Antisemitism and the left

On the return of the Jewish question

Robert Fine, Philip Spencer

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781526104977
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526104984
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Universalism shows two faces to the world: an emancipatory face that looks to the inclusion of the other, and a repressive face that sees in the other a failure to pass some fundamental test of humanity. Universalism can be used to demand that we treat all persons as human beings regardless of their differences, but it can also be used to represent whole categories of people as inhuman, not yet human or even enemies of humanity. The Jewish experience offers an equivocal test case. Universalism has stimulated the struggle for Jewish emancipation, but it has also helped to develop the idea that there is something peculiarly harmful to humanity about Jews – that there is a 'Jewish question' that needs to be 'solved'. This original and stimulating book traces struggles within the Enlightenment, Marxism, critical theory and the contemporary left, seeking to rescue universalism from its repressive, antisemitic undertones.

1
Struggles within Enlightenment: Jewish emancipation and the Jewish question

The principle of modern states has enormous strength and depth because it allows the principle of subjectivity to attain fulfilment in the self-sufficient extreme of personal particularity while at the same time bringing it back to substantial unity and so preserving this unity in the principle of subjectivity itself. The essence of the modern state is that the universal should be linked with the complete freedom of particularity and the well being of individuals. (Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right)¹

… you have rated me

About my moneys and my usances:

Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,

For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.

You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,

And spit upon my Jewish gabardine,

And all for use of that which is mine own.

Well then you now appear to need my help

(Shylock, Shakespeare: Merchant of Venice)²

Equivocations of Enlightenment

The intellectual and political revolutions of the eighteenth century provided the springboard for the ‘long century of Jewish emancipation’ that followed.³ They triggered the lifting of legal barriers that restricted where Jews could live, what professions they could enter and what schools they could attend. In turn, the upshot of these legal reforms included the geographical mobility of Jews from villages and small towns to the major cities of Western and Eastern Europe – Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, London, Paris – and the social mobility of Jews from small traders and middlemen to the professions, business, arts and sciences. Bit by bit, one step forward and one back, with all manner of local and national variations, the universalism intellectually articulated in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and politically actualised in the American and French Revolutions, set in motion processes that allowed the Jews of Europe to enter the modern world. Enlightenment universalism thus prepared the way for the abolition of the old order in which Jews were designated a separate ‘nation’ within their various host societies, permitted to have their own religious and legal institutions, and yet subjected to all manner of occupational, fiscal, residential and political discriminations. The subordinate status of Jews had left most Jews in poverty, vulnerable to external persecution from the Church, state and people, and dependent internally on their own rabbinical and financial elites. The Enlightenment project was to bring this old order to an end and integrate Jews into society as autonomous human beings of a certain faith or indeed of no faith at all.⁴

This was the emancipatory face of Enlightenment universalism. Its repressive face was to prepare the grounds for the long gestation of modern antisemitism that occurred in the nineteenth century. Universalism was wielded as a stick with which to beat Jews by the simple device of representing Jews as the enemy of universalism. In the Enlightenment, these two faces of universalism, that of Jewish emancipation and that of the so-called ‘Jewish question’, were bound tightly together.

In a perceptive essay on Enlightenment and the Jewish Question (1932), Hannah Arendt caught very well the ambiguities of Enlightenment universalism as far as relations to Jews were concerned. She observed that even ‘our great friend Dohm’ – she was referring to Christian von Dohm whom she described as the ‘outstanding advocate’ of Jewish emancipation in Prussia – put forward an idea of emancipation that was ‘the source of a great deal of mischief’.⁵ To illustrate what kind of ‘mischief’ Arendt had in mind, she quoted a passage from Dohm's 1781 text on The Civic Improvement of Jews:

It would be better if the Jews, along with their prejudices, did not exist – but since they do exist, do we really still have a choice from among the following: to wipe them off the face of the earth; … or to let them remain in perpetuity the same unwholesome members of society they have been thus far; or to make them better citizens of the world.⁶

Dohm opted not to wipe the Jews ‘off the face of the earth’ or to leave them the ‘same unwholesome members of society’ but for the third option: to ‘make them better citizens of the world’. The ‘mischief’ Arendt identified was that ‘from the start the Jew became the Jew’ – an abstraction removed from the lives of actual Jews. The superficially innocent use of the definite article in statements about ‘the Jews’ turned out to be not so innocent at all.⁷ The use of the phrase ‘the Jews’, as in ‘the Jews killed Christ’, has a quite different connotation from a sentence without the definite article, as in ‘Jews were involved in killing Christ’, which no longer attributes to the category of ‘the Jews’ guilt for this action even if it recognises that some Jews were involved. In the use of the definite article what is at issue is the abstraction of ‘the Jews’ as a homogeneous collectivity or a collectivity with an essential nature even if individual Jews could be treated as ‘exceptions’. Arendt read Dohm's text as the product of a liberal, reforming consciousness prepared to wager that ‘even the Jew is a human being – the most improbable thing of all’, and prepared to treat the emancipation of Jews as a ‘test case for human rights’ in the sense of testing whether even the Jews could be improved by a regime of equal citizenship. Arendt maintained that this way of thinking about Jewish emancipation was common in the Enlightenment and destined to turn ‘advantage into disadvantage when economic assimilation … turned an oppressed and persecuted people into bankers, merchants and academics’. She wrote:

