History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

That was in some ways a most attractive prospect. But it was not Judaism. The pious Jew–and there could be no other–did not admit the existence of two kinds of knowledge, sacred and secular. There was only one. Moreover, there was only one legitimate purpose in acquiring it: to discover the exact will of God, in order to obey it. Hence the ‘science of Judaism’, as a dislocated academic discipline, was contrary to Jewish belief. Worse, it was the exact reversal of the true Jewish attitude to studying. As the Rabbi Hiyya put it in the fourth century AD: ‘If a man learns the Law without intending to fulfil the Law, it were better for him had he never been born.’47 A real Jew did not see Jewish history as a self-contained bit of world history, on a parallel with that of other peoples. To them, Jewish history was history. They believed that, without Israel, there would

have been no world and therefore no history. God had created many worlds and destroyed them as unsatisfactory. He made the present one for the Torah, and so it gave him pleasure. But if Israel, when offered by him the Torah, had rejected it–and some talmudic scholars thought it nearly had d...

The Jews had ceased to write history from then on because there was no history, as they conceived it, to write. It had stopped. History would be resumed with the coming of the Messiah.

Hence, though Zunz’s ‘scientific’ presentation of Jewish history and learning as a contribution to the world stock might make some impression on gentile society, it involved almost by definition a severance from a great part of Judaism.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch

The history of what Jews do, and what happens to them, cannot be part of secular history as such because it is the unfolding of God’s will and rightly therefore part of Revelation. General culture and Jewish culture are not in conflict: they are quite different. By confusing the two, you can only damage Judaism. If you merge Jewish with secular history, you desacralize it and kill the living idea which is its theme.

Later in the century, the point was to be made still more decisively by Nietzsche: once it became possible to study scientifically the history of a religion, he said, it is already dead.

Yet if the logic of Hirsch’s criticism was followed, Jews would in effect be back where they started before the enlightenment. They would constantly be forced to make distinctions between two types of knowledge. It would not

so much be Gordon’s dichotomy of ‘A man in his town and a Jew in his tent’ as ‘secular knowledge for business (or pleasure), Jewish knowledge for true understanding’. That would be a fatal barrier to Jews ever becoming accepted as a legitimate part of the genera...

Nachman K...

Krochmal believed that the Jewish enlighteners and the unreconstructed Orthodox were alike unacceptable. The first devitalized Judaism, the second made it repellent; both, in nineteenth-century conditions, produced apostasy. The trouble was that neither type of Jew had a sense of Jewish history. The enlighteners thought it was just something you learned as a child, then went on to secular, ‘adult’ history when you grew up. The Orthodox Jews ignored history altogether–as he put it, ‘there is no early or late in the Torah’.

Heinrich Graetz

In his view, the Jews were emphatically not a people like any other. They were part of a unique politico-religious organic entity, ‘whose soul is the Torah and whose body is the Holy Land’.

The Jews, he argued, had always been ‘powerful and productive in religious and moral truths for the salvation of mankind’. Judaism was (by divine providence) self-created. In that respect it was unlike any other great religion. Its ‘sparks’ had ignited Christianity. Its ‘seeds’ had brought forth the fruits of Islam. From its insights could be traced the origins both of scholastic philosophy and Protestantism.

As history it was useful; as a philosophy it was not in the end acceptable to any group.

If no satisfactory solution could be found to the problem of how to relate Jewish to secular culture, was it possible to bring the practice of Jewish religion into harmony with the modern world? That too was attempted. Reform Judaism, as it came to be called, was the product of the second decade of the nineteenth century when the first full effects of emancipation and enlightenment were felt on Jewish communities.

These took place against a background of what contemporaries saw as Protestant Triumphalism. The Protestant nations appeared to be doing well everywhere.

It was a different matter for the Jews, especially in Germany and other ‘advanced’ countries. Enlightened Jews were ashamed of their traditional services: the dead weight of the past, the lack of intellectual content, the noisy and unseemly manner in which Orthodox Jews prayed. In Protestant countries, for Christians to visit a synagogue was quite fashionable, and provoked contempt and pity. Hence Reform Judaism was, in the first place, an attempt to remove the taint of ridicule from Jewish forms of worship.

Then, in 1819, the same year as the Society for Jewish Science was founded, the Hamburg Temple introduced a new prayer-book, and the aesthetic changes spread to more fundamental matters. If liturgical habits could be discarded because they were embarrassing, why not absurd and inconvenient doctrines? The mention of the Messiah was dropped; so was a return to the Holy Land. The idea was to purify and re-energize Judaism in the same spirit as Luther’s reformation.

Reform Judaism was animated less by overwhelming conviction than by social tidy-mindedness and the desire to be more genteel. Its spirit was not religious but secular. It was well meaning but an artificial construct, like so many idealistic schemes of the nineteenth century, from Comte’s Positivism to Esperanto.

Reform waited in vain for a Luther.

