History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Marx was not merely a Jewish thinker, he was also an anti-Jewish thinker. Therein lies the paradox, which has a tragically important bearing both on the history of Marxist development and on its consummation in the Soviet Union and its progeny. The roots of Marx’s anti-Semitism went deep. We have already seen the part anti-Jewish polemic played in the works of enlightenment writers like Voltaire.

Marx’s personal anti-Semitism, however disagreeable in itself, might have played no greater part in his lifework than it did in Heine’s, had it not been part of a systematic and theoretical anti-Semitism in which Marx, quite unlike Heine, profoundly believed. In fact it is true to say that Marx’s theory of communism was the end-product of his theoretical anti-Semitism.

Marx accepted completely the savagely anti-Semitic context of Bauer’s argument, which he said was written ‘with boldness, perception, wit and thoroughness in language that is as precise as it is vigorous and meaningful’. He quoted with approval Bauer’s maliciously exaggerated assertion that ‘the Jew determines the fate of the whole [Austrian] empire by his money power . . . [and] decides the destiny of Europe’. Where he differed was in rejecting Bauer’s belief that the anti-social nature of the Jew was religious in origin and could be remedied by tearing the Jew away from his religion. In Marx’s view, the evil was social and economic.

Marx’s solution, therefore, is not like Bauer’s, religious, but economic. The money-Jew had become the ‘universal anti-social element of the present time’. To ‘make the Jew impossible’ it was necessary to abolish the ‘preconditions’ and the ‘very possibility’ of the kind of money activities for which he was notorious. Once the economic framework was changed, Jewish ‘religious consciousness would evaporate like some insipid vapour in the real, life-giving air of society’. Abolish the Jewish attitude to money, and both the Jew and his religion, and the corrupt version of Christianity he had imposed on the world, would simply disappear:

But whereas originally it was based on the oldest form of conspiracy-theory, anti-Semitism, in the late 1840s and 1850s this was not so much abandoned as extended to embrace a world conspiracy theory of the entire bourgeois class. Marx retained the original superstition that the making of money through trade and finance is essentially a parasitical and anti-social activity, but he now placed it on a basis not of race and religion, but of class. The enlargement does not, of course, improve the validity of the theory. It merely makes it more dangerous, if put into practice, because it expands its scope and multiplies the number of those to be treated as conspirators and so victims. Marx was no longer concerned with specific Jewish witches to be hunted but with generalized human witches. The theory remained irrational but acquired a more sophisticated appearance, making it highly attractive to educated radicals.

‘The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews.’

That Marx should quote this brutal exhortation to kill from an anti-Semitic writer, in a work purporting to be scientific, is suggestive both of Marx’s own violence and of the emotional irrationality which expressed it, first as anti-Semitism and then as economic theory.

Most of the ‘missing rabbis’ seemed to have become radicals, and turned on their Judaism and Jewishness with contempt and anger. They turned on their parents’ class too, for a high proportion came from wealthy homes. Marx’s father had been a lawyer, Lassalle’s a silk merchant; Victor Adler, the pioneer Austrian Social Democrat, was the son of a real-estate speculator, Otto Bauer, the Austrian Socialist leader, of a textile magnate,

There were four principal reasons why Jews, once they began to take part in general politics, moved overwhelmingly first to the liberal and then to the left end of the spectrum. In the first place there was the Biblical tradition of social criticism, what might be termed the Amos Syndrome. From the earliest times there had always been articulate Jews determined to expose the injustices of society, to voice the bitterness and needs of the poor, and to call on authority to make redress.

Jews who became socialists in the nineteenth century and who attacked the unequal distribution of wealth produced by liberal, laissez-faire capitalism were expressing in contemporary language Jewish principles which were 3,000 years old and which had become part of the instincts of the people.

Jewish marriages remained more stable. Jews lived longer. A survey of Frankfurt in 1855, for instance, shows Jewish lifespans averaged forty-eight years nine months, non-Jews thirty-six years eleven months.

As a result, during the period of most rapid growth, 1880–1914, the number of Jews increased by an average of 2 per cent a year, well above the European mean, raising the total number of Jews from 7.5 million to over thirteen million. These ‘new’ Jews were overwhelmingly Ashkenazis, concentrated in big cities.

