No masters but God

Portraits of anarcho-Judaism

Hayyim Rothman, Uri Gordon

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526149022
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Anarchism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The forgotten legacy of religious Jewish anarchism, and the adventures and ideas of its key figures, finally comes to light in this book. Set in the decades surrounding both world wars, No masters but God identifies a loosely connected group of rabbis and traditionalist thinkers who explicitly appealed to anarchist ideas in articulating the meaning of the Torah, traditional practice, Jewish life and the mission of modern Jewry. Full of archival discoveries and first translations from Yiddish and Hebrew, it explores anarcho-Judaism in its variety through the works of Yaakov Meir Zalkind, Yitshak Nahman Steinberg, Yehudah Leyb Don-Yahiya, Avraham Yehudah Heyn, Natan Hofshi, Shmuel Alexandrov, Yehudah Ashlag and Aaron Shmuel Tamaret. With this ground-breaking account, Hayyim Rothman traces a complicated story about the modern entanglement of religion and anarchism, pacifism and Zionism, prophetic anti-authoritarianism and mystical antinomianism.

1
An anarchist minyan

A King who tells the sea: ‘until here and no further!’

He shall rule as King!

A king who comes from a putrid drop

and ends up in the grave,

why should he rule as king?

(Eleazar Kallir)

In one of his lesser-known autobiographical vignettes, Tate Vert an Anarkhist (Daddy Becomes an Anarchist), Isaac Bashevis Singer recounts how, with ‘blue eyes and fiery red beard glowing,’ his father returned one day from Warsaw's Radzyminer shtibl (small synagogue) with news of a group ‘whose members call themselves anarchists.’ He recalls how till late into the night his father described ‘the happy times to come, when there would be no need for money and everyone would work and study Torah,’ concluding that though ‘Jews long for the messiah … while we're in exile, it would be quite a good thing.’ Yet, he reports, his father's ardor waned once he heard ‘that their entire philosophy was incompatible with Judaism (Bashevis Singer 2000, 193–200).’ Rabbi Singer's career as a religious anarchist was thus aborted before it began.

One wonders, however, what might have been had the impressionable Rabbi not rushed home but, after leaving the shtibl on Franciszkanska Street and crossing through Krasinski Garden on the way to Krochmalna Street, instead tarried at the Jewish library next to the Great Synagogue. If we consider the Warsaw of Eliezer Hirschauge's memory, he may have bumped into Aaron Pinhas Gross, known among the anarchist underground by his alias Der Alter (Hamburg 1977)¹ who, with a ‘thick sidur or mahzor and a talis underarm (prayer books and a ritual shawl)’ would have been making his way to synagogue ‘with a lively step (Hirschauge 1964, 53–54).’² He may have come across ‘more than a minyan,’ a prayer quorum, ‘of God seeking youth studying anarchist texts (Hirschauge 1964, 27–30).’ He may even have heard one of the ‘revolutionary sermons’ that were ‘more abundant than flowers’ and thus learned of the ‘religious-mystical views’ that drove others ‘to make human life more just’ and ‘the earth a bit more heavenly (Hirschauge 1964, 53–54).’ Perhaps he would have persisted in the face of skepticism; perhaps the story would have ended differently.

So far as R. Singer himself is concerned, one can do no more than wonder. But this vignette confronts us with more fruitful threads of inquiry. For one, it seems difficult to argue with the claim that dampened Singer's fervor. Classical anarchists were notoriously anti-religious and militantly atheist. Their Jewish followers, men like Joseph Boshover, characterized anarchism as ‘a world in which churches and synagogues become stables … a world of knowledge and not of faith (Boshover 1925, 94–95);’ beyond neglecting tradition, they gleefully trampled it underfoot by hosting sacrilegious ‘Yom Kippur Balls (Margolis 2004).’ Therefore, the true wonder is that Rabbi Singer could have ambled over to Tlomackie Street and encountered what Hirschauge describes: a circle not simply of Jewish, but religious Jewish anarchists. Let us ponder for a moment the significance of this marvel.

In the long arc of Jewish history, many elevated souls have strayed from the fold. In describing such individuals, Isaac Deutcher retold the story of Elisha ben Abuya, the first-century rabbi-cum-heretic later known as Aher, and his last remaining student, R. Meir. As the talmud relates, the two would study together on the Sabbath while strolling outside the city. Upon reaching the tehum, the municipal boundary, which an observant Jew will not cross on the holy day, Aher would walk on while R. Meir would turn back (Hagigah 15b). On Deutcher's reading, the master's step beyond the boundary, the limit of tradition, was an act of bravery; accordingly, he praises the ‘non-Jewish Jews’ who later followed in his footsteps — individuals like Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman. In contrast, he represents the student as a coward, as the progenitor of debased men like Uriel da Costa (Deutscher 2017), who could not bear the challenge of ostracism and accepted the humiliating terms of reacceptance presented to him by his Amsterdam coreligionists.

