Jews on the Move: Modern Cosmopolitanist Thought and its Others

Cathy Gelbin, Sander L Gilman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138555303
• eBook ISBN: 9781351370486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Jewish cosmopolitanism is key to understanding both modern globalization, and the old and new nationalism. Jewish cultures existing in the Western world during the last two centuries have been and continue to be read as hyphenated phenomena within a specific national context, such as German-Jewish or American-Jewish culture. Yet to what extent do such nationalized constructs of Jewish culture and identity still dominate Jewish self-expressions, and the discourses about them, in the rapidly globalizing world of the twenty-first century? In a world in which Diaspora societies have begun to reshape themselves as part of a super- or nonnational identity, what has happened to a cosmopolitan Jewish identity?

In a post-Zionist world, where one of the newest and most substantial Diaspora communities is that of Israelis, in the new globalized culture, is "being Jewish" suddenly something that can reach beyond the older models of Diasporic integration or nationalism? Which new paradigms of Jewish self-location, within the evolving and conflicting global discourses, about the nation, race, Genocides, anti-Semitism, colonialism and postcolonialism, gender and sexual identities does the globalization of Jewish cultures open up? To what extent might transnational notions of Jewishness, such as European-Jewish identity, create new discursive margins and centers? Is there a possibility that a "virtual makom (Jewish space)" might constitute itself? Recent studies on cosmopolitanism cite the Jewish experience as a key to the very notion of the movement of people for good or for ill as well as for the resurgence of modern nationalism. These theories reflect newer models of postcolonialism and transnationalism in regard to global Jewish cultures.

The present volume spans the widest reading of Jewish cosmopolitisms to study "Jews on the move."

This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Review of History.

Cosmopolitanism and the critique of antisemitism: two faces of universality

Robert D. Fine

ABSTRACT

The antisemitic imagination sometimes derides Jews as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, and sometimes as the particularistic enemy of cosmopolitanism. The seemingly contradictory character of these antisemitic representations is not new but needs unpacking. In this article the author argues that Enlightenment cosmopolitanism has shown two faces to Jews: an emancipatory face manifest in movements for legal recognition of Jews as equal citizens and for social recognition of Jews as equal human beings; and a repressive face that has been expressed in the form of the so-called ‘Jewish question’. The former holds that Jews are human beings and treats this sense of common humanity as a practical imperative; the latter turns ‘the Jews’ into an imagined collectivity incapable of meeting the universal standards of humankind. The Jewish question is in nuce the question of what is to be done about the harm Jews inflict on humanity at large; it appears and reappears in the modern world in a variety of forms; and it is always at odds with the emancipatory face of cosmopolitanism. The author illustrates this conflict within cosmopolitanism at three key moments of Western European history: the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, nineteenth-century revolutionary thought, and the ‘new cosmopolitanism’ of our own time. He addresses in a historical fashion some of the difficulties the ambivalence of cosmopolitanism poses for our understanding of antisemitism and conversely some of the difficulties the study of antisemitism poses for the further development of cosmopolitan ways of thinking.

Prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle — solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness.

– George Eliot, Middlemarch (1874)

Two faces of universalism

Under the register of the ‘rootless cosmopolitan Jew’, Jews have been conceived on one hand as lacking in roots in the nations that granted them ‘hospitality’, and on the other as acting as an international network loyal only to themselves. This pejorative reference to Jews, which was favoured by Stalinist regimes after 1945 and paved the way for the trials and tribulations Jews endured in Eastern Europe in the post-war and Cold War periods, had connotations of disloyalty, lack of patriotism, foreignness and worldwide conspiracy. It was first cousin to cognate terms like ‘enemy of the people’ or ‘enemy of the human species’, which began their modern lives as markers of terror in the French Revolution, and signified what we might call a ‘bad universalism’.¹ It was contrasted with the ‘good universalism’ associated with the idea of a universal nation, a nation whose particular interests corresponded with the interests of humanity as a whole, and more especially with Communist conceptions of ‘proletarian internationalism’, which identified Russia as the ‘universal nation’ par excellence.²

Pejorative uses of the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ endure today within contemporary Sociology, including ‘Marxist’ Sociology, although with less fateful consequences. Radical critics of cosmopolitanism have lined up to demean it as the ‘class consciousness of frequent travellers’, as the ideology of corporate managers and intergovernmental bureaucrats, tax dodgers and jet-setting academics – anyone with expensive tastes and a globetrotting lifestyle.³ The once noble term ‘cosmopolitan’, proudly and at vast personal expense embraced by Jewish writers like Stephan Zweig and Joseph Roth to confront the allure of nationalism and Fascism in the inter-war period, has been decried as the idealized expression of those who renounce the normal obligations of national citizenship, such as paying one’s share of taxes and contributing to democratic social life. Before one can say Amazon or Starbucks, the cosmopolitan is turned into the ‘cosmocrat’ who runs the City or the ‘cosmoprat’ who floats ethereally above the world with a false sense of moral superiority. These sceptical currents contrast markedly with positive uses of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ among the classical figures of sociology, including Marx and Durkheim.⁴

Antisemitism is a versatile beast and Jews have been vilified not only for being ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, but also for a failure to be cosmopolitan at all. Kant, one of the ‘founding fathers’ of modern cosmopolitan philosophy, echoed a well-established prejudice when he wrote that in the case of the Jews ‘all estimation of other men, who are not Jews, is totally lost, and goodwill is reduced merely to love of their own tribe’.⁵ Kant showed in this passage that it is possible to turn cosmopolitanism into a weapon against Jews, though Kant himself went on in later life to challenge the misuse of cosmopolitanism as a weapon against colonized peoples supposedly less civilized than the Europeans who conquered and occupied their countries. He began to destabilize the racial stereotypes perceptible in his own Anthropology by looking back to the monogenetic origins of the human species and forward to our future moral unity.⁶ The main point is not how far Kant was able to rid himself of the prejudice that the Jews were in some substantial sense locked in ‘love of their own tribe’ and bereft of ‘all estimation of other men’, but to acknowledge the possibility that even among the most cosmopolitan of thinkers, universal categories can, if adopted unreflectively, metamorphose into means of reproducing old racial and antisemitic typifications.