Friends became foes once they were forced to observe that living Jews were not universally oppressed … the heirs of the Enlightenment, who had insisted on emancipating the Jews along with the rest of humanity, … now accused the Jews of turning emancipation into a privilege they demanded for themselves and not for all oppressed peoples … former friends finally became antisemites themselves.⁸

We might add that when ‘the Jews’ were later presented within the antisemitic imagination as still more harmful after emancipation than they had been before, this was taken as proof that the corruption of Jews was not the result of the oppressive conditions to which Jews were subjected but of the unchanging nature of the Jews themselves. Arendt observed that the idea of a ‘solution to the Jewish question’, which the Enlightenment deployed in support of political emancipation, was to become the conceptual ground on which modern antisemitism was built. As she put it, ‘The classic form in which the Jewish question was posed in the Enlightenment provides classic antisemitism its theoretical basis’.⁹ Even in Dohm, the champion of Jewish emancipation, the assumption was that there was a ‘Jewish question’ and that Jewish emancipation could only be justified in terms of ‘solving’ it.

If we consider more closely Dohm's essay Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews (Über die Bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden), we find a powerful argument for the political emancipation of Jews posed in terms of solving the Jewish question.¹⁰ As Dohm saw it, the role of government was to ‘mitigate the mutually exclusive principles’ of the various groups, religions and classes that constitute society, ‘so that all the single notes are dissolved in the great harmony of the state’. He maintained that the basis of good government was for members of different social groups, religions and classes to ‘consider their separateness as secondary and their role as citizen primary’. Following this line of argument, Dohm wrote that ‘if actually in the faith of today's Jews there should be some principles which would restrict them too strongly to their special group and exclude them from the other groups of the great civil society’, the answer was not to persecute them further, which would ‘only serve to confirm them in their opinions’, but to improve their status.

Dohm acknowledged the force of the old accusations laid against the corruption of the Jews: they entertained ‘such bitter hatred of all who do not belong to their tribe’ that they were unable to look at them ‘as members of a common civil society with equal rights’; they manifested such ‘lack of fairness and honesty in … commerce’ and acted in ways so ‘harmful to the welfare of the rest of the citizens’ as to render it ‘justified to issue restrictive laws against this nation’; they showed ‘exaggerated love … for every kind of profit, usury and crooked practice’ as well as ‘antipathy against other religions’. Dohm did not deny the corruption of the Jews, only the conclusions drawn from it. His response was to point out the error in the reasoning of those opposed to Jewish emancipation: ‘one states as cause what in reality is the effect’. Dohm explained Jewish corruption in terms of ‘the hard and oppressive conditions under which the Jews live almost everywhere’ and held that it was ‘very natural that these conditions cause the spirit of the Jew to lose the habit of noble feelings … to debase him in his activities … to choke every sense of honour in his heart’. He argued that ‘everything the Jews are blamed for is caused by the political conditions under which they now live’ and that ‘any group of men, under such conditions, would be guilty of identical errors’. He put it in material terms: ‘every kind of occupation and trade has some special effects on the way of thinking and the moral character’ of those who practice it. Concerning Jews who ‘had been forced for many centuries now to live on commerce exclusively’, he concluded:

Is it surprising that the spirit of this occupation became entirely their spirit … ? Love of profit must be much more vivid in the Jews because it is the sole means of survival for them … If this reasoning is correct, then we have found in the oppression and in the restricted occupation of the Jews the true source of their corruption. Then we have discovered also at the same time the means of healing this corruption and of making the Jews better men and useful citizens.

Dohm's Enlightenment credo was that improvement in the civil status of Jews would improve the Jews:

The Jew is even more a man than a Jew, and how would it be possible for him not to love a s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: universalism and the Jewish question
• 1 Struggles within Enlightenment: Jewish emancipation and the Jewish question
• 2 Marx’s defence of Jewish emancipation and critique of the Jewish question
• 3 Antisemitism, critical theory and the ambivalences of Marxism
• 4 Political life in an antisemitic world: Hannah Arendt’s Jewish writings
• 5 The Jewish question after the Holocaust: Jürgen Habermas and the European left
• 6 The return of the Jewish question and the double life of Israel
• Index