb, Milton, 233, 401 Hitler, Adolf, 327, 378, 414 Hochberg, Sami, 297, 298, 306, 311

423

Holborn, Hajo, 390 Hook, Sydney, 387, 391, 397 Horkheimer, Max, 1, 5, 26 Horn, Eduard, 343, 347, 350 Howe, Irving, 391 Hungary, 87, 142, 149, 344, 350, 376 Hunt, Lynn, 275 I Ibrahim Pasha, 278 India, 10, 167, 266 Isaacs, Rufus, Marquis of Reading, 356 Israel, 6, 10, 248–254, 380–382, 388, 389, 398, 399, 401–403, 405–407, 415, 416 Istanbul, 48, 49, 198, 210n2, 216, 218–220, 223, 224, 269, 276, 289–312 Italy, 11, 14, 31, 33, 48, 49, 103, 155, 158, 159, 162–164, 168, 170–175, 277, 300, 306, 347, 349, 350, 353, 356 Izmir, 213, 216 J Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 6, 289–312 Jacobs, Joseph, 195, 196 Jacoby, Johann, 344–346 Jamaica, 101, 109, 110 Janowsky, Oscar, 378 Jaques, Heinrich, 14, 131–150 Jaques, Karl, 134 Jerusalem, 83, 199, 239, 276, 299, 354, 405 Jesus, 406

424 

INDEX

Joly, Maurice, 58, 60 Jones, Peter, 41 Joskowicz, Alexander (Ari), 5, 413 Josselson, Michael, 392, 397, 398 Josz, Aurelia, 174 Judson, Pieter, 4, 26, 27, 40 K Kadisch, Hermann, 371 Kallen, Horace, 375, 401 Kann, Jakobus H., 306–309 Kanoui, Simon, 35 Kars, 49 Keith, Arthur Berddiale, 324 Kingston (Jamaica), 115 Kishinev, 246, 248, 249 Knox, Robert, 55 Koditschek, Theodore, 330 Koestler, Arthur, 390, 391, 395 Kogon, Eugen, 392 Kohn, Hans, 317 Kohn, Jacob, 371 Königsberg, 344 Korea, 393 Kossuth, Lajos, 350 Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 147 Kremsier, 346 Kristol, Irving, 391, 392 Kuranda, Ignaz, 343, 344, 350, 351, 358 Kwan, Jonathan, 14 L Lafayette, Gilbert du Motier Marquis de, 342 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 57n33 Langewiesche, Dieter, 12 Laserson, Max, 378 Lasker, Eduard, 53, 75, 343, 350–354, 351n35, 358

Lasky, Melvin, 392–394 Latvia, 376 Laurin, Anton, 279, 281 Lazarus, Emma, 14, 237, 242–248 Lebanon, 272, 292, 348 Leff, Lisa Moses, 8, 11, 413 Lehren, Zvi Hirsch, 277, 278 Leibman, Laura Arnold, 8, 14, 413, 414 Lenin, Vladimir, 368 Leon, Jacob de, 114, 122 Leonhard, Jörn, 7 Lette, Adolf, 79, 80 Levi D’Ancona Modena, Luisa, 355, 414 Levi, David, 350 Levi, Giorgio, 160 Levene, Mark, 5 Levis Sullam, Simon, 11, 13, 411, 413 Lévy, Armand, 107, 108, 111, 112, 117, 122, 124, 343 Levy, Richard S., 25 Levy, Sam, 294 Lewald, Fanny, 355 Liberia, 253, 254 Ligneau, Jean de (pseudonym), see Bournand, François Lilienthal, Max, 237–242, 250, 255 Lindo, Abraham, 121, 124 Lindo, Alexandre, 121, 124 Lippmann, Walter, 12 Lithuania, 373, 376 Livorno (Leghorn), 265, 277, 280, 282 Locke, John, 413 Loeffler, James, 5, 9, 10, 15, 414 Loewenstein, Richard, 393 London, 49, 50, 55, 56, 108, 125, 161, 173, 265, 297, 305, 328, 347, 349, 351 Lopez, Isaac, 97, 116, 125 Lopez, King, 97

 INDEX 

Loria, Prospero Moisè, 154, 160, 163–166, 168, 171–175 Losurdo, Domenico, 3, 25 Luce, Edward, 416 Lueger, Karl, 47, 132, 133, 141–147, 149 Lugano, 161 Lukàcs, Georg, 392 Luria, Isaac, 278–281 Luzzatti, Luigi, 156, 356, 359 Lvov, 48 Lyons, Judah Eleazer, 112–114, 112n51, 117, 120, 121, 124 M Macdonald, Dwight, 391 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 58 Madrid, 196, 201, 202 Mahmut II (Sultan), 269 Maimonides, Moses, 202, 203 Maitland, Frederic William, 319, 321–323, 331 Malta, 33 Manin, Daniele, 346 Mann, Thomas, 390 Mantua, 163, 166 Marcus, Robert, 381 Margulies, Emil, 376 Mariagrün, 147 Marianne (goddess of liberty), 99, 100 Maritain, Jacques, 392 Marr, Wilhelm, 61, 62 Marseilles, 277 Marx, Karl, 50 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue, 326, 328, 329 Massarani, Tullo, 153, 154, 160, 166–175 Masterman, Charles Frederick, 326 Maurognato, Isaaco Pesaro, 344 Mazower, Mark, 329