In short, Jewish demography reflected, but in an exaggerated form, both the European population revolution and its urbanization.

It was in Tsarist Russia, however, that ill-treatment of the Jews was most systematic and embittering. Indeed the Tsarist regime epitomized for radicals everywhere the most evil and entrenched aspects of autocracy.

Despite all the restrictions, some Jews continued to prosper. Discrimination was purely religious and by getting themselves baptized Jews could evade it completely, at any rate in theory. In

Russia was the only country in Europe, at this time, where anti-Semitism was the official policy of the government. It took innumerable forms, from organizing pogroms to forging and publishing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Hence from 1881, this vicious, mounting and cumulatively overwhelming pressure on Russian Jewry produced the inevitable consequence – a panic flight of Jews from Russia westwards. Thus 1881 was the most important year in Jewish history since 1648, indeed since the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Its consequences were so wide, and fundamental, that it must be judged a key year in world history too.

Of these emigrants, more than two million went to the United States alone, and the most obvious and visible consequence, therefore, was the creation of a mass American urban Jewry. This was a completely new phenomenon, which in time changed the whole balance of Jewish power and influence in the world, and it came quite suddenly. The original Jewish settlement in America was small and slow to expand. As late as 1820 there were only about 4,000 Jews in the United States, and only seven of the original thirteen states recognized them politically. The slow growth of the community is hard to understand.

Jewish arrivals, overwhelmingly German-speaking, from Bavaria, north Germany and German–Jewish parts of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, were poor, orderly, hard-working; many began as pedlars, then graduated to keeping shops or founding small businesses.

The Pittsburg Platform (1885), drawn up by Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, which rejected all Torah laws ‘such as are not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization’, became the standard creed of Reform Judaism until 1937. It rejected the old rules on diet, purity and dress, asserted that Jews were ‘no longer a nation, but a religious community’, denied the resurrection, heaven and hell, dismissed a return to Zion, and presented messianism as the struggle for truth, justice and righteousness in modern society – in which it would participate alongside other religions and people of goodwill generally.

Benjamin Bloomingdale from Bavaria,

With 1,640,000 Jews (1920), New York was easily the biggest Jewish (and Yiddish) city on earth. In 1880, American Jewry was just over a quarter of a million out of a nation of fifty million; forty years later, in a nation of 115 million, it had jumped to 4.5 million, an eighteen-fold increase.

By 1910 the spread of varieties of American Judaism was enormous. The wealthier Reform synagogues had preachers in Anglican-style robes, English services, mixed seating, choirs and organs.

Of course Zionism was not new. It was as old as the Babylonian exile. Had not the psalmist sung: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion’?128 For more than a millennium and a half, every Jewish generation, in every Jewish community, had contained one or two who dreamed of Zion. Some had fulfilled the dream personally by going there: to Tiberias, to Safed, to Zion itself. Others had thought to found little congregations or colonies. All of these, however, had been religious Zionists. In one way or another they hoped to precipitate the messianic action.

Jews had periodically drifted to Palestine in small numbers. But not even Alkalai had actually set up a colony. Yet without an initial process of colonization, how could a new Zion, religious or secular or both, emerge? Once Jews thought of colonization, they tended to turn to Britain. She was the great colonizing power of the nineteenth century. She was well on her way to acquiring a quarter of the earth’s surface. Moreover, Britain was peculiarly receptive to Jewish idealism, especially of the Zionist variety. As we have seen, her great Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, had actively supported a modest resettlement of Palestine. Her great Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, had looked even further. His novel Alroy describes its hero’s quest to restore Jerusalem to the Jews.

