The Jewish Century

Chapter 2

SWANN’S NOSE: THE JEWS AND OTHER MODERNS

The nose looked at the Major and knitted its eyebrows a little. “You are mistaken, my dear sir. I am entirely on my own.”

—N. V. Gogol, “The Nose”

The postexilic Jews were the Inadan of Europe, the Armenians of the North, the Parsis of the Christian world. They were quintessential, extraordinarily accomplished Mercurians because they practiced service nomadism for a long time and over a large territory, produced an elaborate ideological justification of the Mercurian way of life and its ultimate transcendence, and specialized in an extremely wide range of traditional service occupations from peddling and smithing to medicine and finance. They were internal strangers for all seasons, proven antipodes of all things Apollonian and Dionysian, practiced purveyors of “cleverness” in a great variety of forms and in all walks of life.

But they were not just very good at what they did. They were exceptional Mercurians because, in Christian Europe, they were at least as familiar as they were odd. The local Apollonians’ God, forefathers, and Scriptures were all Jewish, and the Jews’ greatest alleged crime—the reason for their Mercurian homelessness—was their rejection of a Jewish apostate from Judaism. Such symbiosis was not wholly unparalleled (in parts of Asia, all writing and learning, as well as service nomadism, were of Chinese origin), but probably nowhere were tribal exiles as much at home as Jews were in Europe. The Christian world began with the Jews, and it could not end without them.

Most of all, however, the Jews became the world’s strangest strangers because they practiced their vocation on a continent that went almost wholly Mercurian and reshaped much of the world accordingly. In an age of service nomadism, the Jews became the chosen people by becoming the model “moderns.”

This meant that more and more Apollonians, first in Europe and then elsewhere, had to become more like the Jews: urban, mobile, literate, mentally nimble, occupationally flexible, and surrounded by aliens (and thus keen on cleanliness, unmanliness, and creative dietary taboos). The new market was different from old markets in that it was anonymous and socially unembedded (relatively speaking): it was exchange among strangers, with everyone trying, with varying degrees of success, to play the Jew.

Among the most successful were Max Weber’s Protestants, who discovered a humorless, dignified way to be Jewish. One could remain virtuous while engaging in “usury” and deriving prestige from wealth—as opposed to investing wealth in honor by means of generosity and predation (or simply swallowing it all up). At the same time, the retreat of professional priests and divine miracles forced every seeker of salvation to consult God directly, by reading books, and to pursue righteousness formally, by following rules. Churches became more like synagogues (shuln, or “schools”); experts on virtue became more like teachers (rabbis); and every believer became a monk or a priest (i.e., more like a Jew). Moses’ prayer—“would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets” (Num. 11:29)—had been heard.

The new—modern—world (brave in a new way) was based on the endless pursuit of wealth and learning, with both careers open to talent, as in the shtetl or ghetto, and most talents taking up traditional Mercurian occupations: entrepreneurship, of course, but also medicine, law, journalism, and science. The gradual demise of the soul led to an intense preoccupation with bodily purity, so that diet once again became a key to salvation and doctors began to rival priests as experts on immortality. The replacement of sacred oaths and covenants by written contracts and constitutions transformed lawyers into indispensable guardians and interpreters of the new economic, social, and political order. The obsolescence of inherited wisdom and Apollonian dignity (the greatest enemy of curiosity) elevated erstwhile heralds and town criers to the position of powerful purveyors of knowledge and moral memory (the “fourth” and the “fifth” estates). And the naturalization of the universe turned every scientist into a would-be Prometheus.

Even the refusal to pursue wealth or learning was Mercurian in inspiration. The aptly named “bohemians” occupied the periphery of the new market by engaging in new forms of begging, prophesying, and fortune-telling, as well as more or less seditious singing and dancing. Fully dependent on the society of which they were not full-fledged members, they earned their living by scandalizing their patrons in the manner of most traditional providers of dangerous, unclean, and transcendental services. Their own membership requirements included service nomadism, persistent (if sometimes ironic) defiance of dominant conventions, a strong sense of moral superiority over the host society, and a withdrawal from all outside kinship obligations. To mock, challenge, and possibly redeem a society of would-be Jews and Protestants, one had to become a would-be Gypsy.

“Jews and Protestants” is an appropriate metaphor in more ways than one, because there was more than one way of being successful in the modern economy. Werner Sombart was able to attribute the rise of capitalism to the Jews by dramatically overstating his case (and thus seriously compromising it); Weber established an exclusive connection between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism by emphasizing historical causation (and thus bypassing contemporary Jews); and scholars puzzling over various Asian miracles have felt compelled to either redefine the Protestant ethic or delineate a peculiarly Asian, “familistic” or “network-based,” path to capitalism.¹ It seems, however, that the European route contained both paths—familistic and individualist—at the outset: whereas the Jews, in particular, relied on their expertise as a cohesive tribe of professional strangers, the various Protestants and their imitators built their city on a hill by introducing economic calculation into the moral community while converting countless outsiders into moral subjects (and trustworthy clients)—or, as Benjamin Nelson put it, by turning brothers into others and others into brothers (and thus everyone into a civil stranger).²

Since Weber, it has usually been assumed that “modern capitalism rises upon the ruins of the tribalistic communalism of the Hebrew brotherhood.”³ In fact, they have coexisted, not always peacefully, as two fundamental principles of modern economic organization: one that employs kinship as a central structural element, and one that enshrines a rational individual pursuing economic self-interest on the basis of formal legality. Both are learned behaviors, acquired through practice, ideological reinforcement, and painstaking self-denial (and, in the real world, mixed in various proportions). The first requires a combination of tribalism and commercialism rarely found outside traditional Mercurian communities; the second demands a degree of asceticism and adherence to impersonal man-made rules that seems beyond reach (or indeed, comprehension) in societies little affected by Protestantism or reformed Catholicism. The first “harnesses nepotism in the service of capitalism”; the second claims—against all evidence—that the two are incompatible. The first enjoys dubious legitimacy and tends to avoid the limelight; the second loudly abhors “corruption” and pretends to be the only true modern.⁴

The Jews did not have a monopoly on familism, of course, but there is no doubt that their entrepreneurial success was due to a combination of internal solidarity and external strangeness—and that the only way native entrepreneurs could compete (as it turned out) was by battling kin solidarity and legislating strangeness. Majorities (hosts) could emulate Mercurians (guests) only by forcing everyone to be an exile. A Scottish Protestant was not just a pork-eating Jew, as Heine would have it; he was a solitary Jew, a Jew without the people of Israel, the only creature to have been chosen.⁵

But that is not the whole story. Not only was the tribal path—along with the Protestant one—a part of European modernity; the Protestant path itself was, in a crucial sense, tribal. The new market, new rights, and new individuals had to be constituted, circumscribed, sanctified, and protected by a newly nationalized state. Nationalism was a function of modernity, as both a precondition and defensive reaction, and modernity was, among other things, a new version of tribalism. Protestants and liberals did not manage to create a world in which “all men are ‘brothers’ in being equally ‘others.’ ”⁶ Instead, they built a new moral community on the twin pillars of the nuclear family, which posed as an individual, and the nation, which posed as a nuclear family. Adam Smith and most of his readers took it for granted that wealth was, in some sense, “of nations,” and so they did not pay much attention to the fact that there were others—and then there were others.

To put it differently, the Europeans imitated the Jews not only in being modern, but also in being ancient. Modernity is inseparable from the “tribalistic communalism of the Hebrew brotherhood”—in both the sacredness of the nuclear family and the chosenness of the tribe. As the Age of Mercurianism unfolded, Christians saw the error of their ways and began to go easy on universal brotherhood, on the one hand, and the separation between the sacred and the profane (priesthood and laity), on the other. What started out as a nationalization of the divine ended up as a deification of the national. First, it turned out that the Bible could be written in the vernacular, and that Adam and Eve had spoken French, Flemish, or Swedish in Paradise. And then it became clear that each nation had had its own prelapsarian golden age, its own holy books, and its own illustrious but foolhardy ancestors.⁷

Early Christians had rebelled against Judaism by moving Jerusalem to Heaven; modern Christians reverted to their roots, as it were, by moving it back to earth and cloning it as needed. As William Blake proclaimed,

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem

In Englands green & pleasant Land.⁸

Nationalism meant that every nation was to become Jewish. Every single one of them had been “wounded for our transgressions” and “bruised for our iniquities” (Isa. 53:5). Every people was chosen, every land promised, every capital Jerusalem. Christians could give up trying to love their neighbors as themselves—because they had finally discovered who they were (French, Flemish, Swedish). They were like Jews in that they loved themselves as a matter of faith and had no use for miracles—the only true miracle being the continuing unfolding of the national story, to which every member of the nation bore witness through ritual and, increasingly, through reading.

