The Political Theory of Judith N. Shklar

Exile from Exile

A. Hess

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137032515
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Law

Judith Shklar called for a radical shift in political theory, toward a view of the history of ideas through the lens of exile. Hess takes this lens and applies it to Shklar's own life and theoretical work.

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The Formative Years: From Riga to Montreal

Judith Nisse’s Upringing in Riga: Family Background, Childhood, and Schooling • Contemplating Emigration • Odyssey of a Refugee: From Riga to Montreal • Asylum in Canada and Conditions on Arrival • Montreal: Protestant School for Girls and Entering University • Rousseau at McGill

Judith Nisse’s Upringing in Riga: Family Background, Childhood, and Schooling

Judith Shklar (born Nisse) remembered Riga, the city of her childhood, as being home to a number of different communities, most predominantly Germans, Russians, indigenous Latvians and Jews.¹ A fragile and somewhat tense relationship existed between the various communities, not least because of their highly stratified nature and the extreme poverty that existed in the city. The Jewish community, to which the Nisse family belonged, was itself pluralistic. One could encounter poor Yiddish-speaking Jews, German-speaking Jews who had become part of the professional, mercantile or industrial class (like the Nisse family), and assimilated Russian-speaking Jews who had moved to Riga after the Russian Revolution.

On both the paternal and maternal side of Judith’s family there was only formal, superficial adherence to religious traditions, rituals and festivities. The children, including the young Judith, learned Hebrew, but only its modern variant. On the paternal side the grandfather had been a Russian and Yiddish-speaking land-owning farmer who eventually married a woman from Riga. Judith would never get to know this side of the family well. As to the maternal side, her grandfather had amassed wealth and real estate and appeared to have been one of the richest men in Riga, a condition which lasted until the Revolution and the War of Independence. This grandfather eventually married a German-speaking, educated woman who would become very active in the charitable life of the Jewish community.

While politically conservative, the wealthy grandfather actively supported the idea of higher education for his two daughters and two sons. The two sisters were sent to Switzerland. One of them, later to become Judith’s mother, studied for a medical degree while the other sister received a doctorate in chemistry. The two sons turned out to be very different. While the elder son became a bon-vivant, living off the family fortune and marrying “out,” the younger brother studied engineering in St. Petersburg.² To complete this side of the family’s history, Judith’s mother would eventually marry her brother’s best friend, a frequent visitor to the household.

The social life of the Jewish community was extremely diverse and there was a certainly a richness of culture. While the Nisse family participated in charitable activities and organizations, it did so not out of deeply held religious convictions. On the contrary, Judith’s mother was very anti-religious. This meant that for the offspring, including the young Judith, no traditional Jewish education was pursued. Rather, modern French-style education was favored.

Despite the protected family environment and the wealthy and learned upbringing of the young Judith, all was not well in Riga. In Latvia, anti-semitism had mainly rural origins, yet, from the end of the nineteenth century it had also penetrated the city of Riga. Class and status mediated such anti-semitism and affected the Jewish community according to status and wealth. The richer Jewish families did not suffer direct humiliation and regarded the phenomenon often as something one just had to live with. But persistent anti-semitism could not be simply explained and wished away or be somehow “relegated” to the subconscious. One was constantly reminded that one was never fully accepted. Looking back, Judith Shklar suspected that such prejudice and, on occasion, open hostility probably affected her generation more than her parents. Coming from an assimilated German-speaking environment, her mother had experienced anti-semitism mainly as a Russian phenomenon. Judith’s father, having grown up in a Latvian and Russian-speaking environment, had already been long acquainted with the locals and their prejudices. Despite their different experiences, anti-semitism had not become something direct or personal. In contrast, for a younger generation and also for the young Judith it was something that could be encountered everywhere; in Shklar’s words it progressed from “passively nasty to violent” (Walzer, [1981] 1988, Session I, Part I, 5 of transcript). Shklar further recalls that by the time modern Latvia had established its first government under a liberal and forward-thinking banner it soon became obvious that it was hopeless to aspire to liberal ideals and the development of a Western-style democracy under backward conditions. To the disappointment of many in the Jewish community, the government leaders, who came from an urban environment and were regarded as well-educated, remained passive in the fight against prejudice.

The Nisse family was directly affected by World War One and the Revolution which followed. The father’s Jewish background had limited the chances of being officially promoted to higher rank in the Russian Army. He was put in charge of a special unit that consisted of intellectuals and poets whom he had to teach to drive. Family legend has it that the famous writers Mayakowski and Pasternak learned to drive from him. However, the war and the Revolution which followed ended less well for Judith’s father. His bourgeois class background aroused the suspicion of the revolutionaries and he was eventually arrested and jailed.

In the meantime Judith’s mother had returned from Switzerland with a medical degree from the University of Lausanne. On arrival she was immediately asked to put her qualifications to some use at the front. Her stay there did not last very long; after becoming pregnant she was soon reassigned to a pediatric clinic in Moscow where she had to attend mainly to children of the communist party elite. This Moscow experience made Judith’s mother suspicious of revolutionary ideals, although she did hold egalitarian and socialist beliefs.