‘We were ready to die for Dreyfus,’ wrote Charles Péguy angrily, ‘but Dreyfus himself is not.’160 Why should he? He seems to have realized, along with many older Jews, that the pursuit of the case à l’outrance was increasing, solidifying and would end by institutionalizing anti-Semitism in France. According to Léon Daudet, he used to say to the fanatics on his side: ‘I’ve never had a moment’s peace since leaving Devil’s Island,’ or ‘Shut up, all of you, or I’ll confess.’161 He even remarked, with heavy Jewish irony: ‘There’s no smoke without fire, you know.’ But the new power of the written word in alliance with the radical left was now out of control. It pushed on for revenge and total victory. It got both. The Assumptionists were kicked out of France. The left won an overwhelming electoral success in 1906. Dreyfus was rehabilitated and made a general. Picquart ended up Minister for War. The state, now in Dreyfusard hands, waged a destructive campaign against the church. So the extremists won, both in creating the affair and in winning it.162 But there was a price to pay, and in the end it was the Jews who paid it. Anti-Semitism was institutionalized. Charles Maurras’s League went on to become, after the 1914–18 war, a pro-fascist, anti-Semitic movement which formed the most vicious element in the Vichy regime, 1941–4, and helped to send hundreds of thousands of French Jews, native and refugee, to their deaths, as we shall see. The victory of the Dreyfusards established i...

the demonstration of Jewish intellectual power which the affair provided, the ease with which Jewish writers now strode the French intellectual scene, the fact that nine-tenths of the vast literature which accumulated around the affair was Dreyfusard, all this disturbed Frenchmen who in general sympathized with the Jewish point of view.

In fact, concern at the resistance the Jews were building up against themselves by their massive and highly successful entrance into European culture was the force edging Herzl towards Zionism even before he watched Dreyfus degraded on that bitter January morning in 1895. For in Vienna, his home city, the Jewish ‘invasion’ of local culture was even more impressive than in France, and far more bitterly resented.

In the nineteenth century, German hatred of the Jews acquired a völkisch basis. It started with the nationalist rising against Napoleon. Its first significant event was a mass meeting of the German Burschenschaften (fraternity movement) at the Wartburg Castle in 1817 to burn ‘foreign’ books said to be ‘poisoning the Volk culture’.170 This ideology, which slowly became predominant in Germany and Austria during the nineteenth century, drew a crucial distinction between ‘culture’ (benign, organic, natural) and ‘civilization’ (corrupt, artificial, sterile). Every culture had a soul; and the soul was determined by the local landscape. German culture, then, was in perpetual enmity with civilization, which was cosmopolitan and alien. Who represented the civilization principle? Why, the one race which had no country, no landscape, no culture of their own: the Jews! The argument was typical of those which caught the Jews whatever they did. If they clung to ghetto Judaism, they were alien for that reason; if they secularized and ‘enlightened’ themselves, they became part of alien civilization.

It included the scientists and pseudo-scientists who misapplied Charles Darwin’s work and created ‘social Darwinism’, in which races struggled with each other to determine the ‘survival of the fittest’; Alfred Krupp sponsored an essay prize on the application of social Darwinism to state policy, winning entries advocating stern policies to preserve the Volk, such as sending Jews and other ‘degenerate’ types to the front as cannon-fodder. It included a new element of German neo-paganism. Thus Paul de Lagarde rejected Christianity, which had been corruptly invented by the Jew, St Paul, and wished it replaced by a specifically German Volk religion, which would conduct a crusade to drive the Jews, with their international materialist conspiracy, from the sacred German soil: he predicted a German–Jew armageddon. Then, too, the circle which gathered round Richard Wagner, which dominated much of the German musical scene from the 1870s, absorbed the race teachings of Gobineau and, later, of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and drew a powerful artistic contrast between the ‘purity’ of German–pagan folk culture and the Judaic-infected corruption of the cosmopolitan idea. The violence with which these views were presented was horrifying. De Lagarde, whose original name was Bötticher, demanded a physical campaign against Jewish ‘vermin’: ‘with trichinae and bacilli one does not negotiate, nor are trichinae and bacilli subject to education. They are exterminated as quickly and as thoroughl...

In 1879 the Hamburg anarchist pamphleteer Wilhelm Marr introduced the term ‘anti-Semitism’ into the political vocabulary by founding the Anti-Semitic League.

Even anti-Semites could be useful, because they would often help to set up a Zionist project simply to get rid of ‘their’ Jews. Wenzel von Plehve, the viciously hostile Russian Interior Minister, responsible for organizing pogroms, told him: ‘You are preaching to a convert . . . we would very much like to see the creation of an independent Jewish state capable of absorbing several million Jews. Of course we would not like to lose all our Jews. We should like to keep the very intelligent ones, those of which you, Dr Herzl, are the best example. But we should like to rid ourselves of the weak-minded and those with little property.’184 The Kaiser, too, supported another Exodus: ‘I am all in favour of the kikes going to Palestine. The sooner they take off the better.’

