Between Redemption & Perdition

Modern Antisemitism and Jewish Identity

Robert S. Wistrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000043396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Originally published in 1990, this book focuses on the challenge to Jewish identity posed by the conflicting forces of enlightenment, emancipation, modern political antisemitism, and secular ideologies like Zionism, nationalism, and socialism. At the heart of his discussion stands the intense, tortured, and ultimately tragic encounter of Jews with Germans and Austrians. He also deals at length with the new problems of Jewish cultural and political identity posed by the existence of the state of Israel and its embattled position among the nations. In the course of the analysis the book looks at the tragedy of assimilation in central Europe, with the optimistic dream of Enlightenment and Bildung coming to a climax in the nightmare of racial antisemitism and the Holocaust. He explores the ambivalent relationship of the Jews with the European Left, showing how many Jewish intellectuals found a new political home in radical and socialist movements, though these movements often retained negative stereotypes of Jews and Judaism and exhibited a fierce opposition to the maintenance of any separate Jewish identity. The role of Zionism is discussed and the more recent challenges to its legitimacy examined.

Part 1
Nemesis in Central Europe

Robert S. Wistrich

1

Karl Marx and the Enlightenment

The western Enlightenment intended to regenerate the Jews by liberating them from superstition and despotism. Its proclaimed goal was spiritual and political emancipation which, in the case of the Jews, presupposed severing the religious and national elements in Judaism. The Jew was henceforth to become a citizen, abandoning the separatism of his ghetto existence, and adopting the habits, customs, clothing, and speech of his Gentile neighbours. Israel was to leave its tents and intermingle with the nations on the basis of the new gospel of civic equality.

Until the Enlightenment the Jews had been a people, at least in the ethnic sense. Now they were assumed to be no more than a religion. But the enlighteners had no doubt that all religion, and especially Judaism, was essentially obscurantist, fanatical, and tyrannical. The appeal of the Enlightenment was aggressively secular and hence Jews who clung to their religious tradition were viewed with undisguised hostility. The war-cry of Voltaire and the ‘philosophers’ – ‘Écrasez f’infâme’ – did not spare Jewish customs, manners, and sensibilities. The Enlightenment had many virtues, not least that it offered the Jews a way out of the ghetto and into the mainstream of European history. But the process of adaptation created a new problem for the self-image and self-esteem of the Jews. It demanded a progressive sloughing off of time-honoured traditions, a reform of Jewish life, and a gradual elimination of those ‘Jewish’ characteristics which were deemed unattractive by the Gentile world. Paradoxically, the secular humanism of the Enlightenment was also at the root of modern Jewish self-hatred.

Examples of Jewish antisemitism can certainly be found which predate the nineteenth century, notably among baptized Jews who turned against their former co-religionists with all the passion of the neophyte. Indeed, ‘Jewish antisemitism’ was scarcely surprising in a Christian environment which for nearly 2,000 years had encouraged open or latent Judeophobia. This historical factor, which should never be underestimated, was also pertinent to the case of Karl Marx. The psychological interpretation of Marx as a neophyte must, however, explain how radical and consistent secularism could also generate Jewish self-hatred. Even more than his radical young Hegelian contemporaries, Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Arnold Ruge, and Moses Hess, Marx insisted, in Zur Judenfrage (1844), that ‘we convert theological questions into secular questions’. If Marx’s analysis of the Jewish question was based, as he himself asserted, on a thoroughgoing secular, ‘scientific’ approach which rejected theological prejudices, can the charge of antisemitism be sustained?

The answer must lie in Marx’s own definition of the way secularization affected the Jewish problem, and in his efforts to differentiate his approach from that of Bruno Bauer. Marx’s essay on the Jews was clearly framed as a polemic against Bruno Bauer, his left-wing Hegelian mentor – a Protestant theologian turned atheist and free-thinker. But what are all too frequently overlooked in Marx’s critique of Bauer are the similarities and points of agreement between the two young Hegelian thinkers. The assumption has been that, because Marx rejected Bauer’s position on Jewish emancipation and formulated a different theory of society and the state, his attitude to Judaism was less hostile. What is forgotten is that Marx praised Bauer’s antisemitic propositions on the religious antithesis between Judaism and Christianity in no uncertain terms. Thus at the outset of his essay he emphasized the ‘boldness, sharpness, wit and thoroughness’ with which Bauer had dissected the essence of both the Jewish and Christian religions. He also relied on Bruno Bauer’s characterization of Judaism as a religion which ‘could not be further developed theoretically, because the ideology of practical need is by its nature limited, and exhausted in a few strokes’.

