Redemption and Utopia. Michael Löwy
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Let us first note that the great majority of Jewish revolutionary intellectuals from the East came from ‘enlightened’, assimilated and religiously indifferent families; several were born or grew up in three cities that were the bastions of the Haskala in Russia: Odessa (Martov, Trotsky, Parvus); Vilna (Jogiches); Zamosc (Rosa Luxemburg). This was the movement that advocated opening the Jewish world to rationalist culture and the Enlightenment, which Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish philosopher from Berlin, had inaugurated in the late eighteenth century. But the difference between the Haskala in Germany and Russia needs to be considered. As Rachel Ertel showed so well in her study on the Shtetl, the Haskala and the emancipation of the Jews ‘in a Western Europe made up of nation-states, required a “denominationalization” of the Jewish religion stripped of all its national characteristics’. On the other hand, ‘the East European Haskala had deeply national characteristics. If, in the West, the movement aspired to denominationalization, in the East it aimed at secularization.’31
The national content of emancipation was an outcome both of the nature of the tsarist State – a multinational, authoritarian and anti-Semitic Empire – and of the situation of the Jewish communities: a pariah condition characterized by segregation, discrimination, persecutions and pogroms; territorial concentration in ghettos and in the Shtetl, cultural and linguistic unity (Yiddish).
Of course, many Marxist Jewish intellectuals (unlike the Bund and socialist Zionists) rejected any and all national or Jewish cultural references. One need only recall Trotsky’s famous response to questioning by the Bundist Medem at the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party: ‘I assume that you consider yourself to be either a Russian or a Jew?’ ‘No’, replied Trotsky, ‘you are wrong. I am nothing but a Social Democrat.’ In any event, whether the Jewish identity was accepted or rejected, it was – at least after the terrible pogroms of 1881 – a national/cultural and not merely a religious identity. Unlike in Germany, there were very few Jews in the tsarist Empire who thought of themselves merely as ‘Russian citizens of Jewish denomination’.
The atheist and secular orientation of the Eastern European revolutionary intelligentsia will be better understood if we look more closely at the religious aspect proper of the Haskala movement. In Germany, the Haskala actually did succeed in ‘enlightening’, modernizing, rationalizing and ‘Germanizing’ the Jewish religion. The movement of religious reform led by Rabbi Abraham Geiger (1810–74) and the more prudent reformist current (‘the historical school’) of Rabbi Zacharias Frankel (1801–75) gained hegemony in the religious institutions of the Jewish community. Even the minority neo-orthodox movement founded by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88) accepted certain reforms and values of the German secular culture.
Such was not the case in Russia where reform synagogues had few followers except in a small layer of the Jewish haute bourgeoisie. The iconoclastic attack of the maskilim (‘enlightened’) on the dogmas of orthodoxy only caused traditionalists to burrow into the most dogged immobility: ‘Before Haskala … rabbinic Judaism had been more worldly, more tolerant, and more responsive to social change. After the Haskala, rabbinic Judaism became conservative, inflexible, and repressive; Hasidism, too, followed suit.’32 While in Germany (and to a certain extent, in all of Central Europe) the Jewish religion was reformed and became more flexible and receptive to outside influences – neo-Kantian (Hermann Cohen) or neo-romantic (Buber) – in Eastern Europe, the traditional religious cultural universe remained largely intact, rigid, closed, impervious to any outside cultural input. The quietist and politically indifferentist messianism of orthodox circles (rabbinical or Hasidic) could not combine or link up with a secular utopia, which these circles rejected as a foreign body. One first had to be freed of religion, to become atheist or ‘enlightened’, in order to accede to the ‘outside’ world of revolutionary ideas. It was not surprising, therefore, that such ideas chiefly developed in Jewish concentrations furthest from all religious practices, as in Odessa, for example, which the orthodox considered a true den of sinners.
Another aspect to be taken into consideration is the immense authoritarian power of the orthodox Rabbis and Hasidic Zadikkim in the traditionalist communities, for which there was no equivalent in Central Europe. As a result, there was open conflict between the rebellious youth, be it Bundist, socialist or anarchist, and the religious establishment:
Feeling threatened, the traditional circles often responded with open or insidious violence, trying to maintain their hold by all means, including moral pressure and intellectual terrorism. … The youth was completely moulded by the traditional heritage … but it no longer wanted to be subjected to its law, and did not accept its restrictions. Therefore, the youth violently rejected this heritage and built its own culture against it: it was its inner enemy.33
This was the context in which a virulent ‘anti-clericalism’ developed among progressive Jewish intellectuals, leaving countless evidence in the shape of polemical articles, autobiographical works and imaginative literature.
Directly confronted with the most conservative and authoritarian traditionalism, the young Jewish rebel from Russia (or Poland) could not ‘romanticize’ it in the way his German or Austrian counterpart could. There was not the distance that favours what Benjamin called an auratic perception of religion.
Isaac Deutscher was educated in a heder (religious school for children) in the Polish Shtetl Kranow. But although his family intended him to become a rabbi in the Hasidic sect of the Zaddik of Gere, he broke with religion as a teenager and became a leader of Polish Communism (and later the biographer of Leon Trotsky). Contrasting his attitude to religion with that of the German Jews, he described it as follows:
We knew the Talmud, we had been steeped in Hasidism. All its idealizations were for us nothing but dust thrown into our eyes. We had grown up in that Jewish past. We had the eleventh, and thirteenth and sixteenth centuries of Jewish history living next door to us and under our very roof; and we wanted to escape it to live in the twentieth century. Through all the thick gilt and varnish of romanticists like Martin Buber, we could see, and smell, the obscurantism of our archaic religion and a way of life unchanged since the middle ages. To someone of my background the fashionable longing of the Western Jew for a return to the sixteenth century, a return which is supposed to help him in recovering, or re-discovering, his Jewish cultural identity, seems unreal and Kafkaesque.34
This striking passage reveals in the clearest and most concise way what motivated the Eastern European revolutionary intelligentsia; it shows why a spiritualist movement, like the one spreading throughout Mitteleuropa, could not emerge from within its ranks.
It is a striking fact that the only Jewish socialist intellectual within the Russian Empire who was attracted by the powerful movement of religious/revolutionary rebirth that developed in Petrograd at the turn of the century around D. S. Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius, Nikolai Berdyaev and S. N. Bulgakov (not to mention the ‘God-builders’ within the Bolshevik Party, Bogdanov and Lunacharsky) was someone who converted to orthodox Christianity: Nikolai Maksimovich Minsky (N.M. Vilenkin). A member of the Philosophical-Religious Association of Petrograd and of Gorky’s socialist journal Novaya Zhizn [New Life], Minsky was inspired by Russian-Orthodox spirituality and seemed not to have any ties to Judaism.35
Were there no revolutionary Jews in Eastern Europe who were an exception to the rule – such as Bernard Lazare in Western Europe? Probably yes, but in all my research to date, I have yet to find one.36
Religious Jews Tending to Anarchism:Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig,Gershom Scholem, Leo Löwenthal
Within the turn-of-the-century generation of Jewish rebel romantics, the trend of religious semi-anarchism was one whose works were dominated by the Jewish dimension, both national-cultural and religious. This current had no common attitude to Zionism: Rosenzweig never accepted