The Reformers might have had more impact if they had been able to erect a clearly defined platform of belief and practice, and stick to it.

Samuel Holdheim

Geiger believed in ‘progressive revelation’, whereby the practice of Judaism had to be changed periodically as God’s will was made manifest. Holdheim wanted to abolish Temple and ceremonial Judaism altogether, immediately. Most of the Talmud had to go too: ‘In the talmudic age, the Talmud was right. In my age, I am right.’ He saw traditional Judaism as an obstacle to Jews becoming part of a universal brotherhood of man, which to him represented the messianic era.

But what Reform did not do, any more than the ‘Science of Judaism’, was to solve the Jewish problem. It did not normalize the Jews because it never spoke for more than a minority. It was, in essence, an alternative to baptism and complete assimilation, among Jews whose faith, or at any rate whose piety, was strong enough to keep them attached to their religion in some form, but not strong enough to defy the world.

The men of the Jewish enlightenment wanted to resurrect Hebrew.

they used it to signify their commitment to reason, as opposed to revelation, as the source of truth.

They chose Hebrew not because they wanted to express themselves in it: for that, they much preferred German. Nor did they venerate it for religious reasons. They saw it, rather, as being intellectually respectable, the Jewish equivalent of the Latin and Greek which was the ancient cultural heritage of Christian Europe.

Logically, of course, they should have picked Yiddish, a tongue which Jews actually spoke. But the maskils regarded it with abhorrence. They dismissed it as nothing more than a corrupt form of German. It stood for everything they most deplored about the ghetto and unregenerated Judaism: poverty, ignorance, superstition, vice.

But for a temporary language, Yiddish was old, almost as old as some European tongues. Jews first began to develop it from the German dialects spoken in the cities when they pushed up from France and Italy into German-speaking Lotharingia. Old Yiddish (1250-1500) marked the first contact of German-speaking Jews with Slavic Jews speaking a dialect called Knaanic. During the 200 years 1500-1700, Middle Yiddish emerged, becoming progressively more Slavic

and dialectic. Finally, modern Yiddish developed during the eighteenth century. Its literary form was completely transformed in the half-century 1810-60, in the cities of the east European diaspora, as Yiddish newspapers and magazines proliferated, and a secular Yiddish book-trade flourished. Philologists and grammarians tidied it up. By 1908 it was sophisticated enough for its proponents to hold a world Yiddish conference in Czernowitz. As the Jewish population of eastern Europe grew, more people spoke, read and wrote it. By the end of the 1930s it was the primary tongue of about eleven million people.

In short, during the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Jewish linguistic outlook and future was confused, for reasons which had their roots deep in history and faith. 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 programme or a united leadership. Where other oppressed and insurgent peoples could concentrate their energy on marching behind the banners of nationalism and independence, the Jews were rebels without a cause. Or rather, they knew what they were rebelling against–both the hostile society in which they were implanted, which gave them full citizenship grudgingly if at all, and the suffocating embrace of ghetto Judaism–but they did not know what they were rebelling for. None the less, though inchoate, the Jewish rebellion was real. And the individual rebels, though lacking a common objective, were formidable. Collectively, they constituted a huge force for good and evil. So far we...

Heine suffered from a destructive emotion which was soon to be commonplace among emancipated and apostate Jews: a peculiar form of self-hatred.

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. They suppressed all his books. But they could not erase his poems from the anthologies and were forced to reprint them with what every schoolboy knew was a lie: ‘By an Unknown Author’.

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.

Karl Marx,

Like Heine and everyone else, his notion of progress was profoundly influenced by Hegel, but 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 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. 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.

Enlightenment thinkers, both French and German, argued that the objectionable features of Judaism had to be erased before the Jew could be free: Jews who were discriminated against accepted this, and thus often directed their rage more towards the unregenerated Jew than those who persecuted them both.

Spinoza had first shown how a critique of Judaism could be used to reach radical conclusions about the world. His example had been followed by the French enlightenment, though their treatment of Judaism was far more hostile, and racial, in tone. Among radical German writers, the idea that solving the ‘Jewish problem’ might provide a key to solving the problems of humanity was much discussed.

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.

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.

Later in the century August Bebel, the German Social Democrat, would coin the phrase, much used by Lenin: ‘Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.’ Behind this revealing epigram was the crude argument: we

all know that Jewish money-men, who never soil their hands with toil, exploit the poor workers and peasants. But only a fool blames the Jews alone. The mature man, the socialist, has grasped the point that the Jews are only symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself. The disease is the religion of money, and its modern form is capitalism. Workers and peasants are exploited not just by the Jews but by the entire bo...

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.

To reverse Bebel’s saying, if anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, socialism became the anti-Semitism of intellectuals. An intellectual like Lenin, who clearly perceived the irrationality of the Russian anti-Semitic pogrom, and would have been ashamed to conduct one, nevertheless fully accepted its spirit once the target was expanded into the whole capitalist class–and went on to conduct pogroms on an infinitely greater scale,