Similarly, Marx quoted with approval his mentor’s verdict on ‘Jewish Jesuitry, the same practical Jesuitry that Bauer points out in the Talmud’, which merely reflected the logic of egoism in the everyday world. Marx passed over in silence the antisemitic features in Bauer’s portrayal of Judaism, because for him they were self-evidently true and therefore not worth discussing. Bruno Bauer, like his teacher Voltaire, blamed Judaism for the rise of Christianity, for tyranny and superstition. He considered that the essence of Judaism lay in the fanatical intolerance and narrow-mindedness of the Jewish national spirit. In common with the French Enlightenment, Bauer regarded Jewish particularism as incompatible with the spirit of emancipation. If the Jews wanted human rights, then Bauer insisted that they strip off their ‘Jewish essence’ and abandon their ‘privileges’ as a medieval corporation. German Jewry must recognize that a Christian state could never emancipate them, only an atheist state, which had no room for Christians or Jews. Radical, abstract secularism as exhibited in Bruno Bauer’s essays on the Jewish question demanded that German Jews renounce unconditionally their ‘chimerical nationality’ and their religious affiliation.

This was the weak point in Bauer’s case which Marx attacked with remorseless logic, offering in its place a different and more convincing interpretation of the meaning of secularization and of human rights as proclaimed by the American and French revolutions. But it is essential to notice that, in so doing, Marx did not in the least quarrel with Bauer’s antisemitic falsifications of Jewish history and of the Jewish religion. On the contrary, he radicalized Bauer’s critique of Judaism, transferring it from the realm of theological abstraction to that of social analysis.

Moreover in putting forward his own version of the Jewish ‘practical essence’, Marx built on the young Hegelian assumptions of Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, and Moses Hess. The consensus among the Left Hegelians on this subject was remarkable: they all emphasized that the ‘Jewish’ character of Christianity made it inhuman, and that in this sense emancipation from Judaism was desirable. For Feuerbach, ‘Judaism is worldly Christianity’, for Bruno Bauer ‘Judaism is unachieved Christianity’, for Moses Hess the blood-mystique of Judeo-Christianity is realized ‘in the modern Jewish-Christian peddler world’.

The young Marx did not disagree with any of these opinions, although his own formulation was more dialectical. ‘Christianity overcame real living Judaism in appearance only. It was too respectable, too spiritual, to remove the crudeness of practical need, other than by raising itself into heaven.’ When the young Marx sought in 1844 the key to the negativity of his own age, it was decidedly within the framework of Left Hegelianism. ‘Christianity arose out of Judaism. It has now dissolved itself back into Judaism.’ The implications of this standpoint for Jewish emancipation in Germany were clear. The post-revolutionary western society which had emerged after 1789 in the Christian world was already the apogee of ‘Judaism’. Or as Marx put it in more provocative terms - ‘The Jews have emancipated themselves, in so far as the Christians have become Jews’.

What, then, was the purpose of Marx’s polemic against Bruno Bauer on the issue of Jewish emancipation? Why did he declare in a letter to Arnold Ruge on 13 March 1843 that ‘Although the Israelite faith is repugnant to me, yet Bauer’s opinion seems to me too abstract.’ Why did he welcome the bitterness which ‘grows with every petition rejected amid protests’ and insist that ‘We must riddle the Christian state with as many holes as possible and smuggle in the rational as far as we can’? Certainly it was not out of any love for the Jews, but rather out of hatred for the Christian-Germanic state, where ‘the domination of religion is the religion of domination’. Jewish emancipation in Germany was, from the standpoint of radical politics, a useful weapon against Prussian absolutism. If German Jews were demanding their civil (that is, human) rights, then this for Marx was a blow struck in the name of secularization. It exposed the hypocrisy and backwardness of the Prussian state by comparison with the more progressive ‘constitutional’ bourgeois societies of France and America. With reference to Prussian conditions, Marx wrote: ‘As the State evangelizes, when although a State, it adopts the attitude of a Christian toward the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands the rights of the citizen.’

This was the nub of Marx’s quarrel with Bruno Bauer over Jewish emancipation, which comes out with greater clarity and force in The Holy Family of 1845. There, he approvingly quoted Gabriel Riesser, the leading spokesman for German Jewish emancipation, who (in Marx’s view) ‘correctly expresses the meaning of the demand of the Jews who claim the recognition of free humanity, when he calls among other things, for the freedom of movement, to sojourn, travel and trade’. Against the clerical-authoritarian state which denied the Jews rights guaranteed by the American and French constitutions, Marx was ready to support the Jewish critics of Bruno Bauer. As a consistent secularist and enemy of the Christian-Germanic ideology which sought to confine the Jews to the ghetto, any other position would have struck Marx as regressive. But Bruno Bauer, from whom Marx had imbibed his secularism and his hostility to the Christian state and Jewish religion, did not share this view. Hence, Marx felt obliged to justify his tactical position in theoretical terms, by showing that Bauer’s concept of secularization was inadequate. The object of this demonstration was, however, in no sense intended to justify or defend Judaism. On the contrary, the arguments developed by Marx were all designed to show that political emancipation was insufficient to achieve the necessary and desirable abolition of Judaism.