In most of Europe, the sacralization and, eventually, standardization of national languages resulted in the canonization of the authors credited with their creation. Dante in Italy, Cervantes in Spain, Camões in Portugal, Shakespeare in England, and later Goethe (with Schiller) in Germany, Pushkin in Russia, Mickiewicz in Poland, and various others became objects of strikingly successful cults (popular as well as official) because they came to symbolize their nation’s golden age—or rather, a modern, newly recovered, articulate, and personalized version of their nation’s original unity. They molded and elevated their nations by embodying their spirit (in words as well as in their own lives), transforming history and myth into high culture, and turning the local and the absolute into images of each other. They all “invented the human” and “said it all”; they are the true modern prophets because they transformed their mother tongues into Hebrew, the language spoken in Paradise.⁹

The cultivation of tribalism along with strangeness (modernity as universal Mercurianism) involved an intense preoccupation with bodily purity. Civilization as a struggle against odors, excretions, secretions, and “germs” had as much to do with ritual Mercurian estrangement as it did with the rise of science—a fact duly noted by the Gypsies, for example, who welcomed prepackaged meals and disposable utensils as useful aids in their battle with marime, and a number of Jewish physicians, who argued that kashrut, circumcision, and other ritual practices were modern hygiene avant la lettre.¹⁰

Mercurian strangeness implies cleanliness and aloofness, and so does Mercurian tribalism. Modern states are as keen on the symmetry, transparency, spotlessness, and boundedness of the body politic as traditional Jews and Gypsies are on the ritual purity and autonomy of their communities. In a sense, good citizenship (including patriotism) is a version of the ever vigilant Jewish endeavor to preserve personal and collective identity in an unclean world. Except that modern states are not usually beleaguered and despised minorities (although many imagine themselves so). In the hands of heavily armed, thoroughly bureaucratized, and imperfectly Judaized Apollonians, Mercurian exclusivity and fastidiousness became relentlessly expansive. In the hands of messianically inclined Apollonians, it turned lethal—especially to the Mercurians. The Holocaust had as much to do with tradition as it did with modernity.¹¹

The painful transformation of Europeans into Jews was paralleled by the emergence of the Jews from legal, ritual, and social seclusion. In the new society built on formerly unclean occupations, segregated communities specializing in those occupations lost their raison d’être—for the specialists themselves as well as for their clients. At the same time, the new state was growing indifferent to religion, and thus “tolerant” of religious differences—and thus more inclusive as well as more intrusive. As Jewish communities began to lose their independence, coherence, and self-sufficiency, individual Jews began to acquire new legal protections and new moral legitimacy even as they continued to pursue Mercurian occupations. Some of them became Apollonians or even Christians, but most simply joined the world created in their image, a world in which everyone would wear Hermes’ “unspeakable, unthinkable, marvelous” sandals.

But of course most Apollonians untempered by the “Protestant ethic” could not wear those sandals any more than Cinderella’s stepsisters could wear her glass slipper—at least not until they had had time to practice and make the proper adjustments. The Jewish journey was equally tumultuous, perhaps, but much shorter. The Jews were already urban (including those who represented urbanity in the shtetls—“little cities”—of rural Eastern Europe) and had, compared to their hosts, virtually no tradition of internal estate distinctions (“the whole ghetto was, as it were, ‘Third Estate’ ”). They tended to base social status on personal achievement, associated achievement with learning and wealth, sought learning by reading and interpreting texts, and pursued wealth by cultivating human strangers rather than land, gods, or beasts. In a society of refugees, permanent exiles could feel at home (or so it seemed for a while).¹²

Over the course of the nineteenth century, most of the Jews of Central and Western Europe moved to large cities to participate in the unbinding of Prometheus (as David Landes, conveniently for our purposes, called the rise of capitalism). They did it in their own way—partly because other avenues remained closed but also because their own way was very effective, as well as well rehearsed (Prometheus had been a trickster and manipulator similar to Hermes before becoming a martyred culture hero). Wherever they went, they had a higher proportion of self-employment than non-Jews, a greater concentration in trade and commerce, and a clear preference for economically independent family firms. Most Jewish wage laborers (a substantial minority in Poland) worked in small Jewish-owned shops, and most great Jewish banking houses, including the Rothschilds, Bleichröders, Todescos, Sterns, Oppenheims, and Seligmans, were family partnerships, with brothers and male cousins—often married to cousins—stationed in different parts of Europe (in-laws and outmarrying females were often excluded from direct involvement in business). In the early nineteenth century, thirty of the fifty-two private banks in Berlin were owned by Jewish families; a hundred years later many of these banks became shareholding companies with Jewish managers, some of them directly related to the original owners as well as to each other. The greatest German joint stock banks, including the Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank, were founded with the participation of Jewish financiers, as were the Rothschilds’ Creditanstalt in Austria and the Pereires’ Crédit Mobilier in France. (Of the remaining private—i.e., non–joint stock—banks in Weimar Germany, almost half were owned by Jewish families).¹³

In fin de siècle Vienna, 40 percent of the directors of public banks were Jews or of Jewish descent, and all banks but one were administered by Jews (some of them members of old banking clans) under the protection of duly titled and landed Paradegoyim. Between 1873 and 1910, at the height of political liberalism, the Jewish share of the Vienna stock exchange council (Börsenrath) remained steady at about 70 percent, and in 1921 Budapest, 87.8 percent of the members of the stock exchange and 91 percent of the currency brokers association were Jews, many of them ennobled (and thus, in a sense, Paradegoyim themselves). In industry, there were some spectacularly successful Jewish magnates (such as the Rathenaus in electrical engineering, the Friedländer-Fulds in coal, the Monds in chemical industries, and the Ballins in shipbuilding), some areas with high proportions of Jewish industrial ownership (such as Hungary), and some strongly “Jewish” industries (such as textiles, food, and publishing), but the principal contribution of Jews to industrial development appears to have consisted in the financing and managerial control by banks. In Austria, of the 112 industrial directors who held more than seven simultaneous directorships in 1917, half were Jews associated with the great banks, and in interwar Hungary, more than half and perhaps as much as 90 percent of all industry was controlled by a few closely related Jewish banking families. In 1912, 20 percent of all millionaires in Britain and Prussia (10 million marks and more in the Prussian case) were Jews. In 1908–11, in Germany as a whole, Jews made up 0.95 percent of the population and 31 percent of the richest families (with a “ratio of economic elite overrepresentation” of 33, the highest anywhere, according to W. D. Rubinstein). In 1930, about 71 percent of the richest Hungarian taxpayers (with incomes exceeding 200,000 pengő) were Jews. And of course the Rothschilds, “the world’s bankers” as well as the “Kings of the Jews,” were, by a large margin, the wealthiest family of the nineteenth century.¹⁴

Generally speaking, Jews were a minority among bankers; bankers were a minority among Jews; and Jewish bankers competed too fiercely against each other and associated too much with erratic and mutually hostile regimes to be able to have permanent and easily manageable political influence (Heine called Rothschild and Fuld “two rabbis of finance who were as much opposed to one another as Hillel and Shammai”). Still, it is obvious that European Jews as a group were very successful in the new economic order, that they were, on average, better off than non-Jews, and that some of them managed to translate their Mercurian expertise and Mercurian familism into considerable economic and political power. The pre–World War I Hungarian state owed its relative stability to the active support of the powerful business elite, which was small, cohesive, bound by marriage, and overwhelmingly Jewish. The new German Empire was built not only on “blood and iron,” as Otto von Bismarck claimed, but also on gold and financial expertise, largely provided by Bismarck’s—and Germany’s—banker, Gerson von Bleichröder. The Rothschilds made their wealth by lending to governments and speculating in government bonds, so that when members of the family had a strong opinion, governments would listen (but not always hear, of course). In one of the most amusing episodes in Alexander Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts, “His Majesty” James Rothschild blackmails Emperor Nicholas I into releasing the money that the father of Russian socialism has received from his serf-owning German mother.¹⁵

