Redemption and Utopia. Michael Löwy
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Meister Eckhart before turning towards the Jewish tradition; and that Gershom Scholem rediscovered the cabbala through the writings of the German Romantic Franz Joseph Molitor. Consequently, the Jewish religious heritage was seen through a grid of romantic interpretation which favoured its non-rational and non-institutional dimension, its mystical, explosive, apocalyptic, ‘anti-bourgeois’ aspects (to use Scholem’s phrase from the first article he wrote on the cabbala in 1919). Messianism is the theme which, as in a pool of radiant light, concentrates all of the Sturm und Drang aspects of the Jewish religion – provided, of course, that it is stripped of the liberal, neo-Kantian and Aufklärer interpretation (in which messianism equals the gradual perfection of mankind) and that the original tradition is re-established in all its eschatological force, from the prophets to the cabbala, from the Bible to Sabbatai Sevi. It is therefore not surprising that the messianic reference, in its double restorative and utopian meaning, became the Shibboleth of the religious anamnesis of the Jewish-romantic generation of the 1880s. On the other hand, it goes without saying that this sort of Jewish messianism, charged with romantic explosiveness, was far more susceptible to political activation than the rabbinical (quietist or abstentionist) messianism of the orthodox milieux.
How did this activation work? Or rather, how can we explain that a large fringe of this generation adhered to the path of revolutionary utopias?
This question must be placed in a broader context: that of the attraction of Jewish intellectuals in general to left-wing movements and socialist ideas. For, as historians have noted, the majority of left-wing Jews in Central Europe (the situation was different in Eastern Europe, with its Jewish proletariat) were intellectuals.20
Anti-Semites had their own ‘explanation’: the stateless and cosmopolitan Jews tended instinctively towards red internationalism. This platitude is obviously false – the majority of Jews were good-and-proper German or Austrian patriots – but probably the situation of national assimilation/rejection/marginalization of the Jewish intellectuals made them potentially more sensitive than their non-Jewish counterparts to the internationalist themes of socialism. The intelligentsia felt more directly than did the bourgeoisie and the business class the pariah condition of the Jew in Central Europe, the pervading anti-Semitism, the professional and social discrimination. As Hannah Arendt wrote, this new stratum of intellectuals, which had to find both their daily bread and their self-respect outside of Jewish society, was particularly exposed (‘without shelter and defence’) to the new wave of Jew-hatred at the turn of the century, and it was within the intelligentsia that a rebel ‘pariah consciousness’ developed in opposition to the conformist posture of the parvenu.21 There were only two possibilities for the pariah: either radical self-negation (Otto Weininger!) or radical questioning of the societal values that devalued his otherness. The pariah consciousness, by definition marginal or outside, tended to be critical and could become, in the words of Elisabeth Lenk, ‘the quintessential mirror of society’.22
The ‘negative privileges’ (to use Max Weber’s phrase) of Jewish pariah intellectuals in Central European societies took various forms. At the socio-professional level, civil-service and (to a large extent) academic positions were closed to Jews – a situation which condemned them to marginal intellectual occupations such as ‘freelance’ journalist or writer, independent artist or researcher, ‘private’ educator, and so on. According to the German sociologist Robert Michels, it was this discrimination and marginalization which explained ‘the Jews’ predisposition to joining revolutionary parties’.23 Analysing this same phenomenon in Hungary, Karady and Kameny underscored that
the formation of a hard revolutionary core within the liberal intelligentsia seemed directly indebted to the rigidities within the marketplace of intellectual occupations, in which institutionalized anti-Semitism within certain professional bodies (such as higher education) was but one aspect … that could only reinforce the conviction held by the excluded that ‘normal’ integration into the intellectual marketplace required subversion of its ground-rules.24
Now, the importance of this point should not be underestimated. But it seems to me that the revolutionary radicalization of a large number of Jewish intellectuals – be it in Hungary or Germany – cannot not be reduced to a problem of the job market or career opportunities. Other factors must be taken into consideration in order to explain why the son of a Jewish banker (Georg Lukács) became a People’s Commissar in the Budapest Commune, or why the son of a rich Jewish merchant (Eugen Leviné) led the Bavarian Soviet Republic.
In an attempt to understand why Jews turned to Socialism, Walter Laqueur wrote, in his book on the Weimar Republic:
They gravitated towards the left because it was the party of reason, progress and freedom which had helped them to attain equal rights. The right on the other hand, was to varying degrees anti-semitic because it regarded the Jew as an alien element in the body politic. This attitude had been a basic fact of political life throughout the nineteenth century and it did not change during the first third of the twentieth.25
Such an analysis certainly helps to clarify why many Jewish intellectuals in Germany and especially in Austria joined social democracy. However, it does not explain the radicalization of the romantic Jewish generation of the 1880s, which was distrustful of rationalism, industrial progress and political liberalism – and none of whose members was attracted by social democracy.
What was the spiritual road that led a part of this current to socialist ideas – or, more precisely, to the revolutionary socialist version of anti-capitalism? Why was it, for example, that in one of the main discussion centres of the neo-romantic world-view, the Max Weber circle of Heidelberg, it was precisely the Jews (Lukács, Bloch, Toller) who opted for revolution?
As noted earlier, their social condition as pariahs, their marginalization and uprooting clearly made Jewish intellectuals receptive to ideologies that radically contested the established order. But other motivations entered into play, which were specific to the anti-capitalist romantic milieu. Jewish national/cultural romanticism (i.e. Zionism) did not gain the support of the majority. Assimilation was too deep for Jewish intellectuals to be able to identify with a rather abstract Jewish nation in Central Europe (unlike in Eastern Europe). It is, therefore, understandable that most of them refused all nationalism and opted instead for an internationalist, anti-capitalist romantic utopia, in which social and national inequalities would be completely abolished: in other words, anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, or a romantic and libertarian interpretation of Marxism. The attractive power of this ideal was so great that it even influenced Zionists such as Buber, Hans Kohn or Gershom Scholem.
There are various reasons why, above all before 1917, libertarian utopia held a particular attraction: first, as we have already seen, of all socialist doctrines, libertarian utopia was the one most charged with anti-capitalist romanticism – while orthodox Marxism, then identified with social democracy, appeared as a more left-wing version of liberal/rationalist philosophy and worship of industrial civilization (Gustav Landauer’s criticism of Marxism as the ‘son of the steam-engine’ typifies this attitude). On the other hand, the authoritarian and militarist character of the German imperial state also stimulated the libertarian anti-authoritarianism of the rebel intelligentsia, especially after 1914, when it appeared to the intelligentsia like a Moloch avid for human sacrifices. Finally, anarchism corresponded better to the intellectual’s posture of being ‘without social attachments’, uprooted and marginal, especially in Germany where (unlike in France, Italy or Spain) the libertarian current was not an organized mass social movement.
It was the combination of all these economic, social, political and cultural conditions which made it possible – at a specific moment in history, and within a specific generation of Central European Jewish intellectuals – for the correspondence between Jewish messianism and libertarian utopia to become dynamic and to turn into a relationship of elective affinity. It is hard to know which of the two was the primordial or determining element: what is important is that they sustained, reinforced and stimulated each other. This was the context, then, in which a complex network of links took shape, between anti-capitalist romanticism, Jewish religious rebirth, messianism, anti-bourgeois and anti-statist cultural revolt, revolutionary utopia, anarchism and Socialism. To this socio-historical process,