Antisemitism, page 9
More important than the expansion of the independent Jewish business class was another shift in the occupational structure. Central and Western European Jewries had reached a saturation point in wealth and economic fortune. This might have been the moment for them to show that they actually wanted money for money’s or for power’s sake. In the former case, they might have expanded their businesses and handed them down to their descendants; in the latter they might have entrenched themselves more firmly in state business and fought the influence of big business and industry on governments. But they did neither. On the contrary, the sons of the well-to-do businessmen and, to a lesser extent, bankers, deserted their fathers’ careers for the liberal professions or purely intellectual pursuits they had not been able to afford a few generations before. What the nation-state had once feared so much, the birth of a Jewish intelligentsia, now proceeded at a fantastic pace. The crowding of Jewish sons of well-to-do parents into the cultural occupations was especially marked in Germany and Austria, where a great proportion of cultural institutions, like newspapers, publishing, music, and theater, became Jewish enterprises.
What had been made possible through the traditional Jewish preference and respect for intellectual occupations resulted in a real break with tradition and the intellectual assimilation and nationalization of important strata of Western and Central European Jewry. Politically, it indicated emancipation of Jews from state protection, growing consciousness of a common destiny with their fellow-citizens, and a considerable loosening of the ties that had made Jews an inter-European element. Socially, the Jewish intellectuals were the first who, as a group, needed and wanted admittance to non-Jewish society. Social discrimination, a small matter to their fathers who had not cared for social intercourse with Gentiles, became a paramount problem for them.
Searching for a road into society, this group was forced to accept social behavior patterns set by individual Jews who had been admitted into society during the nineteenth century as exceptions to the rule of discrimination. They quickly discovered the force that would open all doors, the “radiant Power of Fame” (Stefan Zweig), which a hundred years’ idolatry of genius had made irresistible. What distinguished the Jewish pursuit of fame from the general fame idolatry of the time was that Jews were not primarily interested in it for themselves. To live in the aura of fame was more important than to become famous; thus they became outstanding reviewers, critics, collectors, and organizers of what was famous. The “radiant power” was a very real social force by which the socially homeless were able to establish a home. The Jewish intellectuals, in other words, tried, and to a certain extent succeeded, in becoming the living tie binding famous individuals into a society of the renowned, an international society by definition, for spiritual achievement transcends national boundaries. The general weakening of political factors, for two decades having brought about a situation in which reality and appearance, political reality and theatrical performance could easily parody each other, now enabled them to become the representatives of a nebulous international society in which national prejudices no longer seemed valid. And paradoxically enough, this international society seemed to be the only one that recognized the nationalization and assimilation of its Jewish members; it was far easier for an Austrian Jew to be accepted as an Austrian in France than in Austria. The spurious world citizenship of this generation, this fictitious nationality which they claimed as soon as their Jewish origin was mentioned, in part already resembled those passports which later granted their owner the right to sojourn in every country except the one that issued it.
By their very nature, these circumstances could not but bring Jews into prominence just when their activities, their satisfaction and happiness in the world of appearance, proved that, as a group, they wanted in fact neither money nor power. While serious statesmen and publicists now bothered with the Jewish question less than at any time since the emancipation, and while antisemitism almost entirely disappeared from the open political scene, Jews became the symbols of Society as such and the objects of hatred for all those whom society did not accept. Antisemitism, having lost its ground in the special conditions that had influenced its development during the nineteenth century, could be freely elaborated by charlatans and crackpots into that weird mixture of half-truths and wild superstitions which emerged in Europe after 1914, the ideology of all frustrated and resentful elements.
Since the Jewish question in its social aspect turned into a catalyst of social unrest, until finally a disintegrated society recrystallized ideologically around a possible massacre of Jews, it is necessary to outline some of the main traits of the social history of emancipated Jewry in the bourgeois society of the last century.
Chapter Three
The Jews and Society
THE JEWS’ political ignorance, which fitted them so well for their special role and for taking roots in the state’s sphere of business, and their prejudices against the people and in favor of authority, which blinded them to the political dangers of antisemitism, caused them to be oversensitive toward all forms of social discrimination. It was difficult to see the decisive difference between political argument and mere antipathy when the two developed side by side. The point, however, is that they grew out of exactly opposite aspects of emancipation: political antisemitism developed because the Jews were a separate body, while social discrimination arose because of the growing equality of Jews with all other groups.
Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modem mankind. The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become. This perplexing consequence came fully to light as soon as equality was no longer seen in terms of an omnipotent being like God or an unavoidable common destiny like death. Whenever equality becomes a mundane fact in itself, without any gauge by which it may be measured or explained, then there is one chance in a hundred that it will be recognized simply as a working principle of a political organization in which otherwise unequal people have equal rights; there are ninety-nine chances that it will be mistaken for an innate quality of every individual, who is “normal” if he is like everybody else and “abnormal” if he happens to be different. This perversion of equality from a political into a social concept is all the more dangerous when a society leaves but little space for special groups and individuals, for then their differences become all the more conspicuous.