Money was one means of advancement; education was the other. The two were closely connected, of course, but proportions could vary considerably. Throughout modern Europe, education was expected to lead to money; only among Jews, apparently, was money almost universally expected to lead to education. Jews were consistently overrepresented in educational institutions leading to professional careers, but the overrepresentation of the offspring of Jewish merchants seems particularly striking. In fin de siècle Vienna, Jews made up roughly 10 percent of the general population and about 30 percent of classical gymnasium students. Between 1870 and 1910, about 40 percent of all gymnasium graduates in central Vienna were Jewish; among those whose fathers engaged in commerce, Jews represented more than 80 percent. In Germany, 51 percent of Jewish scientists had fathers who were businessmen. The Jewish journey from the ghetto seemed to lead to the liberal professions by way of commercial success.¹⁶

The principal way station on that route was the university. In the 1880s, Jews accounted for only 3–4 percent of the Austrian population, but 17 percent of all university students and fully one-third of the student body at Vienna University. In Hungary, where Jews constituted about 5 percent of the population, they represented one-fourth of all university students and 43 percent at Budapest Technological University. In Prussia in 1910–11, Jews made up less than 1 percent of the population, about 5.4 percent of university students, and 17 percent of the students at the University of Berlin. In 1922, in newly independent Lithuania, Jewish students composed 31.5 percent of the student body at the University of Kaunas (not for long, though, because of the government’s nativization policies). In Czechoslovakia, the Jewish share of university students (14.5 percent) was 5.6 times their share in the general population. When Jews are compared to non-Jews in similar social and economic positions, the gap becomes narrower (though still impressive); what remains constant is that in much of Central and Eastern Europe, there were relatively few non-Jews in similar social and economic positions. In large parts of Eastern Europe, virtually the whole “middle class” was Jewish.¹⁷

Because civil service jobs were mostly closed to Jews (and possibly because of a general Jewish preference for self-employment), most Jewish students went into the professions that were “liberal,” congruent with Mercurian upbringing, and, as it happens, absolutely central to the functioning of modern society: medicine, law, journalism, science, higher education, entertainment, and the arts. In turn-of-the-century Vienna, 62 percent of the lawyers, half the doctors and dentists, 45 percent of the medical faculty, and one-fourth of the total faculty were Jews, as were between 51.5 and 63.2 percent of professional journalists. In 1920, 59.9 percent of Hungarian doctors, 50.6 percent of lawyers, 39.25 percent of all privately employed engineers and chemists, 34.3 percent of editors and journalists, and 28.6 percent of musicians identified themselves as Jews by religion. (If one were to add converts to Christianity, the numbers would presumably be much higher.) In Prussia, 16 percent of physicians, 15 percent of dentists, and one-fourth of all lawyers in 1925 were Jews; and in interwar Poland, Jews were about 56 percent of all doctors in private practice, 43.3 percent of all private teachers and educators, 33.5 percent of all lawyers and notaries, and 22 percent of all journalists, publishers, and librarians.¹⁸

Of all the licensed professionals who served as the priests and oracles of new secular truths, messengers were the most obviously Mercurian, the most visible, the most marginal, the most influential—and very often Jewish. In early twentieth-century Germany, Austria, and Hungary, most of the national newspapers that were not specifically Christian or anti-Semitic were owned, managed, edited, and staffed by Jews (in fact, in Vienna even the Christian and anti-Semitic ones were sometimes produced by Jews). As Steven Beller put it, “in an age when the press was the only mass medium, cultural or otherwise, the liberal press was largely a Jewish press.”¹⁹

The same was true, to a lesser degree, of publishing houses, as well as the many public places where messages, prophecies, and editorial comments were exchanged orally or nonverbally (through gesture, fashion, and ritual). “Jewish emancipation” was, among other things, a search by individual Jews for a neutral (or at least “semineutral,” in Jacob Katz’s terms) society where neutral actors could share a neutral secular culture. As the marquis d’Argens wrote to Frederick the Great on behalf of Moses Mendelssohn, “A philosophe who is a bad Catholic begs a philosophe who is a bad Protestant to grant the privilege [of residence in Berlin] to a philosophe who is a bad Jew.” To be bad in the eyes of God was a good thing because God either did not exist or could not always tell bad from good. For the Jews, the first such corners of neutrality and equality were Masonic lodges, whose members were to adhere “to that religion in which all men agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves.” When it appeared as if the only religion left was the one on which everyone agreed, some particular opinions became “public opinion,” and Jews became important—and very public—opinion makers and opinion traders. In the early nineteenth century, the most prominent salon hostesses in the German-speaking world were Jewish women, and Jews of both sexes became a visible, and sometimes the largest, part of the “public” in theaters, concert halls, art galleries, and literary societies. Most of the patrons in Viennese literary coffeehouses seem to have been Jewish—as were many of the artists whose inventions they judged. Central European modernism, in particular, owed a great deal to the creativity of “emancipated” Jews.²⁰

And so did science (from scientia, “knowledge”), another transgressive Mercurian specialty closely related to the arts and crafts. For many Jews, the transition from the study of the Law to the study of the laws of nature proved congenial and extremely successful. The new science of the individual (named after Psyche, the Greek for “soul” and the perennial victim of Eros’s cruelty) was an almost exclusively Jewish affair; the new science of society seemed to the literary historian Friedrich Gundolph (né Gundelfinger) a “Jewish sect”; and virtually all of the old sciences, perhaps especially physics, mathematics, and chemistry, benefited enormously from the influx of Jews. At least five of the nine Nobel Prizes won by German citizens during the Weimar years went to scientists of Jewish descent, and one of them, Albert Einstein, joined Rothschild in becoming an icon of the Modern Age. Or rather, Rothschild remained a name, a ghostly symbol of the “invisible hand,” whereas Einstein became a true icon: an image of the divine, the face of the mind, the prophet of Prometheanism.²¹

At the turn of the twentieth century, the spectacular Jewish success in the central compartments of modern life provoked a vigorous debate about its origins. Some of the arguments and outbursts are routinely included in histories of anti-Semitism, but there was a lot more to the debate than anti-Semitism (however defined). Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the racist ideologue and breathless poet of the “free and loyal” Teuton, offered several tenuously related but influential explanations for the fateful (and altogether “negative”) fact that the Jews had become “a disproportionately important and in many spheres actually dominant constituent of our life.” First, there was the apparently innate Jewish “possession of an abnormally developed will,” which gave rise to their “phenomenal elasticity.” Second, there was their historically formed faith, which lacked “abstract inconceivable mysteries,” politicized man’s relationship to God, equated morality with blind obedience to the law, and spawned the corrosive rationalism that had proved the nemesis of the free and loyal Teuton. Finally—and most fatefully—“Judaism and its product, the Jew,” were responsible for “the idea of physical race-unity and race-purity”: the very idea that Chamberlain admired in the Teutons and urged them to safeguard in the face of the Jewish onslaught. The future Nazi prophet condemned the Jews for inventing nationalism and intolerance. “Sin is for them a national thing, whereas the individual is ‘just’ when he does not transgress the ‘law’; redemption is not the moral redemption of the individual, but the redemption of the State; that is difficult for us to understand.”²²

Joseph Jacobs, a prominent Jewish historian and folklorist, agreed with Chamberlain that there was a special relationship between the Jews and the Modern Age, but he had a much higher opinion of both. In his account, Jewish “thinkers and sages with eagle vision took into their thought the destinies of all humanity, and rang out in clarion voice a message of hope to the down-trodden of all races. Claiming for themselves and their people the duty and obligations of a true aristocracy, they held forth to the peoples ideals of a true democracy founded on right and justice.” Jacobs’s explanations for the Jewish preeminence are similar to Chamberlain’s, if much more concise and consistent. Regarding religion as a possibly important but ultimately elusive factor, he attributes Jewish success to heredity, or “germ-plasm.” “There is a certain probability,” he argues, “that a determinate number of Jews at the present time will produce a larger number of ‘geniuses’ (whether inventive or not, I will not say) than any equal number of men of other races. It seems highly probable, for example, that German Jews at the present moment are quantitatively (not necessarily qualitatively) at the head of European intellect.” The spread of such high intellectual ability over dissimilar environments would seem to confirm the theory of a common ancestry of contemporary Jews, and “if this be so, the desirability of further propagation of the Jewish germ-plasm is a matter not merely of Jewish interest.” One proof is the observable success of the “Jewish half-breeds”: “their existence, in large number, is sufficient to disprove Chamberlain’s contention of the radical superiority of the German over the Jewish germ-plasm.”²³

Werner Sombart had little use for the germ-plasm. “What the race-theorists have produced is a new sort of religion to replace the old Jewish or Christian religion. What else is the theory of an Aryan, or German, ‘mission’ in the world but a modern form of the ‘chosen people’ belief?” Instead, he argues that the “Jewish genius” stems from perennial nomadism, first of the pastoral, then of the trading kind. “Only in the shepherd’s calling, never in the farmer’s, could the idea of gain have taken root, and the conception of unlimited production have become a reality. Only in the shepherd’s calling could the view have become dominant that in economic activities the abstract quantity of commodities matters, not whether they are fit or sufficient for use.” The Jews are the nomads of Europe. “ ‘Nomadism’ is the progenitor of Capitalism. The relation between Capitalism and Judaism thus becomes more clear.”