The Janus-faced capacity of cosmopolitanism both to pursue a policy of radical inclusion on the basis of common humanity and to pathologize one or other category of people as the enemy of humanity⁷ has manifested itself in its relation to Jews through a dialectic of emancipation and prejudice – in its emancipatory aspect treating Jews as fellow human beings and drawing practical conclusions from a sense of common humanity, while in its prejudicial aspect deeming Jews incapable of acting as universal human beings – at least as long as they remained Jews. The two faces of cosmopolitanism have not only represented a problem for Jews but for all categories of people to whom the labels ‘not-yet human’, ‘inhuman’ or even ‘anti-human’ are attached. Yet what is specific to the Jewish experience in Western Europe is the way in which the property of ‘particularism’ has been projected onto them. A temptation that long preceded the constitution of antisemitism has been to treat conflicts between Jews and non-Jews not as ordinary human conflicts but as the symbolic expression of a metaphysical conflict between the Particular and the Universal – Judaism on the side of the particular and Christianity on the side of the universal. While Jewish emancipation movements have been oriented to the legal, political and social recognition of Jews, at least in the West, the Jewish question has typically been based on how to understand the harm ‘the Jews’ as a category inflicted on humanity as a whole, what to do about it and how to bring it to an end.

I shall seek to illustrate my argument by addressing the two faces of cosmopolitanism at three pivotal moments in Western history: the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the revolutionary tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the ‘new cosmopolitanism’ of our own day. I shall argue that at every stage there has been a struggle waged over the spirit of cosmopolitanism between forces of Jewish emancipation and of the ‘Jewish question’ that are not always easy to distinguish.

I should say as an aside that this task leads me to question some dominant modes of historical consciousness within my own field of Sociology. For example, some of the leading sociological advocates of the ‘new cosmopolitanism’, while acknowledging the dual character of cosmopolitanism, have placed it in a rigid time frame. Thus in Cosmopolitan Vision the sociologist Ulrich Beck wrote that universalism is two-faced, with ‘respect’ on one side and ‘terror’ on the other.⁸ Beck argued that Enlightenment universalism was based on the ‘elimination of plurality’ and ‘sacrifice of particularity’ and that it universalized ‘Western’ values in order to pathologized the values of others. He maintained that the ‘humanist universalism’ of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was deeply flawed in not recognising rights of particularity, but that at least it put human universality on the agenda. He then maintained that Enlightenment cosmopolitanism was succeeded by the rise of ‘methodological nationalism’ in the nineteenth century in which there was no universal moment at all. This appeared to Beck as the age in which nationalism, imperialism and racism became supreme. In the current period, according to Beck, what has finally arisen is ‘post-universalism’ that leans toward both a universal conception of humanity and toward the recognition of difference and rejection of all homogenising claims. Situating the cosmopolitan synthesis of the universal and the particular in the here and now has allowed Beck to label as ‘obsolete’ both the humanist universalism of the Enlightenment because of its readiness to sacrifice rights of subjective freedom to the universal, and the methodological nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that sacrificed any idea of the universal. This enabled Beck to present the new cosmopolitanism of our own age as ‘post-universal’ in the sense that it is finally capable of reconciling our universal humanity and our particular differences.

The central problem with this approach to history that I want to consider here is that it rules out the possibility that recognition of difference and suspicion of homogenising claims were already present within the Enlightenment or the alternative possibility that the elimination of plurality and sacrifice of particularity remain temptations within the new cosmopolitanism. I would suggest that it is an illusion of progress to lock the past in the past as if it contained no alternative possibilities, and to idealize the present in the present as if we have definitively learned the lessons of history and now know exactly what is to be done. I would further suggest that we can problematize the limitations of this historical consciousness by reconfiguring cosmopolitanism not so much as a stage of history that renders obsolete the properties of a previous stage, but as a repeated struggle for emancipation that constantly has to confront its own d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Cosmopolitanism and the critique of antisemitism: two faces of universality
• 2. Aliens vs. predators: cosmopolitan Jews vs. Jewish nomads
• 3. Revolutions, wars and the Jewish and Christian contribution to redemptive cosmopolitanism in Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
• 4. Hotel patriots or permanent strangers? Joseph Roth and the Jews of inter-war Central Europe
• 5. Marxism, cosmopolitanism and ‘the’ Jews
• 6. New futures, new pasts: Horace M. Kallen and the contribution of Jewishness to the future
• 7. Rootless cosmopolitans: German-Jewish writers confront the Stalinist and National Socialist atrocities
• 8. Inviting essential outsiders in: imagining a cosmopolitan nation
• 9. ‘Cosmopolitan from above’: a Jewish experience in Hong Kong
• 10. The possibilities and pitfalls of a Jewish cosmopolitanism: reading Natan Sznaider through Russian-Jewish writer Olga Grjasnowa’s German-language novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (All Russians Love Birch Trees)
• 11. Cosmopolitan Europeans? Jewish public intellectuals in Germany and Austria and the idea of ‘Europe’
• 12. Drifting towards Cosmopolis
• 13. Maximalism as a Cosmopolitan strategy in the art of Ruth Novaczek and Doug Fishbone
• Index