The great challenge to the modern period, and its peculiar danger, has been that in it man for the first time confronted man without the protection of differing circumstances and conditions. And it has been precisely this new concept of equality that has made modem race relations so difficult, for there we deal with natural differences which by no possible and conceivable change of conditions can become less conspicuous. It is because equality demands that I recognize each and every individual as my equal, that the conflicts between different groups, which for reasons of their own are reluctant to grant each other this basic equality, take on such terribly cruel forms.
Hence the more equal the Jewish condition, the more surprising were Jewish differences. This new awareness led to social resentment against the Jews and at the same time to a peculiar attraction toward them; the combined reactions determined the social history of Western Jewry. Discrimination, however, as well as attraction, were politically sterile. They neither produced a political movement against the Jews nor served in any way to protect them against their enemies. They did succeed, though, in poisoning the social atmosphere, in perverting all social intercourse between Jews and Gentiles, and had a definite effect on Jewish behavior. The formation of a Jewish type was due to both—to special discrimination and to special favor.
Social antipathy for Jews, with its varying forms of discrimination, did no great political harm in European countries, for genuine social and economic equality was never achieved. To all appearances new classes developed as groups to which one belonged by birth. There is no doubt that it was only in such a framework that society could suffer the Jews to establish themselves as a special clique.
The situation would have been entirely different if, as in the United States, equality of condition had been taken for granted; if every member of society—from whatever stratum—had been firmly convinced that by ability and luck he might become the hero of a success story. In such a society, discrimination becomes the only means of distinction, a kind of universal law according to which groups may find themselves outside the sphere of civic, political, and economic equality. Where discrimination is not tied up with the Jewish issue only, it can become a crystallization point for a political movement that wants to solve all the natural difficulties and conflicts of a multinational country by violence, mob rule, and the sheer vulgarity of race concepts. It is one of the most promising and dangerous paradoxes of the American Republic that it dared to realize equality on the basis of the most unequal population in the world, physically and historically. In the United States, social antisemitism may one day become the very dangerous nucleus for a political movement.1 In Europe, however, it had little influence on the rise of political antisemitism.
I: Between Pariah and Parvenu
THE PRECARIOUS balance between society and state, upon which the nationstate rested socially and politically, brought about a peculiar law governing Jewish admission to society. During the 150 years when Jews truly lived amidst, and not just in the neighborhood of, Western European peoples, they always had to pay with political misery for social glory and with social insult for political success. Assimilation, in the sense of acceptance by non-Jewish society, was granted them only as long as they were clearly distinguished exceptions from the Jewish masses even though they still shared the same restricted and humiliating political conditions, or later only when, after an accomplished emancipation and resulting social isolation, their political status was already challenged by antisemitic movements. Society, confronted with political, economic, and legal equality for Jews, made it quite clear that none of its classes was prepared to grant them social equality, and that only exceptions from the Jewish people would be received. Jews who heard the strange compliment that they were exceptions, exceptional Jews, knew quite well that it was this very ambiguity—that they were Jews and yet presumably not like Jews—which opened the doors of society to them. If they desired this kind of intercourse, they tried, therefore, “to be and yet not to be Jews.” 2
The seeming paradox had a solid basis in fact. What non-Jewish society demanded was that the newcomer be as “educated” as itself, and that, although he not behave like an “ordinary Jew,” he be and produce something out of the ordinary, since, after all, he was a Jew. All advocates of emancipation called for assimilation, that is, adjustment to and reception by, society, which they considered either a preliminary condition to Jewish emancipation or its automatic consequence. In other words, whenever those who actually tried to improve Jewish conditions attempted to think of the Jewish question from the point of view of the Jews themselves, they immediately approached it merely in its social aspect. It has been one of the most unfortunate facts in the history of the Jewish people that only its enemies, and almost never its friends, understood that the Jewish question was a political one.
The defenders of emancipation tended to present the problem as one of “education,” a concept which originally applied to Jews as well as non-Jews.3 It was taken for granted that the vanguard in both camps would conlist of specially “educated,” tolerant, cultured persons. It followed, of course, that the particularly tolerant, educated and cultured non-Jews could be bothered socially only with exceptionally educated Jews. As a matter of course, the demand, among the educated, for the abolition of prejudice was very quickly to become a rather one-sided affair, until only the Jews, finally, were urged to educate themselves.