What does become clear from Sombart’s account of the relation between capitalism and Judaism is that nomadism is scarcely more useful to his cause than the germ-plasm. Sombart’s book The Jews and Modern Capitalism was a response to Max Weber, and most of his argument was entirely—if imperfectly—Weberian. Capitalism is inconceivable without the Protestant ethic; Judaism is much more Protestant (older, tougher, and purer) than Protestantism; Judaism is the progenitor of Capitalism. “The whole religious system is in reality nothing but a contract between Jehovah and his chosen people, a contract with all its consequences and all its duties.” Every Jew has an account in Heaven, and every Jew’s purpose in life is to balance it by following written rules. To follow the rules, one has to know them; hence “the very study itself is made a means of rendering life holy.” Relentless study and obedience impel one “to think about one’s actions and to accomplish them in harmony with the dictates of reason.” Ultimately, religion as law aims “at the subjugation of the merely animal instincts in man, at the bridling of his desires and inclinations and at the replacing of impulses by thoughtful action; in short, at the ‘ethical tempering of man.’ ” The result is worldly asceticism rewarded by earthly possessions, or Puritanism without pork.²⁴

The rationalization of life accustomed the Jew to a mode of living contrary to (or side by side with) Nature and therefore also to an economic system like the capitalistic, which is likewise contrary to (or side by side with) Nature. What in reality is the idea of making profit, what is economic rationalism, but the application to economic activities of the rules by which the Jewish religion shaped Jewish life? Before capitalism could develop the natural man had to be changed out of all recognition, and a rationalistically minded mechanism introduced in his stead. There had to be a transvaluation of all economic values. And what was the result? The homo capitalisticus, who is closely related to the homo Judaeus, both belonging to the same species, homines rationalistici artificiales.²⁵

This was a reinterpretation of the old contrast, most famously expressed by Matthew Arnold, between the legalism, discipline, and “self-conquest” of Hebraism, on the one hand, and the freedom, spontaneity, and harmony of Hellenism, on the other.²⁶ Arnold had considered both indispensable to civilized life but lamented a growing modern imbalance, produced by the Reformation, in favor of Hebraism. Nietzsche (who provided Sombart with much of his terminology) rephrased the lament and took it into the realm of good and evil—and beyond:

The Jews have brought off that miraculous feat of an inversion of values, thanks to which life on earth has acquired a novel and dangerous attraction for a couple of millennia; their prophets have fused “rich,” “godless,” “evil,” “violent,” and “sensual” into one and were the first to use the word “world” as an opprobrium. This inversion of values (which includes using the word “poor” as synonymous with “holy” and “friend”) constitutes the significance of the Jewish people: they mark the beginning of the slave rebellion in morals.²⁷

In Nietzsche’s theater of two actors, this inversion of values amounted to a victory of “the hopelessly mediocre and insipid man” over the warrior, and thus over Nature—the very transformation, albeit much older, that Max Weber described as the source of that “middle-class life,” of which “it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.’ ” What Sombart did was reconcile the two chronologies by providing the missing link: the Judaic ethic produced the modern Jew; the modern Jew summoned the spirit of capitalism.²⁸

Sombart did not like capitalism (any more than did Weber); Jews excelled under capitalism; so Sombart did not like the Jews (any more than Weber liked the Puritans). Madison C. Peters, a celebrated New York preacher and Protestant theologian, associated the Modern Age with freedom, democracy, prosperity, progress, and clipped fingernails—and liked both the Jews and the Puritans very much. It is true, he argued, that the Puritans were born-again Jews who reverted “to biblical precedents for the regulation of the minutest details of daily life,” but the important thing is that “the Hebrew Commonwealth” had been held up by “our patriotic divines” as a “guide to the American people in their mighty struggle for the blessings of civil and religious liberty.” According to Peters, “it was Jewish money and Jewish encouragement which backed the genius and daring of the Genoese navigator to brave the terrors of the unknown seas,” and it was Jewish energy and Jewish enterprise that helped build “the greatness and the glory, the fame and fortune, the prestige and prosperity of this unapproached and unapproachable land.” And if Jewish rationalism, studiousness, and a sense of chosenness are bad traits, then so are “their thrift and industry, their devotion to high ideals, their love for liberty and fairness between man and man, their unquenchable thirst for knowledge, their unswerving devotion to the principles of their race and the tenets of their faith.” Finally—and not at all trivially—“the Jew is extremely fond of soap and water under all circumstances; especially has he a fondness for the latter. Whenever he gets an opportunity to take a bath he takes one.” All things considered, therefore, the Jews epitomize Western civilization—as its original creators, best practitioners, and rightful beneficiaries. And of the many traits that are essential to both, one of the most fundamental is mental agility, or intellectualism. “The only way to prevent Jewish scholars from winning most of the prizes is to shut them out of the competition.”²⁹

Virtually all of those who associated Jews with modernity judged them according to the traditional Apollonian-Mercurian oppositions of natural versus artificial, settled versus nomadic, body versus mind. Especially body versus mind: what was sterile rationality to Sombart was intellectual ability to Jacobs, but both agreed on the centrality of the two concepts and the permanence of their attachments. The Jews always represented the mind, which always represented the modern world, whether one liked it or not. In the words of John Foster Fraser (a celebrated British journalist and travel writer who liked both the Jews and the modern world), “in what goes to make what is called ‘the man of the world’—alertness and knowledge—the Jew is the superior of the Christian,” leaving the latter no choice but to “recognize that in fair contest it is pretty certain that the Jew will outstep the Christian.” No wonder, then, that the Americans, who value fair contest above all else, get their ideals (which include democracy, frugality, and love of children, among others) “more from the Jews than from their Saxon forebears,” whereas the Germans, who resemble their forebears much more closely, have no choice but to resort to numerus clausus because the struggle “between the sons of the North, with their blond hair and sluggish intellects, and these sons of the Orient, with their black eyes and alert minds, is an unequal one.”³⁰

Sombart agreed (curiously enough), as he lamented the fact that “the more slow-witted, the more thick-skulled, the more ignorant of business a people is, the more effective is Jewish influence on their economic life,” and so did the British historian (and committed Zionist) Lewis Bernstein Namier, who attributed the rise of Nazism—in familiar Mercurian terms—to the German inability to compete. “The German is methodical, crude, constructive mainly in a mechanical sense, extremely submissive to authority, a rebel or a fighter only by order from above; he gladly remains all his life a tiny cog in a machine”; whereas “the Jew, of Oriental or Mediterranean race, is creative, pliable, individualistic, restless, and undisciplined,” providing much needed but never acknowledged leadership in German cultural life. Similar contrasts were easily observed throughout Europe, especially in the East and most strikingly in the Russian Empire, where the Apollonian-Mercurian gap appeared as wide as the legal restrictions were severe. According to Fraser, “if the Russian dispassionately spoke his mind, I think he would admit that his dislike of the Jew is not so much racial or religious—though these play great parts—as a recognition that the Jew is his superior, and in conflicts of wits get the better of him.” Indeed, the Russian may be admirable because of “his simplicity of soul, his reverence, his genuine brotherliness, his wide-eyed wondering outlook on life,” which shines through in his music and literature, “but when you reckon the Russian in the field of commerce, where nimbleness of brain has its special function, he does not show well.”³¹

Nimbleness could always be denigrated as deviousness, whereas soulfulness was the usual consolation of a thick skull; either way, the fact of the Jewish success, or “ubiquity,” remained at the center of the debate, the real puzzle to be explained. Between the supernatural tales of conspiracy and possession on the one hand and the arcana of the germ-plasm on the other, the most common explanations were historical and religious (“cultural”). Sombart, who bemoaned the passing of “those Northern forests . . . where in winter the faint sunlight glistens on the rime and in summer the song of birds is everywhere,” provided a particularly influential antirationalist account. On the “Enlightenment” side, one of the most eloquent statements belonged to the prolific publicist and social scientist Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu. “We often marvel at the variety of Jewish aptitudes,” he wrote by way of summarizing his argument, “at their singular ability to assimilate, at the speed with which they appropriate our knowledge and our methods.”