425

Mazzini, Giuseppe, 161, 162, 166, 172, 342 McCarthy, Mary, 394 McIntosh, Peggy, 78 Mecca, 56, 266 Mediterranean (sea), 13, 173, 280, 282 Mehta, Uday Singh, 3, 25 Merlato, Caspar Giovanni, 274, 275, 280, 281 Mesopotamia, 266, 310n92 Michelet, Jules, 26n10, 28 Middle East, 15, 221n28, 228n38, 266, 332, 373, 381, 398, 414 Milan, 153, 158, 163–165, 167–169, 174 Mill, John Stuart, 59, 135 Millingen, Frederick, 13, 47–64 Millingen, Julius, 48 Minervi, Jacob, 278 Mishkova, Diana, 32, 40 Modena, 157, 173 Mohammed, 56 Moise, Abraham, 114 Moldavia, 28–30 Mommsen, Theodor, 359 Montagu, Edwin, 356 Montagu, Lily, 357 Montefiore, John, 118, 119 Montefiore, Lady Judith, 354 Montefiore, Sir Moses, 53, 264, 265, 272, 281, 282, 348 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat baron de, 58 Moore, Deborah Dash, 234, 236 Moravia, 71, 149 Morelli, Salvatore, 159 Morocco, 34, 35, 72, 194, 199 Morpurgo (Jewish notable of Alexandria), 278

426 

INDEX

Mortara, Edgardo, 348 Moses, 56 Moskowitz, Moses, 380 Mosse, Werner E., 3 Mowschowitsch, David, 359 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 402, 403 Munich, 237 Münzenberg, Willi, 395 Murchison, Roderick Impey, 55 Murray, George Gilbert Aimé, 319 Musset, Alfred de, 327 N Nahum, Haim, 308, 309 Namier, Julia, 316, 316n1 Namier, Lewis B., 15, 315–335, 399, 414 Napoleon III, emperor, 58 Nathan, Ernesto, 162n45, 163, 357 Nathan, family, 162, 163, 171 Nathan, Giuseppe, 163 Nathan, Paul, 357–359 Nathan, Sara Levi, 14, 154, 156, 161, 163, 166, 171, 172, 174, 175, 355 Navarino, 269 Netherlands, 274 Neuchâtel, 50 New York City, 235, 248, 402 Nice, 50 Nicholas I, 237, 238, 240, 241 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 365, 366, 381, 391 Niguarda (Milan), 174 Nike of Samothrace, 100 Nimes, 277 Nissim, Mazliah, 294, 309 Nordhausen, 245 Nuri, Celal, 290, 297, 298, 307, 310, 310n92

O O’Connell, Daniel, 347 Odessa, 48, 296 Odysseus, 1 Oppenheim, Heinrich Bernhard, 343, 350, 352 Oran (city), 34–38 Oran (département), 33, 35 Osman Bey, see Millingen, Frederick Ottoman empire, 13–15, 49, 50, 53, 71, 209, 211, 212, 213n10, 228, 267n10, 268, 269, 276, 282, 289–292, 290n2, 295, 296, 299–301, 308, 310, 311, 356, 359, 389, 411, 415 Ozavci, Ozan, 6, 9, 15, 414 P Pakistan, 10 Palestine, 10, 146, 212n7, 224n30, 226, 249, 252, 271, 291–295, 298, 299, 304–306, 308–310, 333–335, 368, 371, 373, 398 Papal States, 155 Pappenheim, Bertha, 357 Parenzo, Cesare, 156 Paris, 48–50, 57, 100, 173, 279, 349, 351, 370, 387, 392, 405 Parvus, Alexander, 300 Pasha, Enver, 291 Pasha, Sharif, 271, 273, 274, 276 Pateman, Carole, 3, 25 Pedersen, Susan, 329 Peffau, V.-J., 36 Pekelis, Alexander, 379 Pérez Galdós, Benito, 194 Philippson, Ludwig, 191–193, 344 Picciotto, Eliahu, 276, 277 Picciotto, Isaac ben Ezra, 265, 267, 271, 273–275, 279–282 Pincherle, Leone, 344

 INDEX 

Pinsker, Leon, 371, 372 Pisa, 160, 161 Pitts, Jennifer, 3, 25 Pius IX (Pope), 349 Plener, Ernst, 131, 141, 147 Podhoretz, Norman, 234, 401 Poland, 373, 376 Popper, Karl, 12, 387, 389, 391, 395, 397, 398 Preuss, Hugo, 356 Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 202, 202n56 Proskauer, Joseph, 377 Prussia, 53, 274, 327, 329 Pulido Fernández, Ángel, 198 Pulzer, Peter, 2, 3, 11, 23 Pyrenees, 186, 187, 199, 205 Q Quadrio, Maurizio, 161 Quinet, Edgar, 28 R Raffalovich, Elena, 174 Randegger, Flora, 354 Ratti-Menton, Ulisse, Comte de, 271, 274, 275, 279, 280 Reed, Peter, 115 Régis, Max, 33, 36, 36n43 Retcliffe, John, 64, 64n60, 64n61 Riesser, Gabriel, 344, 346 Riga, 237–242 Rivas, 201 Rollin, Charles, 63 Romania, 8, 27–33, 38, 40, 75, 354, 356, 359, 360 Rome, 161–164, 175, 346, 357 Rosenblatt, Helena, 7, 8, 412, 416 Rosetti, Constantin, 28 Rothschild, Albert, 142 Rothschild, family, 52