This, however, is only one side of the matter. Jews were exhorted to become educated enough not to behave like ordinary Jews, but they were, on the other hand, accepted only because they were Jews, because of their foreign, exotic appeal. In the eighteenth century, this had its source in the new humanism which expressly wanted “new specimens of humanity” (Herder), intercourse with whom would serve as an example of possible intimacy with all types of mankind. To the enlightened Berlin of Mendelssohn’s time, the Jews served as living proof that all men are human. For this generation, friendship with Mendelssohn or Markus Herz was an ever-renewed demonstration of the dignity of man. And because Jews were a despised and oppressed people, they were for it an even purer and more exemplary model of mankind. It was Herder, an outspoken friend of the Jews, who first used the later misused and misquoted phrase, “strange people of Asia driven into our regions.”4 With these words, he and his fellow-humanists greeted the “new specimens of humanity” for whom the eighteenth century had “searched the earth,”5 only to find them in their age-old neighbors. Eager to stress the basic unity of mankind, they wanted to show the origins of the Jewish people as more alien, and hence more exotic, than they actually were, so that the demonstration of humanity as a universal principle might be more effective.
For a few decades at the turn of the eighteenth century, when French Jewry already enjoyed emancipation and German Jewry had almost no hope or desire for it, Prussia’s enlightened intelligentsia made “Jews all over the world turn their eyes to the Jewish community in Berlin” 6 (and not in Paris!). Much of this was due to the success of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, or to its misinterpretation, which held that the “new specimens of humanity,” because they had become examples of mankind, must also be more intensely human individuals.7 Mirabeau was strongly influenced by this idea and used to cite Mendelssohn as his example.8 Herder hoped that educated Jews would show a greater freedom from prejudice because “the Jew is free of certain political judgments which it is very hard or impossible for us to abandon.” Protesting against the habit of the time of granting “concessions of new mercantile advantages,” he proposed education as the true road to emancipation of Jews from Judaism, from “the old and proud national prejudices,. . . customs that do not belong to our age and constitutions,” so that Jews could become “purely humanized,” and of service to “the development of the sciences and the entire culture of mankind.”9 At about the same time, Goethe wrote in a review of a book of poems that their author, a Polish Jew, did “not achieve more than a Christian étudiant en belles lettres,” and complained that where he had expected something genuinely new, some force beyond shallow convention, he had found ordinary mediocrity.10
One can hardly overestimate the disastrous effect of this exaggerated good will on the newly Westernized, educated Jews and the impact it had on their social and psychological position. Not only were they faced with the demoralizing demand that they be exceptions to their own people, recognize “the sharp difference between them and the others,” and ask that such “separation . . . be also legalized” by the governments;11 they were expected even to become exceptional specimens of humanity. And since this, and not Heine’s conversion, constituted the true “ticket of admission” into cultured European society, what else could these and future generations of Jews do but try desperately not to disappoint anybody?12
In the early decades of this entry into society, when assimilation had not yet become a tradition to follow, but something achieved by few and exceptionally gifted individuals, it worked very well indeed. While France was the land of political glory for the Jews, the first to recognize them as citizens, Prussia seemed on the way to becoming the country of social splendor. Enlightened Berlin, where Mendelssohn had established close connections with many famous men of his time, was only a beginning. His connections with non-Jewish society still had much in common with the scholarly ties that had bound Jewish and Christian learned men together in nearly all periods of European history. The new and surprising element was that Mendelssohn’s friends used these relationships for nonpersonal, ideological, or even political purposes. He himself explicitly disavowed all such ulterior motives and expressed time and again his complete satisfaction with the conditions under which he had to live, as though he had foreseen that his exceptional social status and freedom had something to do with the fact that he still belonged to “the lowliest inhabitants of the (Prussian king’s) domain.” 13
This indifference to political and civil rights survived Mendelssohn’s innocent relationships with the learned and enlightened men of his time; it was carried later into the salons of those Jewish women who gathered together the most brilliant society Berlin was ever to see. Not until after the Prussian defeat of 1806, when the introduction of Napoleonic legislation into large regions of Germany put the question of Jewish emancipation on the agenda of public discussion, did this indifference change into outright fear. Emancipation would liberate the educated Jews, together with the “backward” Jewish people, and their equality would wipe out that precious distinction, upon which, as they were very well aware, their social status was based. When the emancipation finally came to pass, most assimilated Jews escaped into conversion to Christianity, characteristically finding it bearable and not dangerous to be Jews before emancipation, but not after.
Most representative of these salons, and the genuinely mixed society they brought together in Germany, was that of Rahel Varnhagen. Her original, unspoiled, and unconventional intelligence, combined with an absorbing interest in people and a truly passionate nature, made her the most brilliant and the most interesting of these Jewish women. The modest but famous soirees in Rahel’s “garret” brought together “enlightened” aristocrats, middle-class intellectuals, and actors—that is, all those who, like the Jews, did not belong to respectable society. Thus Rahel’s salon, by definition and intentionally, was established on the fringe of society, and did not share any of its conventions or prejudices.