We are mistaken. They have been prepared by heredity, by two thousand years of intellectual gymnastics. By taking up our sciences, they do not enter an unknown territory, they return to a country already explored by their ancestors. The centuries have not only equipped Israel for stock-market wars and assaults on fortune, they have armed it for scientific battles and intellectual conquests.³²

Equally mistaken, according to Leroy-Beaulieu, was the talk of a peculiarly Jewish (and peculiarly harmful) messianism—what Chamberlain would call “their talent for planning impossible socialistic and economic Messianic empires without inquiring whether they thereby destroy the whole of the civilization and culture which we have so slowly acquired.” In fact, the Jewish Messiah belonged to us all: “we have a name for him, we await him, too, we call him as loudly as we can.” It is called Progress—the same progress that had “slumbered in the [Jewish] books, biding its time, until Diderot and Condorcet revealed it to the nations and spread it around the world. But no sooner had the Revolution proclaimed it and begun to implement it than the Jews recognized it and reclaimed it as the legacy of their ancestors.” The Messiah finally arrived when, “at the approach of our tricolor, caste barriers and ghetto walls tumbled down,” and the liberated Jew stood atop a barricade, at the head of the universal struggle against prejudice and inequality.³³

Marianne was as Jewish as Rothschild and Einstein, in other words, and most authors agreed that the reasons for their rise could be found in the Jewish past. Even conspiracy theorists explained the Jewish capacity for intrigue as a result of their long-standing traits, and most racial explanations were Lamarckian in that they assumed the inheritance of historically acquired characteristics. But there was another view, of course—one that preferred rootlessness and homelessness to antiquity and continuity. In a 1919 essay which reshaped that tradition to fit a radically Mercurianized world, Thorstein Veblen argued that “the intellectual preeminence of Jews in modern Europe” was due to a break with the past, not its resurrection. “The cultural heritage of the Jewish people” may be very ancient and very distinguished, “but these achievements of the Jewish ancients neither touch the frontiers of modern science nor do they fall in the lines of modern scholarship.” Scientific progress “presupposes a degree of exemption from hard-and-fast preconceptions, a sceptical animus, Unbefangenheit, release from the dead hand of conventional finality,” and the reason “the intellectually gifted Jew” is everywhere on top is that he is the most unattached, the most marginal, and therefore the most skeptical and unconventional of all scientists. “It is by loss of allegiance, or at the best by force of a divided allegiance to the people of his origin, that he finds himself in the vanguard of modern inquiry. . . . He becomes a disturber of the intellectual peace, but only at the cost of becoming an intellectual wayfaring man, a wanderer in the intellectual no-man’s-land, seeking another place to rest, farther along the road, somewhere over the horizon.” The eternal Jew meets the new Jewish scientist and likes what he sees. By curing the Jews of their homelessness, Zionism would spell the end of their “intellectual preeminence.”³⁴

Where Sombart had compared the Jews to Mephistopheles shadowing the Christian Faust, Veblen insisted that it was Faust who was the real Jew. But both agreed—and so did everyone else—that there was a peculiar kinship between Jews and the Modern Age, that the Jews, in some very important sense, were the Modern Age. No matter what the standard—rationalism, nationalism, capitalism, professionalism, Faustian Prometheanism, literacy, democracy, hygiene, alienation, or the nuclear family—Jews seemed to have been there first, done it earlier, understood it best. Even Zarathustra, whom Nietzsche chose to speak on his behalf, turned out to be the exclusive God of the “Jews of India.” In the words of the Parsi poet Adil Jussawalla, “Nietzsche did not know that Superman Zarathustra was the Jews’ first brother.”³⁵

The identification of the Jews with the forces that were molding the modern world was one of the few things that most European intellectuals, from the Romantics of the “Northern forests” to the prophets of Reason and the tricolor, could occasionally agree on. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, the two great apocalyptic revolts against modernity were also the two final solutions to the “Jewish problem.” Marx, who began his career by equating capitalism with Judaism, attempted to solve his own Jewish problem (and that of so many of his disciples) by slaying capitalism. Hitler, whose “long soul struggle” as a young man had revealed the Jewish roots of urban “corruption,” attempted to tame capitalism by murdering Jews.³⁶

The Jewish economic and professional success beyond the ghetto walls was accompanied by the easing of the old “blood” and food taboos and the adoption of new languages, rituals, names, clothes, and kinsmen in a dramatic makeover commonly described as “assimilation.” But who were the Jews becoming similar to? Certainly not their peasant neighbors and clients, who were undergoing an agonizing “urbanization,” “modernization,” and “secularization” of their own. Both were moving, at the same time, into the same semineutral spaces of modern citizenship by paying the required fee of ceasing to be “themselves.” The Jews were shedding their names and their tribe in order to keep their Mercurian trades and Mercurian cleverness; the peasants had to forsake their whole world in order to keep their name and their tribe. Both were deluded: whereas the assimilating Jews believed, reasonably but mistakenly, that they were discarding something that had lost all meaning, the urbanizing peasants assumed, absurdly but correctly, that they could change completely while remaining the same. At the dawn of the Modern Age, Henri de Navarre had been able to say that Paris was “worth a mass” because religion no longer mattered much to him. Many nineteenth-century European Jews felt the same way, forgetting that there was a new religion abroad. The mass, it is true, was not worth very much, but Paris was now the capital of a nation, and it was asking a much higher price. All modern states were Mercurias in Apollonian garb; old Mercurians, of all people, should never have underestimated the importance of disguise.

The Modern Age was Jewish not only because everyone was now a stranger but also because strangers were organized—or reassembled—into groups based on common descent and destiny. The Weberian world of “mechanized petrification embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance” could be sustained—indeed, conceived—only within states that posed as tribes. The ordeal of peasant conversion to city life could be endured only if the city claimed convincingly and sincerely enough that it was but an expanded and improved version of the peasant village, not its demonic slayer. The transformation of peasants into Frenchmen could be accomplished only if France stood for Patrie as well as Progress.³⁷

This combination of patriotism and progress, or the worship of the new state as an old tribe (commonly known as nationalism) became the new opium of the people. Total strangers became kinsmen on the basis of common languages, origins, ancestors, and rituals duly standardized and disseminated for the purpose. The nation was family writ large: ascriptive and blood-bound but stretched well beyond human memory or face recognition, as only a metaphor could be. Or perhaps it was Christianity writ small: one was supposed to love certain others as brothers and certain neighbors as oneself. In other words, the Jews were doomed to a new exile as a result of the Judaizing of their Apollonian hosts: no sooner had they become ready to become Germans (for who needed chosenness, kashrut, or the shadkhen [matchmaker] if everyone was becoming Jewish anyway?) than the Germans themselves became “chosen.” It was now as difficult for a Jew to become German as it had always been for a German to become Jewish. Christianity, at least in principle, had been open to all by means of conversion, but back when Christianity was being taken seriously, so was Judaism, which meant that conversions were true acts of apostasy. Only when Judaism became less legitimate among the “enlightened” and the “assimilated,” and conversion became a more or less formal oath of allegiance to the bureaucratic state, did the bureaucratic state became national and thus jealously exclusive.

A male convert to Judaism had always cut a lonely and melancholy figure because it was not easy to “imagine” one’s way into an alien community bounded by sacralized common descent and a variety of physical and cultural markers that served as both proof of shared parentage and a guarantee of continued endogamy. The would-be Jewish converts to Germanness or Hungarianness found themselves in a similar but much more difficult position, because Germanness and Hungarianness were represented by a powerful state that claimed to be both national and (more or less) liberal while also insisting on being the sole guardian of rights and judge of identity.