By that time Herzl was dead, aged forty-four. His was a personal tale of exceptional pathos. His heroic efforts over ten crowded years destroyed his body. They killed his marriage too. His family legacy was pitiful. His wife Julia survived him only three years. His daughter Pauline became a heroin addict and died in 1930 of an overdose. His son Hans, under treatment by Freud, committed suicide a little later. His other daughter Trude was starved to death in a Nazi camp, and her son Stephan too killed himself in 1946, wiping out the family. Yet Zionism was his progeny. He told Stefan Zweig in his last months, ‘It was my mistake I began too late . . . . If you knew how I suffer at the thought of the lost years.’187 In fact by the time Herzl died, Zionism was a solidly established movement, with a powerful friend in Britain. By starting it in 1895 he gave Zionism a lead of nearly twenty years over its Arab nationalist equivalent, and that was to prove absolutely decisive in the event.

The founders of Zionism, for the most part, were not merely Westerners, they were (in the eyes of the Orthodox) atheists. When Herzl and Nordau went together to the Sabbath service on the eve of the First Zionist Congress, it was the first time either had done so since childhood – they had to be coached about the benedictions.188 The Orthodox knew all this. Most of them saw secular Zionism as open to all the objections raised against the enlightenment plus the mighty additional one that it was a blasphemous perversion of one of the central and most sacred Judaic beliefs. The notion that religious and secular Zionism were two heads of the same coin is quite false. To religious Jews the return to Zion was a stage in the divine plan to use the Jews as a pilot-scheme for all humanity. It had nothing to do with Zionism, which was the solution of a human problem (Jewish unacceptability and homelessness) by human means (the creation of a secular state).

The Orthodox argued that Satan, having despaired of seducing Israel by persecution, had been given permission to try it by even more subtle methods, involving the Holy Land in his wicked and idolatrous scheme, as well as all the evils of the enlightenment. Zionism was thus infinitely worse than a false messiah – it was an entire false, Satanic religion. Others added that the secular state would conjure up the godless spirit of the demos and was contrary to God’s command to Moses to follow the path of oligarchy:

This wide, though by no means universal, opposition of pious Jews to the Zionist programme inevitably tended to push it more firmly into the hands of the secular radicals.

The truth is that, despite Germany’s long tradition of vicious anti-Jewish feeling – despite, as it were, the Judensau–Jews felt at home in Germany. It was a society which honoured and revered its professoriat, and in some respects its values were those of the Jewish cathedocracy. A Jew could slip naturally from a yeshivah into one of Germany’s universities, now in their golden period of effort and achievement. He relished the opportunities which slowly opened to him in a country where intellectual achievement was justly measured and treated with awesome respect. German Jews worked fanatically hard. They soon began to carry off the new Nobel prizes: two in physiology and medicine, four in chemistry, two in physics, all for work done before the First World War.193 Ferdinand Julius Cohn founded bacteriology. Paul Ehrlich produced the first practical form of chemotherapy. Franz Boas founded the science of cultural anthropology. German Jews were workaholics, hurrying men. Eduard Devrient wrote of his friend Felix Mendelssohn: ‘The habit of constant occupation, instilled by his mother, made rest intolerable to him’; he kept looking at his watch.194 Gustav Mahler used to run from his apartment to his office at the Opera House in Vienna; on his return, to save time, he would announce his arrival by whistling the opening bars of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, as a signal for lunch to be served. But it was not merely intellectual habits Jews shared with the Germans: there was intelle...

Freud ran his large household in patriarchal fashion. Neither Marx nor Freud applied his theories to his home and family.

Not that Freud was a believer, let alone a believer in Torah. He considered all religion to be a form of collective delusion and all his work tended to show that religious (and other) beliefs were wholly man-made.

If Freudianism, like Marxism, is a system of superstition in some ways, if it suffers from the same osmotic quality as Nathan of Gaza’s messianic kabbalah – an ability to accommodate inconvenient facts as they emerge – that is not surprising, because it comes from the same background: western science is more a veneer than a substance.