Despite these difficulties the couple eventually managed to come together again. With the help of his cousin and his good connections Judith’s father was released from jail. After a waiting period of a few more months, the family, now including their first child—Judith’s older sister—was able to leave Moscow for Riga. After the treatment received in Moscow it should not come as a surprise that the Nisse family never became admirers of the Russian Revolution.

Contemplating Emigration

We know from Shklar’s own account that because of the threats of increasingly open anti-semitism and because of the precarious political situation in Latvia and the new country’s problematic relations vis-à-vis Russia, her father at one point considered the possibility of moving to Palestine. As in many other Jewish families—assimilated or not—the collective Jewish memory of exile was always present; however, the more traditional Jewish understanding of exile with its religious vocabulary did not seem to apply to the Nisse family. The idea of Mosaic Law, namely that exile was temporary, and that the Jewish community had been forced to stay outside the homeland (Israel), or even the metaphysical idea that exile (that is, anywhere outside of Palestine-Israel) had been part of a divine plan, including the experience of suffering on foreign soil, would have seemed strange to a Jewish family like the Nisses. Similarly, the more radical Zionist conviction that there was no future in countries where Jews had actually been living for centuries, was somewhat at odds and in contrast with other popular views and political positions such as those of the Bund, which paid attention to the peculiar present conditions of the Jewish population, especially in east-central Europe, but that showed no inclination to “return” to Israel. Rather, so many reform-minded Jews believed, conditions had to change in the countries where Jews had been living for hundreds of years. In particular any racial notions that saw a direct connection between modern Jews and those who left after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple were anathema to secular families like the Nisses. While it is true that Judith’s father played with the idea of emigrating to Palestine and even harbored some Zionist views, in the end he never acted on them, mainly because there seems to have been no consensus within the family.

Returning to Riga after the spell abroad, family life seemed at first daunting, interrupted only by two more arrivals: a second daughter, Judith, was born on the September 24, 1928. Another daughter followed soon after. There was little prospect of recovering the same status that the family had experienced before the Revolution. Yet, despite political hurdles, Judith’s father and his brother-in-law put every effort into starting a small business venture—and eventually they succeeded. They managed to become successful by establishing links with an oil exporting company, which had plans for expansion in the East. The brother-in-law’s engineering degree proved to be especially helpful, despite his lack of applied knowledge in petroleum engineering. Once the new job started generating steady work, he brought in Judith’s father who took care of business relations and provided legal aid. Eventually, the company became affiliated to Royal Dutch Shell. With this deal there seemed to be no limit to the partners’ potential fortunes. The two businessmen invested some of their money in other companies. One of them, Elite Chocolates, actually turned out to be so successful that even half a century later one of the inheritors, Judith Nisse Shklar, continued to be a major shareholder.

Such success did not mean that life in Riga was without problems. The omnipresence of rising anti-semitism was certainly one concern, but another was the threat of a Russian invasion. While the father dreamed of moving to Palestine, his wife was not convinced that leaving Riga was such a good idea. She remained committed to her charity work for the Jewish community. With the financial support of her husband and his business partner she had helped to set up a children’s facility, as part of an outpatient clinic in the poorer parts of Riga. The project proved to be very successful, so successful that Judith’s mother even trained a number of nurses who convinced the patients that there were real advantages in improving sanitary conditions and introducing preventative health care measures.

While Judith’s mother was engaged in the clinic, the education of the children was left to professional nannies. Until Judith turned seven, she was taken care of by a German governess. At first she would be taught at home since she didn’t like the idea of going to school. “I hated school, avoiding it as long and as often as I could, without being an actual dropout,” Shklar remembered many years later, adding also that she was very slow when it came to learning to read ([Shklar 1989] Yack 1996, 263). However, once she picked up reading, there seemed to be no stopping her. Later Shklar would recall some of those early reading experiences, which not only hint at the richness of cultural life in a German-Jewish environment in the East but also at a unique capacity to digest at an early age some of the best that classic literature had to offer: “The first book I ever read through by myself was a German translation of David Copperfield. I read it over and over again and I still love it. The second book was a children’s novel about two boys in the Thirty Years War, which led me to look it up in a wonderful illustrated world history in many volumes in my parents’ library. I was hooked for life on fiction and history.” Not all reading was as easily digestible as David Copperfield: “One day I picked up the first volume of Shakespeare in the Schlegel-Tieck translation. The first play was Titus Andronicus, and I read it all. To this day I can still feel the fear and horror it inspired. I was afraid and confused that I could not bring myself to tell anyone what was bothering me. Finally I managed to spill it out to my oldest sister. As soon as I told her, I, of course, felt infinitely relieved, especially as she assured me that these things did not really happen.” To this Shklar added, “The trouble was that both she and I knew that far worse was going on all around us” (all quotes 263).