The most common early strategy of the newly “emancipated” and “assimilated” Jews was to promote the liberal cause by celebrating “neutral spaces” in public life and cultivating a liberal education and the liberal professions in their own. Jews were not just the embodiment of Reason and Enlightenment—they were among their most vocal and loyal champions. They voted for liberal parties, argued the virtues of individual liberties, and faithfully served those states that allowed them to do so. The Habsburg Empire—as well as France, of course—was the object of much loyalty and admiration because, as the historian Carl Schorske put it, “the emperor and the liberal system offered status to the Jews without demanding nationality; they became the supra-national people of the multinational state, the one folk which, in effect, stepped into the shoes of the earlier aristocracy.”³⁸

To join the later—liberal—aristocracy, one needed to acquire a new secular education and professional expertise. And that is exactly what the Jews, as a group, did—with an intensity and fervor worthy of a yeshiva and a degree of success that was the cause of much awe and resentment. Gustav Mahler’s father read French philosophers when he was not selling liquor; Karl Popper’s father translated Horace when he was not practicing law; and Victor Adler’s grandfather divided his time between Orthodox Judaism and European Enlightenment. But what mattered most—to them and thousands like them, as well as to History—is whose fathers they were. Liberal education as the new Jewish religion was very similar to the old Jewish religion—except that it was much more liberal. Secularized Jewish fathers—stern or indulgent, bankers (like Lukács’s father) or haberdashers (like Kafka’s)—did their best to bring up free, cosmopolitan Men: men without fathers. They were remarkably successful: indeed, few generations of patriarchs were as good at raising patricides and grave diggers as first-generation Jewish liberals. And no one understood it better than Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx.³⁹

Liberalism did not work because neutral spaces were not very neutral. The universities, “free” professions, salons, coffeehouses, concert halls, and art galleries in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest became so heavily Jewish that liberalism and Jewishness became almost indistinguishable. The Jews’ pursuit of rootlessness ended up being almost as familial as their pursuit of wealth. Success at “assimilation” made assimilation more difficult, because the more successful they were at being modern and secular, the more visible they became as the main representatives of modernity and secularism. And this meant that people who were not very good at modernity and secularism, or who objected to them for a variety of Apollonian (and Dionysian) reasons, were likely to be impressed by political anti-Semitism. As Käthe Leichter remembered her high school days in fin de siècle Vienna, “with my [Jewish] friends I discussed the meaning of life, shared my ideas about books, poetry, nature, and music. With the daughters of government officials I played ‘house.’ ” Käthe Leichter grew up to be a socialist and a sociologist; at least some of those officials’ daughters grew up to be anti-Semites.⁴⁰

But mostly liberalism did not work because it never could—not in the sense of interchangeable cosmopolitan individuals and certainly not in the Apollonian Babylon of Central and Eastern Europe. The facts that nobody spoke Liberalese as a native tongue and that the Man who had Rights also had citizenship and family attachments were easy to forget if one lived in a state that was more or less successful at equating itself with both family and the universe. It was much harder to do in a doomed Christian state or a youthful national one. Nobody spoke Austro-Hungarian, on the one hand, and on the other, it took a lot of practice to start thinking of Czech as a language of high secular culture. The Jews who did not wish to speak the language of particularism (Yiddish, for most of them) had to find the language of universalism by shopping around. The main selling points of would-be national universalisms (French, German, Russian, Hungarian) were a claim to a prestigious high-cultural tradition and, most important, a state that would give that claim some muscle and conviction. Esperanto—conceived in Białystok by the Jewish student Ludwik Zamenhof—had no chance of living to maturity. Universalism relied on the nation-state as much as the nation did.

The Jews did not launch the Modern Age. They joined it late, had little to do with some of its most important episodes (such as the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions), and labored arduously to adjust to its many demands. They did adjust better than most—and reshaped the modern world as a consequence—but they were not present at the creation and missed out on some of the early role assignments.

By most accounts, one of the earliest episodes in the history of modern Europe was the Renaissance, or the rebirth of godlike Man. But the Renaissance did not just create the cult of Man—it created cults of particular men whose job it was to write the new Scriptures, to endow an orphaned and deified humanity with a new shape, a new past, and a new tongue fit for a new Paradise. Dante, Camões, and Cervantes knew themselves to be prophets of a new age, knew their work to be divinely inspired and “immortal,” knew they were writing a new Bible by rewriting the Odyssey and the Aeneid. Even as Christianity continued to claim a complete monopoly on the transcendental, the Modern Age turned polytheistic—or rather, reverted to the days of divine oligarchy, with the various gods enjoying universal legitimacy (the “Western canon”) but serving as patrons and patriarchs of particular tribes. Dante, Camões, and Cervantes defined and embodied national golden ages, national languages, and national journeys toward salvation. Ethnic nationalism, like Christianity, had a content, and every national Genesis had an author. Cervantes may be the inventor of the modern novel and an object of much reverence and imitation, but only among Spanish-speakers is he worshiped rapturously and tragically, as a true god; only in Spanish high culture must every contender for canonical status take part in the continuing dialogue between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.⁴¹

In England, the Age of Shakespeare coincided with, and perhaps ushered in, the Universal Age of Discovery, or the Era of Universal Mercurianism. This was true of all national golden ages, but the English one proved more equal than others because England (along with Holland but much more influentially) became the first Protestant nation, the first nation of strangers, the first nation to replace God with itself—and with its Bard. By being the English national poet, Shakespeare became “the inventor of the human.” The Renaissance met the Reformation, or, as Matthew Arnold put it, “Hellenism reentered the world, and again stood in the presence of Hebraism, a Hebraism renewed and purged.”⁴²

In this context, the French Revolution was an attempt to catch up by taking a shortcut—an attempt to build a nation of strangers by creating a world of brothers. According to Ernest Gellner, “the Enlightenment was not merely a secular prolongation and more thorough replay of the Reformation. In the end it also became an inquest by the unreformed on their own condition, in the light of the successes of the reformed. The philosophes were the analysts of the under-development of France.”⁴³ France is the only European nation without a consecrated and uncontested national poet, the only nation for which the rational Man is a national hero. It is “ethnic” as well, of course, with its “ancestors the Gauls” and its jealous worship of the national language, but the seriousness of its civic commitments is unique in Europe. Rabelais, Racine, Molière, and Victor Hugo have failed to unseat Reason and have had to cohabit with it, however uncomfortably.

From then on, England and France presented two models of modern nationhood: build your own tribe of strangers complete with an immortal Bard, or claim, more or less convincingly, to have transcended tribalism once and for all. The English road to nationalism was the virtually universal first choice. The old “Renaissance nations” with established modern pantheons and golden ages (Dante’s Italy, Cervantes’s Spain, Camões’s Portugal) had only the Mercurian (“bourgeois”) half of the task ahead of them; the new Protestant nations (Holland, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, possibly Germany) could take their time searching for an appropriate bard; all the others had to scramble desperately on both fronts and perhaps entertain the French option when in trouble. Romanticism was a rebirth of the Renaissance and a time of frenetic Bible writing (on canvas and music sheets, as well as on paper). Those laboring in the shadow of an already canonized national divinity (Wordsworth and Shelley, for example) had to settle for demigod status, but elsewhere the field was wide open, for better or worse. The new Romantic intelligentsias east of the Rhine were all raised to be “self-hating” because they had been born in the twilight of Christian universalism and had promptly found themselves belonging to inarticulate, undifferentiated, and unchosen tribes (and possibly to illegitimate states, as well). Petr Chaadaev, the founding father of the Russian intelligentsia, was speaking for all of them when he said that Russia lived “in the narrowest of presents, without past or future, amidst dull stagnation. . . . Alone in the world, we have not given the world anything, have not taken anything from the world, have contributed nothing to the advance of human thought, and have distorted whatever traces of that advance we did receive.” His words rang out like “a shot in the dark night,” according to Herzen, and soon everyone woke up and went to work. Goethe, Pushkin, Mickiewicz, and Petőfi, among many others, were celebrated as national messiahs in their lifetimes and formally deified soon after their deaths. New modern nations were born: certifiably chosen and thus immortal, ready to tackle History in general and the Age of Mercurianism, in particular.⁴⁴

Jews who wanted to join the world of equal and inalienable rights had to do it through one of these traditions. To enter the neutral spaces, one had to convert to a national faith. And that is precisely what many European Jews did—in much greater numbers than those who converted to Christianity, because the acceptance of Goethe as one’s savior did not seem to be an apostasy and because it was much more important and meaningful than baptism. After the triumph of cultural nationalism and the establishment of national pantheons, Christianity was reduced to a formal survival or reinterpreted as a part of the national journey. One could be a good German or Hungarian without being a good Christian (and in an ideal liberal Germany or Hungary, religion in the traditional sense would become a private matter “separate from the state”), but one could not be a good German or Hungarian without worshiping the national canon. This was the real new church, the one that could not be separated from the state lest the state lose all meaning, the one that was all the more powerful for being taken for granted, the one that Jews could enter while still believing that they were in a neutral place worshiping Progress and Equality. It was possible to be an American “of Mosaic faith” because the American national religion was not based on tribal descent and the cult of the national soul embodied by a national bard. In turn-of-the-century Central and Eastern Europe, it was impossible because the national faith was itself Mosaic.