The new creed was Jewish in two more important ways. Its Torah, its essential documents, were Freud’s own writings and cases, and they, like the Bible, were the apotheosis of the short story. The skill in illustrating a thesis by a tale had been a characteristic of the sages which had re-emerged in hasidism.

Secondly, Freudianism was a creed spread and practised primarily by Jews.

But Josef Breuer, Freud’s John the Baptist – in so far as he had one227 – was a Jew, and so were all the original psychoanalysts. The significance of Jung to Freud was that he was the first important gentile follower he had been able to attract.

he never tolerated serious opposition to himself within it. Alfred Adler (1870–1937), one of the first and most brilliant of its members, was treated – once he ventured to disagree – not as a critical colleague but as a heresiarch or, in a term the Marxists would popularize, as a ‘defector’. As Graf put it, ‘It was a trial and the charge was heresy. . . . Freud, as the head of a church, banished Adler; he rejected him from the official church. Within the space of a few years, I lived through the whole development of a church history.’ Thereafter the herem was often in use, notably in the case of Jung, the greatest heresiarch of all. The break with Jung was especially bitter because, as Jones put it, he was to have been ‘the Joshua to Freud’s Moses’. His ‘face beamed whenever he spoke of Jung: “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” ’ ‘When the empire I have founded is orphaned’, he wrote, ‘no one but Jung must inherit the whole thing.’230 The detection and expulsion of heretics was attended by odium theologicum. As Sachs said, Freud was ‘hard and sharp as steel, a good hater’.

Freud had the intolerance of an Ezra and the characteristic faults of the cathedocracy, he also had some of its heroic virtues: dauntless courage in the defence of what he saw as the truth; passionate industry in pursuit of it, right to the end of a life marked by unremitting labour; a saintly death, after a slow cancer for which he refused morphia: ‘I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly.’233 Arthur Koestler, who saw him at the end, found a ‘small and fragile’ sage, with ‘the indestructible vitality of a Hebrew patriarch’.234 Freud was in the irrationalist Jewish tradition, more of a Nahmanides or a Besht than a Maimonides. But, perhaps because of this, he became a central pillar of the twentieth-century intellectual structure, itself a largely irrational edifice. To vary the metaphor, he gave humanity a new mirror, and no man has ever changed so radically and irreversibly the way in which people see themselves; or indeed talk about themselves, for he changed the vocabulary of introspection too.

If Freud transformed the way we see ourselves, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) changed the way we see the universe.

Einstein never seems to have been a practising Jew in the ordinary sense. In this he resembled Freud. But unlike Freud he did not dismiss belief in God as an illusion; he sought, rather, to redefine it. Intellectually, he was wholly in the Jewish–rationalist tradition of Maimonides and Spinoza. He was an empirical scientist of the most rigorous kind, formulating his theories specifically to make exact verification possible, and insisting it take place before according his views any validity – almost the exact opposite of Freud’s dogmatics. But he was prepared to admit the existence of non-verifiable truth. In this respect too he was more honest than Freud. Freud denied mystic truth while remaining, essentially, a mystic himself; Einstein remained a rationalist, while admitting a mystic sphere.

The conjunction of Einstein and Freud, at least in the popular perception, struck a devastating blow at the absolute certainties of Judaeo-Christian ethics, in which Einstein, at any rate, profoundly believed.

The mortal enemy of the Jews was Tsarist Russia, which the German army was now trying to tear to pieces. In London’s East End, Jews were reluctant to volunteer to fight the Germans for this very reason. Everyone associated Jewish cultural leadership with Germany. Except for the pacifists of the far left, all the leading German-speaking Jewish intellectuals, led by Max Liebermann, signed a petition supporting Germany’s war aims – Einstein was almost the only one who refused.

Even in the Jewish settlements in Palestine, German tended to be the lingua franca. Many of the settlers wanted German, rather than Hebrew, to be the language of instruction in Jewish schools. It was accepted, without debate, as the official language of Zionist congresses. The Zionist office in Berlin saw itself as the headquarters of the world movement, and its members were calling for a German protectorate over the Jews, as well as over Islam. Many believed it was the big Jewish community of Salonika which had helped to push Turkey into the war on Germany’s side.