427

Rothschild, James Baron de, 277, 342 Rougemont, Denis de, 392 Russia, 28, 29, 32, 49, 210n4, 220, 236–239, 238n13, 242, 249, 255, 291, 297, 300, 358, 359, 372, 373, 389, 397 S Saint Louis, 48 Saint Petersburg, 291, 373 Salonica, 212, 216, 219 Samuel, Herbert, 356 Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., 391 Schmitt, Carl, 396, 397 Scholem, Gershom, 76 Schönerer, Georg, Ritter von, 23, 141, 142, 145, 149, 355 Scott, Charles Prestwich, 321 Scott, Walter, 57, 58 Sepharad, 5, 185–205 Seton-Watson, Robert William, 326, 328, 329 Sheehan, James, 12 Shklar, Judith, 395 Shlomo (Jewish barber of Damascus), 273 Silver, M. M., 14, 414 Simmel, Georg, 76, 77 Sivan, Emmanuel, 34 Smith, Adam, 59, 63 Smith, Arthur Lionel, 321–324 Sommaruga, Angelo, 50n7 Soviet Union, 389, 406 Spain, 8, 13, 14, 33, 185–205, 189n10, 194n29, 197n38, 198n41, 268 Spender, Stephen, 392 Spengler, Oswald, 318

428 

INDEX

Sperber, Manès, 387, 390, 392, 395, 405, 406 Stalin, Josef, 395, 406 Steiner, George, 398 Stendhal, see Bayle, Henri Stern, Fritz, 401 Stöcker, Adolf, 23, 354 Straucher, Benno, 371 Straus, Oscar, 356, 359 Suriname, 98n3, 101, 107, 108, 112, 120 Switzerland, 49, 50, 62n56, 173, 373 Syria, 8, 15, 264–270, 264n2, 278, 348 T Taaffe, Eduard, 141, 143, 145 Taine, Hippolyte, 57 Talmon, Jacob, 380n40, 397 Tevfik, Ebuzziya, 296, 297, 303, 309 Tevfik, Riza, 295 Thierry, Augustin, 57, 57n35, 58 Thiers, Adolphe, 279 Thomas, Father, 271, 275 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 12, 139, 144 Torberg, Friedrich, 390, 392, 397 Torno, professor, 201 Toury, Jacob, 87 Toussenel, Alphonse, 54, 55, 80 Toynbee, Arnold Joseph, 318–320, 326, 333 Transvaal, 356 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 62, 63, 355–356 Trilling, Diana, 394, 401 Trilling, Lionel, 391 Trump, Donald, 245 Tsur, Yaron, 8, 15, 211n6, 217n19, 414

Tunis, 160 Tunisia, 72 Turin, 159, 167n72, 350 Turkey, 56, 199n42, 228, 292, 302, 304, 307 U Unger, Josef, 350, 351 United Kingdom (UK), see Britain United States of America (USA), 48, 72, 87, 120, 171, 174, 228, 326, 356, 373, 388–398, 401, 402, 404 Ussishkin, Menahem, 252, 296 Uvarov, Sergei, 237 Uzielli, Mosè, 159 V Valensino (Jewish notable of Damascus), 278 Veit, Moritz, 344, 350 Venice, 103, 174 Ventura (Jewish notable of Alexandria), 278, 279 Vienna, 14, 41, 47, 131–150, 198, 199, 350, 351, 405 Vietnam, 396 Vigny, Alfred de, 55n24 Vilnius, 401 Vinaver, Maksim, 372 Volkov, Shulamit, 148 W Wallachia, 28, 29 Warsaw, 48 Washington D.C., 84, 248, 398 Wedgwood, Josiah Clement, 333 Wertheimstein, Charlotte, 134

 INDEX 

Wertheimstein, Josephine, 133 West Bank, 382 West Indies (British), see Caribbean (British) West Indies (Dutch), see Caribbean (Dutch) Wiesbaden, 48, 62n56 Williams, Raymond, 7 Wilson, Woodrow, 12, 375 Wise, Isaac Mayer, 239 Wolf, Lucien, 357, 358 Wolffsohn, David, 293–296, 296n30, 306, 307, 310 Woodward, George, 108

429

Y Yahuda, Abraham Shalom, 199–202, 201n52, 201n53 Z Zangwill, Israel, 237, 245, 246, 248–254, 254n56 Zevi, Shabbetai, 406 Zimmern, Alfred Eckhard, 319–321, 323, 324, 326, 334 Zöpfl, Heinrich, 79, 80 Zunz, Leopold, 344