The temporary arrangement of being taught at home came to an end after only one year. The problem of going to school was compounded by the new and unique prescriptions concerning knowledge acquisition for the young generation from an ethnic minority. The new Latvian laws demanded that each community had to have its own school. Thus, not only could Judith not be educated at home, she was also not allowed to attend the German-speaking school. Instead, she was sent to the rabbinate-controlled Ezra School, which had been set up by those German-speaking Jews who had been compelled to leave the regular German schools. Shklar vividly remembers the bizarre new arrangements. Religion was taught in modern Hebrew while the other classes were officially conducted in Latvian; but behind closed doors a different practice prevailed. In order to learn anything meaningful, such as for example mathematics, the teachers had to resort to German—it was after all the only language the pupils spoke and understood fluently and in which teaching material was available. Despite such bureaucratic hindrances, the school succeeded by following the French Lycée model and by providing a comprehensive modern education, including the teaching of classical and modern languages, literature and the sciences. As well as attending school, private education continued at home. The daughters received private tuition in English, French, Hebrew and music. On the insistence of their father, the Nisse children also joined the Maccabee movement, a Jewish reform organization that favored sports and physical education. As Shklar would recall later, the virtues of physical education were supplemented by a strict dietary regime. The idea was very much that Jews had to appear strong in a hostile environment which did not allow for weakness.

But soon the Nisse family would be shattered by tragic events. The young Judith had taken particularly to her older sister who, while the mother was absent running the clinic, had become the de facto head of the family. Like her mother, the older sister had enrolled in medical school and had spent a year in Switzerland. Her father had talked her into continuing with medical school at New York’s Columbia University, not least because of the potential availability of visiting visas for the rest of the family. The political situation in Latvia could become unstable again—and indeed all signs pointed toward the forthcoming crisis in which Latvia might lose its recently acquired and fragile sovereignty. The original plan was for a kind of collective family insurance, an “opt-out of Riga” option for emergency purposes in light of the suspected imminent Russian invasion and occupation.

Further west things didn’t look any better since the Nazis had come to power in Berlin in 1933. The Jewish community in Riga, and particularly those who spoke German like the Nisses, followed the news from Germany as events unfolded. This made sense because most German Jews were of the secularized and assimilated kind. Thus, what happened in Germany was eagerly followed by, and had an impact on, the decisions of many German-speaking Jews further east who, for the time being, had decided to stay despite the manifest anti-semitism. In general they regarded such prejudices as a historical legacy of a backward region, something that would eventually be overcome as the Baltic republics embarked on reform and began to modernize.

The patterns of German-Jewish exile and exile-seeking once Hitler came to power seem to confirm this position of somewhat hesitant and reluctant observers. In Germany the Jewish population before 1933 amounted to roughly 530,000 people. In the first year after Hitler came to power only 38,000 Jews left the country. Obviously cultural ties to Germany remained strong, despite the growing and ever-more threatening anti-semitic rhetoric. In the following years, until the Reichskristallnacht in 1938, the exodus remained below 25,000 persons per year. The number peaked in the wake of the organized pogroms of 1938. 40,000 German Jews left the same year and in 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, 80,000 left Germany. Organized arrests and deportations began to start in the same year (30,000). Jewish refugee numbers began to dwindle to 15,000 in 1940 and to 8,000 in 1941. The number of all German Jews who finally managed to emigrate amounted to 278,000. Those who remained were either deported or found themselves trapped and were later deported from the countries where they had sought refuge, such as Pre-Anschluss Austria, Czechoslovakia and later France.³

Those who were closely watching the events as they unfolded, such as the Nisse family, were of course not so naive as to try their luck in Nazi Germany or Anschluss Austria. However, with the latent threat of Russian occupation, Riga began to look more and more like a trap. As it turned out, political circumstances and the individual family fortunes of the Nisse family were at cross purposes. Most important, Judith’s elder sister had not been enthusiastic about the Columbia plan at all. In the winter of 1939, just as larger political events were unfolding after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and with the emergent Russian invasion of Latvia, tragedy struck. While Judith’s sister was taking a bath, the gas heater which was supposed to heat the water allegedly malfunctioned and she died of gas poisoning. Whether it was mechanical failure or suicide could never be properly determined.

Odyssey of a Refugee: From Riga to Montreal

The Columbia plan was now in tatters. Worse, after the tragic and premature death of the eldest daughter the entire family appeared to be shell-shocked and unable to come to a decision whether to stay or to leave. It was at this critical juncture that the father’s business partner and brother-in-law’s political instincts and common sense proved, again, to be decisive. He provided the family with tickets and arranged for them to be flown out to Sweden.⁴ The Nisses left for Sweden under very dramatic circumstances and at a fortunate historical moment, just before the Hitler-Stalin pact led to the Russian occupation of Latvia (and the German invasion of Latvia just a few months later).

Sweden itself had become a significant destination for many refugees from German-speaking countries but also for a number of families from outside those countries, like the Nisse family. Betw...