Having entered the new church, Jews proceeded to worship. At first the preferred medium was German, but with the establishment of other strong, institutionalized canons, large numbers of Jews became Hungarian, Russian, and Polish believers. Osip Mandelstam’s description of his bookcase tells the story of these Jews chronologically, genealogically (his mother’s and father’s lineages), and, from his vantage point as a Russian poet, hierarchically:

I remember the lower shelf as being always chaotic: the books were not standing side by side but lay like ruins: the rust-colored Pentateuchs with their tattered bindings, a Russian history of the Jews, written in the clumsy and timid language of a Russian-speaking Talmudist. This was the Judaic chaos abandoned to the dust. . . .

Above these Judaic remnants the books stood in orderly formation; these were the Germans—Schiller, Goethe, Koerner, and Shakespeare in German—the old Leipzig and Tübingen editions, short and stout in their embossed dark-red bindings, with the fine print meant for youthful sharp-sightedness and with delicate engravings hinting at classical antiquity: the women with their hair down and arms outstretched, the lamp depicted as an oil-burning one, the horsemen with their high foreheads, and the grape clusters in the vignettes. That was my father the autodidact fighting his way into the Germanic world through the Talmudic thicket.

Higher still were my mother’s Russian books: Pushkin in the 1876 Isakov edition. I still think it was an absolutely marvelous edition and like it better than the Academy one. There is nothing superfluous in it; the type is gracefully arranged; the columns of verse flow freely, like soldiers in flying battalions, and leading them, like generals, are the sensible, distinct year headings all the way through 1837. What color is Pushkin? Every color is accidental—for what color could capture the wizardry of words?⁴⁵

The secular Jews’ love of Goethe, Schiller, and other Pushkins—as well as the various northern forests they represented—was sincere and tender. (Germany was peculiar in having twin gods, as Mandelstam called them. They are still together in their Weimar mausoleum.) “At night I think of Germany / And then there is no sleep for me,” wrote Heine, with as much longing as irony, in his Parisian exile. “Were we not raised on German legends?” asked Moritz Goldstein more than half a century later, “Does not the Germanic forest live within us?” His own answer was a resounding “yes”: virtually all the Jewish households in the German lands—and far, far beyond—had their own Schiller shelves next to, and increasingly above, the “rust-colored Pentateuchs with their tattered bindings.” So strong was the passion and so complete the identification that very soon Jews became conspicuous in the role of priests of various national cults: as poets, painters, performers, readers, interpreters, and guardians. “We Jews administer the spiritual possessions” of Germany, wrote Moritz Goldstein.⁴⁶

The prominence of Jews in the administration of Germany’s spiritual possessions posed a problem. First, because there seemed to be more to Germany than spiritual possessions. In the words of Gershom Scholem, “for many Jews the encounter with Friedrich Schiller was more real than their encounter with actual Germans.” And who were the actual Germans? According to Franz Rosenzweig, they were “the assessor, the fraternity student, the petty bureaucrat, the thick-skulled peasant, the pedantic school master.” If one wished to be German, one had to join them, embrace them, become them—if one knew how.⁴⁷ “We meet the Russian people through their culture,” wrote Vladimir Jabotinsky in 1903, “mostly their writers—or rather, the best, highest, purest manifestations of the Russian spirit.” However, he continued,

Because we do not know the daily life of Russia—the Russian dreariness and philistinism—we form our impression of the Russian people by looking only at their geniuses and leaders, and of course we get a beautiful fairy tale as a result. I do not know if many of us love Russia, but many, too many of us, children of the Jewish intelligentsia, are madly, shamefully in love with Russian culture, and through it with the whole Russian world.⁴⁸

This is a “distorted image,” to borrow Sidney Bolkosky’s expression. Not only because “stupid Ivan” remained—in the shtetls, at least—the dominant Jewish representation of their non-Jewish neighbors, but also because the assessors, petty bureaucrats, and thick-skulled peasants were themselves trying to learn who their geniuses were and how to love them madly. The meaning of nationalism and the point of state-run mass education systems is to persuade large numbers of vaguely related rural Apollonians that they belong to a chosen tribe that is much bigger than the local community of shared customs and meals, but much smaller than the more or less universal Christianity of shared humanity and devotion. The various assessors, petty bureaucrats, and thick-skulled peasants had to learn—along with Jabotinsky’s Jewish children but with much greater difficulty—that “the whole Russian world” was a reflection of Russian culture, and that Russian culture, like any other high culture worthy of the name, had its auspicious folkloric beginnings, its glorious golden age, its very own Shakespeare, its many geniuses who sprouted in his wake, and—if they were lucky—its own mighty state that defended and promoted that culture and its proud bearers. No one was supposed to love the “dreariness” and the “daily life” for their own sake, and no one was seriously expected to become a thick-skulled peasant (except perhaps in the summer, when colleges were not in session).

The non-Jewish “intelligentsia children” had as much trouble trying to embrace “the people” as the Jewish ones did, because both had become accustomed, as a result of intensive training, to viewing “actual Germans” through Friedrich Schiller. The “people,” meanwhile, were scratching their heads trying to combine authenticity with education. Like all great religions, nationalism is based on an absurd doctrine, and it so happened that the two high-culture areas where most European Jews lived failed to come to terms with it. In Germany, the assessor, the fraternity student, the petty bureaucrat, the pedantic schoolmaster, and the thick-skulled peasant were able to lash out against the impossible demands of modernity by identifying them with the Jews and staging the world’s most brutal and best-organized pogrom; in Russia, the children of the intelligentsia (many of them Jewish) took power and attempted to implement an uncompromising version of the “French model” by waging the world’s most brutal and best-organized assault against the assessor, the fraternity student, the petty bureaucrat, the pedantic schoolmaster, and the thick-skulled peasant. Especially the thick-skulled peasant.

In any case, the Jewish problem with national canons was not that the Jews loved Pushkin too much (it is impossible to live in Russia and love Pushkin too much) but that they were too good at it. It was the same problem, in other words, as the one faced by Jewish doctors, lawyers, and journalists—except that the object in question was the “spiritual possessions of a nation.” In pre–World War I Odessa, according to Jabotinsky, “assimilated Jews found themselves in the role of the only public bearers and propagandists of Russian culture,” with no choice but “to honor Pushkin . . . in total isolation.” Something similar—allowing for Goldstein’s polemical hyperbole—was happening in Vienna and Budapest. Much to their own surprise and discomfort (as well as pride), Jews became extremely visible in the occupations whose function was to disguise the irreversibility of what was happening to yesterday’s Apollonians. To promote liberalism, they took up national canons, and by promoting national canons, they undermined liberalism and their own position—because the point of national canons was to validate therapeutic claims to tribal continuity. Pushkin, Mickiewicz, Goethe-Schiller, Petőfi, and their successors enacted and symbolized the conversion of legendary Slavic, Germanic, and Magyar pasts into modern high cultures, to be used by the putative descendants of those pasts. Jews could not and mostly did not pretend to partake of that tribal connection and thus were seen as interlopers. To complete the quotation from Moritz Goldstein, “We Jews administer the spiritual possessions of a people that denies us the capability of doing so.”⁴⁹

The stronger the denial, the greater the perceived Jewishness of the “administrators,” many of whom never agreed to become German on German terms in any case. As Eugen Fuchs, the president of the largest German Jewish organization, said in 1919, “We are German and want to remain German, and achieve here, in Germany, on German soil, our equal rights, regardless of our Jewish characteristics. . . . Also, we want inner regeneration, a renaissance of Judaism, not assimilation. And we want proudly to remain true to our characteristics and our historical development.”⁵⁰ This statement can serve as a useful explication of the paradox contained in the title of Fuchs’s organization: Zentralverein für deutsche Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, or Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith. In the Age of Nationalism, one could not be German without sharing the German “historical development” any more than one could separate “the Jewish faith” from ethnic belonging.

But being unable or unwilling to be German in Germany or Russian in Russia was only half the problem, because most Jews of Central and Eastern Europe did not live among Germans or Russians. At the turn of the twentieth century, most Jews of Central and Eastern Europe were “the bearers and propagandists” of German culture among Czechs, Latvians, and Romanians; Magyar culture among Slovaks, Ukrainians, and Romanians; Russian culture among Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, and Poles; and Polish culture among Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Belorussians (to simplify a dizzyingly diverse picture). The Jews allied themselves with powerful states and cohesive national elites because that was their path to Progress; many of their neighbors strongly objected to those states and those elites—and therefore to the Jews—because they were on a different path to Progress. And so while the Jews worshiped Goethe-Schiller and Pushkin, their old Apollonian clients were learning how to express their love for Shevchenko and perhaps dreaming of a savior-state that would unite them for eternity. To the traditional Apollonian dislike of Mercurians was added a new resentment of the Jewish association, however tenuous, with a foreign nation-state, as well as the Jewish monopoly of the jobs that more and more Apollonians now wanted for themselves. Slovaks moving into towns found Jews occupying many high-status jobs and persisting in speaking German or Hungarian. The old secret language of Mercurian trade had been replaced by the new secret language of alien modernity. What pogroms, persuasion, and competition could not accomplish, perhaps one’s “own” state would.