I see both men differently. There is a comfort in severing ties with the past and starting over with a clean slate. Likewise, there is a profound challenge in changing while yet maintaining old bonds and taking responsibility for them. If indeed there was something worthwhile across the tehum, who is more praiseworthy, the one who pursues it for himself or the one who fetches it and brings it home? I see in R. Meir someone who adopted the second alternative, someone who learned what Aher had to teach but then carried it into the beyt midrash, the study hall, enriching the tradition rather than wiping his hands of it. I aver that the minyan of which Hirschauge speaks was an example of precisely this type of courage. It was composed of individuals who, like R. Meir, ventured to the farthest extreme but somehow found a way to integrate it with their Judaism — this in spite of the sort of skepticism that discouraged R. Singer.

It is one thing to reverse our interpretation of a talmudic anecdote, to vilify the hero and heroize the villain, and quite another to substantiate that reversal. As R. Elazar once taught, one must know ‘how to respond to an apikoros (M. Avot 2:14),’ a skeptic. Simply to valorize R. Meir's return is insufficient. We must be able to explain what it meant and how he did it. By analogy, if we wish to imagine R. Singer's meeting with Mr Gross and his comrades, if we wish to imagine an alternate scenario in which tatte not only became, but also remained an anarchist, it is necessary to respond to the apikoros who told him that Judaism and anarchism are inconsistent. If not exactly the Warsaw minyan, we must imagine one like it. If not exactly their revolutionary sermons, others like them. In short, we must trace for ourselves a hermeneutic and historical path leading from the anarchist edge of the tehum back to the proverbial ‘four cubits of Jewish law (Berakhot 8a)’ — back into Jewish tradition.

The skepticism with which R. Singer was assailed is not merely a pious gesture, it also represents the prevailing scholarly orthodoxy according to which Jewish radicalism generally, and Jewish anarchism in particular, stood at the farthest distance from Jewish piety during the period in question. In many respects, this account is justified. Irving Howe, for instance, writes that while ‘public avowal of agnosticism, atheism, apostasy, and backsliding was no new phenomena’ in late nineteenth-century Jewish life, anarchists more so than other radical groups ‘went far beyond secularism or anticlericalism in the bitter extremes of their antireligious struggle (Howe 2005, 105).’ As Rebecca Margolis explains, if other groups held religion in disdain, they also tended to treat it as a private concern. In contrast, early Jewish anarchists saw religion as ‘a fundamental evil … and sought to battle it directly (Margolis 2004).’

Their animosity represented a long tradition of anarchist opposition, not only to organized religion but to theistic faith itself. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, the father of modern anarchism, wrote that ‘the first duty of man, on becoming intelligent and free, is to continually hunt the idea of God out of his mind and conscience (Proudhon 2012).’ Anarchists in later generations largely agreed. Some went so far as to assert that anarchist libertarianism stops short at the freedom of worship. As Madeleine Pelletier wrote in L’Encyclopedie Anarchiste, there is no question of ‘freedom and liberty’ where religion is concerned, ‘only war (Pelletier 1934, 2311–2315)’ — both in figurative and literal senses.³ Nevertheless, scholarship has long recognized a minority trend of religious and spiritual anarchist expression among writers, including Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, and Mohandas Gandhi. Kropotkin (1995) already noted anarchist tendencies in both Reformation Christianity and Taoism. Lately there has been booming scholarly interest in religious anarchism, with several new monographs (Rapp 2010; Wiley 2014; Christoyannopoulos 2019) and the three-volume collection Essays in Anarchism and Religion (Christoyannopoulos and Adams 2017, 2018, 2020).⁴ While the field has been dominated by Christian voices, others have also begun to make themselves heard: Muslim, Taoist, Hindu, Buddhist, and also Jewish.

The view that Jewish anarchism is inherently anti-religious has recently been challenged by appeal to historical shifts in the circumstances of European Jewry, both external and internal. Externally, as Paul Avrich (1990, 189) noted, the steep rise in antisemitic violence during the period surrounding the infamous Kishinev pogrom ‘had a sobering effect, turning more than a few Jewish anarchists back to their roots.’ At the very least, these tragedies prompted more nuanced reflection on the question of Jewish religion. Internally, Annie Polland (2007) argues that the waning of religious authority after the turn of the twentieth century created an identity crisis; a successful rebellion against tradition mean that secularism had to be redefined in positive terms; it also permitted a degree of tolerance towards religiosity that seemed impossible before. A later stage of the same phenomenon has recently been addressed in greater detail by Lillian Turk and...