For the purposes of this demonstration Marx appealed, in particular, to the example of North America, which evidently in 1844 represented for him the model of a secular society. In the blossoming of religious sects in American society Marx saw decisive evidence for his argument that political emancipation did not necessitate the abolition of religion. Quoting such European observers of American life as Hamilton, Beaumont, and De Tocqueville, Marx argued that religion and commerce were inextricably related features of a secularized civil society. He cited Hamilton’s comments on the religion of Mammon in New England – where ‘the earth in their eyes is nothing else but a stock-exchange, where they have no other calling than to become richer than their neighbors’. But if Mammon was the worldly God of the New Englanders, this only proved to Marx how ‘judaized’ the Christian world had become: ‘Indeed, the practical dominance of Judaism over the Christian world has reached its unambiguous normal expression in North America.’

In secular America, Marx found the evidence he had been looking for to confound Bauer’s thesis that Jewish emancipation implied the victory of atheism. However, it is highly significant that none of the writers on America whom Marx quoted had discussed Judaism, let alone the incarnation of vulgar commercial practice in the Jewish spirit. This was gratuitously introduced by Marx himself, in terms which even the most uninhibited antisemite would have been hard put to surpass. ‘With the Jew and without him, money has become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples.’ In 1869 Gougenot des Mousseaux was to write one of the classic antisemitic works of the nineteenth century, Le Juif, le Judaisme et la Judaisation des peuples chretiens, which elaborated similar propositions.

Marx’s references to America intended to show that Judaism would survive and even flourish under conditions of political emancipation and the separation of church and state. The elimination of Judaism required a far more radical transformation which would abolish the contradiction between civil society and the state, between the private and public sphere, between the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘citoyen’. This solution, which would finally restore to man his collective species-essence and overcome his alienation from nature, society, and his fellow man, Marx called human emancipation. This was the radical, revolutionary form of secularization which Marx proposed in answer to Bruno Bauer and it was indeed the embryonic germ of his scientific socialism. But human emancipation was impossible as long as egoistic man, the atomized privatized bourgeois, was governed by money, which Marx in common with Moses Hess saw as the omnipotent and radically self-alienating power in modern bourgeois society. In Judaism and to a lesser extent in Christianity (which, like Hess, he saw as merely the ‘theoretical’ expression of practical need) Marx felt he had discovered the source of his alienation. ‘Thus we recognize in Judaism a general, contemporary, anti-social element which has been brought to its present height by a historical development which the Jews zealously abetted and which must necessarily dissolve itself.’ The Jews had not only aided and abetted the process by which money had become a dominant factor in the modern secular world, they had actively corrupted the Christian bourgeoisie.

It is not difficult to see in this method of argument the classic procedure of the antisemite. First Marx defines the Jewish ‘essence’ in abstract, mythical terms as a homogeneous, unchanging entity rooted in the Jewish religion. Then, having equated this negative essence with the Jewish group as a whole, he calls for its elimination and thereby the elimination of the related social evils of egoism, money, and avarice. Far from transcending Bruno Bauer’s ‘theoretical’ antisemitism, Marx simply generalized and radicalized it. Whereas Bauer had projected on to the Jews his hatred of Christian intolerance and fanaticism in the classic style of the Voltairean Enlightenment, Marx blamed Judaism for the alienation of the secular world created by the Christian bourgeoisie. The mythologizing of the Jewish ‘essence’ simply took different forms in the two cases. For Bauer, the Jew was unchanging, static, Oriental in his passivity and indifference to modernity. For Marx, the Jew was unchanging in his practical activity, narrow-minded, money-grabbing, and parasitical. Bauer’s antisemitism combined traditional Christian and secular humanist motifs. Marx’s antisemitism was thoroughly modern, materialist, and pseudo-revolutionary.

In both cases the options left open to the Jews involved their disappearance as a social group and as a religious entity. Bruno Bauer envisaged the possibility that once the Jews were liberated from Judaism they could enjoy human rights in an atheist society. Marx held out the equally uninviting prospect that ‘if the Jew recognizes the futility of his practical existence and strives to put an end to it, he will work ... toward human emancipation in general and turn against the highest practical expression of human self-alienation’.

What motivated Marx...