History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

The maskils were not to foresee that Hebrew would indeed make a formidable re-entry into Jewish life–but as the instrument of Zionism, a form of Judaism which was as abhorrent to them as mystic messianism.

Ironically enough, the Jewish language which made most, and entirely spontaneous, progress in the ni...

Yiddish was a rich, living language, the chattering tongue of an urban tribe. It had the limitations of its origins. There were very few Yiddish words for animals or birds. It had virtually no military vocabulary.

Its chief virtue, however, lay in its internal subtlety, particularly in its characterization of human types and emotions.

But there were many reasons why it could not fulfil its appointed destiny. Its role was riddled with paradoxes. Many rabbis saw it as the language of women, who were not clever or educated enough to study in Hebrew. The German maskils, on the other hand, linked it with Orthodoxy, because its use encouraged backwardness, superstition and irrationality.

In the Russian Pale, however, and Austrian Galicia, it was often the language of secularization.

the political radicals increasingly turned to German, then to Russian.

The non-political secularizers usually, in true maskil fashion, accorded a superior status to Hebrew.

This linguistic confusion was merely one part of a much wider cultural confusion. And this cultural confusion sprang, in turn, from a growing religious confusion among Jews themselves, which can be summed up in one sentence: was Judaism a part of life, or the whole of it?

If it was only a part, then a compromise with modernity was possible. But in that case the Jews might simply fade into the majority societies around them. If it was the whole, then they had merely replaced the ghetto of stone with the ghetto of intellect. So in that case, too, most Jews would choose to escape from the prison, and be lost to the Law for ever. All the compromises we have examined collapsed before the majestic logic of this stark choice.

Hence the central fact of the Jewish predicament in the first half of the nineteenth century was the absence of an agreed...

they did not know what they were rebelling for.

So far we have looked at only one side of the problem of emancipation: how could Jews liberated from the ghetto adjust to society? But the other side was equally important: how could society adjust to liberated Jews?

The problem was gigantic because for 1,500 years Jewish society had been designed to produce intellectuals. It is true they were sacerdotal intellectuals, in the service of the god Torah. But they had all the characteristics of the intellectual: a tendency to pursue ideas at the expense of people; endlessly sharpened critical faculties; great destructive as well as creative power. Jewish society was geared to support them.

Quite suddenly, around the year 1800, this ancient and highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals began to shift its output. Instead of pouring all its products into the closed circuit of rabbinical studies, where they remained completely isolated from general society, it unleashed a significant and ever-growing proportion of them into secular life. This was an event of shattering importance in world history.

Heinrich Heine

The point had now been established: the Jew and the German had a special intellectual relationship. The German Jew was a new phenomenon of European culture. For German anti-Semites, this posed an almost unbearable emotional problem, epitomized in Heine. They could not deny his genius; they found its expression in German intolerable. His ghostly presence, right at the centre of German literature, drove the Nazis to incoherent rage and childish vandalism.

From emancipation onwards, the Jews were blamed both for seeking to ingratiate themselves with established society, enter it and dominate it; and, at the same time, for trying to destroy it utterly. Both charges had an element of truth.

Heine himself was both the prototype and the archetype of a new figure in European literature: the Jewish radical man of letters, using his skill, reputation and popularity to undermine the intellectual self-confidence of established order.

Karl Marx,

his sense of history as a positive and dynamic force in human society, governed by iron laws, an atheist’s Torah, is profoundly Jewish.

His Communist millennium is deeply rooted in Jewish apocalyptic and messianism. His notion of rule was that of the cathedocrat. Control of the revolution would be in the hands of the elite intelligentsia, who had studied the texts, understood the laws of history. They would form what he called the ‘management’, the directorate. The proletariat, ‘the men without substance’, were merely the means, whose duty was to obey–like Ezra the Scribe, he saw them as ignorant of the law, the mere ‘people of the land’.

Marx’s methodology, too, was wholly rabbinical. All his conclusions were der...

Like the gaon of Vilna, he locked himself up with his texts and solved the mysteries of ...

He called his work ‘scientific’ but it was no more scientific than theology. His temperament was religious, and he was quite incapable of conducting objective, empirical research. He simply went through any likely material to furnish ‘proof’ of conclusions he had already reached in his head, and which were as dogmatic as any rabbi’s or kabbalist’s.

Stripped of its spurious documentation, Marx’s theory of how history, class and production operate, and will develop, is not essentially different from Lurianic kabbalah’s theory of the Messianic Age, especially as amended by Nathan of Gaza, to the point where it can accommodate any awkward facts whatever.

he prophesied the Messiah-revolution all the same: in 1849, in August 1850, in 1851, in 1852, ‘between November 1852 and February 1853’, in 1854, in 1857, in 1858, in 1859.83 His later work, like Nathan of Gaza’s, was to a great extent an explanation for the non-arrival.

Marx was not merely a Jewish thinker, he was also an anti-Jewish thinker.

anti-Jewish polemic played in the works of enlightenment writers like Voltaire. This tradition passed into two streams. One was the German ‘idealist’ stream, going through Goethe, Fichte, Hegel and Bauer, in each of whom the anti-Jewish elements became more pronounced. The other was the French ‘socialist’ stream. This linked the Jews to the Industrial Revolution and the vast increase in commerce and materialism which marked the beginning of the nineteenth century.

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.

‘On the Jewish Question’.

What, he asked, was ‘the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money.’97 The Jews had gradually conveyed this ‘practical’ religion to all 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: ‘In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.’

Marx’s two essays on the Jews thus contain, in embryonic from, the essence of his theory of human regeneration: by economic changes, and especially by abolishing private property and the personal pursuit of money, you could transform not merely the relationship between the Jew and society but all human relationships and the human personality itself. His form of anti-Semitism became a dress-rehearsal for Marxism as such.

Hence the militant socialism Marx adopted in the later 1840s was an extended and transmuted form of his earlier anti-Semitism.

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 theory remained irrational but acquired a more sophisticated appearance, making it highly attractive to educated radicals.

To reverse Bebel’s saying, if anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, socialism became the anti-Semitism of intellectuals.

However, Marx’s paradoxical combination of Jewishness and anti-Semitism did not prevent his works from appealing to the growing Jewish intelligentsia. Quite the contrary. For many emancipated Jews, especially in eastern Europe, Capital became a new kind of Torah.

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.

Their break with the past, with family and community, often combined with self-hatred, promoted among them a spirit of negation and destruction, of iconoclasm, almost at times of nihilism–an urge to overthrow institutions and values of all kinds–which gentile conservatives were beginning to identify, by the end of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Jewish social and cultural disease.

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,

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.

the second force pushing emancipated Jews to the left: demography.

These ‘new’ Jews were overwhelmingly Ashkenazis, concentrated in big cities.

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

the crowded industrial quarters of the new or expanded towns, where traditional Jewish life was struggling to survive, bred an intense secular Jewish redicalism.

third ...

the Jewish sense of injustice was never al...

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