The Jewish Age was also the Age of Anti-Semitism. Because of their Mercurian training, the Jews excelled in the entrepreneurial and professional occupations that were the source of status and power in the modern state; because of their Mercurian past, they were tribal strangers who did not belong in the modern state, let alone in its centers of power. This was a completely new “Jewish problem”: in the traditional society, Apollonians and Mercurians had lived in separate worlds defined by their different economic roles; their need and contempt for each other had been based on the continual reproduction of that difference. Now that they were moving into the same spaces without becoming interchangeable, the mutual contempt grew in reverse proportion to mutual need. Except that it was the Apollonians who wanted the Mercurian jobs and the Apollonians who “owned” the nation-state. The better the Jews were at becoming Germans or Hungarians, the more visible they became as an elite and the more resented they were as tribal aliens (“hidden” and therefore much more frightening, to be defined as “contagion” and combated by “cleansing”). Even when the transformation, or disguise, seemed successful, the never-ending influx of immigrants from the East, with their secret language, distinctive appearance, and traditional peddling and tailoring occupations, continually exposed the connection. The Jews were associated with both faces of modernity: capitalism and nationalism. As capitalists and professionals, they seemed to be (secretly) in charge of a hostile world; as the “administrators” of national cultures, they appeared to be impostors.

The “Jewish problem” was not just the problem that various (former) Christians had with the Jews; it was also the problem that various (former) Jews had with their Jewishness. Like other modern intelligentsias that did not have a secular national canon or nation-state to call their own, the “enlightened” Jews had some apocalyptic things to say about their fathers’ world. In 1829, Petr Chaadaev, the first prophet of Russian national despair, had written that Russians lived “like illegitimate children: without inheritance, without any connection to those who went before, without any memory of lessons learned, each one of us trying to reconnect the torn family thread.”⁵¹ By the turn of the twentieth century, many Jewish writers felt the same way about their own paternity. According to Otto Weininger, the Jew was lacking in a “free intelligible ego,” “true knowledge of himself,” “the individual sense of ancestry,” and ultimately in a “soul.”⁵² And in 1914 Joseph Hayyim Brenner wrote:

We have no inheritance. Each generation gives nothing of its own to its successor. And whatever was transmitted—the rabbinical literature—were better never handed down to us. . . . We live now without an environment, utterly outside any environment. . . . Our function now is to recognize and admit our meanness since the beginning of history to the present day, and the faults in our character, and then to rise and start all over again.⁵³

This is “self-hatred” as the lowest and earliest stage of national pride. Chaadaev, Weininger, Brenner, and many more like them, Jews and non-Jews, were prophets reminding their people of their chosenness. “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider” (Isa. 1:3). All three were martyrs: Chaadaev was declared insane; Weininger committed suicide; and Brenner was killed in Palestine. All three suffered in the name of national salvation—including Weininger, who appeared uncompromising in his negation: “Christ was a Jew, precisely that He might overcome the Judaism within Him, for he who triumphs over the deepest doubt reaches the highest faith; he who has raised himself above the most desolate negation is most sure in his position of affirmation.”⁵⁴

But what would be the salvation of secular Jews? One year after Chaadaev published his “First Philosophical Letter,” Pushkin was killed in a duel and Russia acquired its national poet and cultural legitimacy along with an inheritance and a future. To most Jewish intellectuals, meanwhile, the nationalist solution (proposed by the Zionist Brenner) seemed neither likely nor desirable. Were they not already Mercurian? Would they not have to go backward (away from Progress)? Did they really want to transform themselves into thick-skulled peasants now that the actual peasants had, for all practical purposes, admitted the error of their ways? Some did (by posing the questions differently), but the majority continued to battle, tragically, with various ethnic editions of European Enlightenment. The Jewish embrace of Pushkin was not being returned, and the more they loved him, the less fond he seemed to be of them (to paraphrase a line from Eugene Onegin).

With all their success—because of all their success—the highly cultivated children of upwardly mobile Jewish businessmen felt lonely indeed. The great modern transformation did not just combine tribalism with “ascetic rationalism.” As far as the European Jews, at least, were concerned, it was primarily—and tragically—about tribalism. By acting in a Weberian (ascetic rational) fashion, many of them found themselves in an impossible, and possibly unique, situation. Deprived of the comforts of their tribe and not allowed into the new ones created by their Apollonian neighbors, they became the only true moderns.

Thus the Jews stood for the discontents of the Modern Age as much as they did for its accomplishments. Jewishness and existential loneliness became synonyms, or at least close intellectual associates. “Modernism” as the autopsy and indictment of modern life was not Jewish any more than it was “degenerate,” but there is little doubt that Jewishness became one of its most important themes, symbols, and inspirations.

Modernism was a rebirth of Romanticism and the next great Promethean, prophetic revolution. (Realism did not propose a brand-new universe and thus never left the shadow of Romanticism.) Once again, would-be immortals set out to overcome history and reinvent the human by improving on Homer and the Bible. This time, it was an internal odyssey in search of the lost self: the confession, and perhaps salvation, of the Eternal Jew as the Underground Man. Modernism was a rebellion against the two bodies of modernity, and no one expressed or experienced it more fully than the chosen Jewish son who had rejected the capitalism and tribalism of his father and found himself all alone. It was a culture of solitude and self-absorption, a personification of Mercurian exile and reflexivity, a manifesto of the newly invented rebellious adolescence as a parable for the human condition.

Of the three most canonical voices of this revolution, one belonged to Franz Kafka, who classified—and damned—his businessman father as belonging to that “transitional generation of Jews which had migrated from the still comparatively devout countryside to the cities” and failed to retain, much less pass on, any meaningful Judaism beyond “a few flimsy gestures.” According to his filial denunciation (a genre that another modern Jewish prophet would make compulsory), “this sense of nothingness that often dominates me (a feeling that is in another respect, admittedly, also a noble and fruitful one) comes largely from your influence.” Brutally but “guiltlessly,” his father had created a perfect witness to the continual Fall of Man (as the junior Kafka described it). “What have I in common with Jews?” he wrote in his diary on January 8, 1914, at the age of thirty. “I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in the corner, content that I can breathe.” But of course he did no such thing, because it was precisely his “sense of nothingness”—which is to say, his Jewishness—that enabled him to “raise the world into the pure, the true, and the immutable.”⁵⁵

Another great poet of sublime loneliness and narcissism was Marcel Proust, the grandson of a successful Jewish foreign-exchange speculator and the baptized son of a woman who bore her liberal education and lost religion with an irony that Marcel seems to have found seductive. Seductive but not irresistible: elusive and protean as Proust’s characters appear to be, there existed, in his memory-induced world, two marginal “races” that circumscribed human fluidity even as they embodied it. Endowed with irreducible qualities that, once perceived, make persons and lives “intelligible” and “self-evident,” Jews and “inverts” are more proficient at wearing masks because they have more recognizable faces:

Shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not want their company, forgiving their rebuffs, enraptured by their condescensions; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism to which they are subjected, the opprobrium into which they have fallen, having finally been invested . . . with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which one who, more closely integrated with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is in appearance relatively less inverted, heaps upon one who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some support in their existence, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), they readily unmask those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it.⁵⁶

Accordingly, when Swann approached death, his “sense of moral solidarity with the rest of the Jews, a solidarity which Swann seemed to have forgotten throughout his life,” became wholly intelligible and self-evident. “Swann’s punchinello nose, absorbed for long years into an agreeable face, seemed now enormous, tumid, crimson, the nose of an old Hebrew rather than of a dilettante Valois.” Swann’s nose was both his curse and his strength. As Hannah Arendt summed up her discussion of Proust’s pursuit of things lost and recovered, “Jewishness was for the individual Jew at once a physical stain and a mysterious personal privilege, both inherent in a ‘racial predestination.’ ”⁵⁷

But it is the defiantly European disciple of Irish Jesuits who is most frequently credited with the creation of modernism’s most sacred text. An odyssey of “silence, exile, and cunning,” Ulysses does battle with the Bible, Hamlet, and every other certifiably divine comedy from Don Quixote to Faust as it follows the wanderings of the “half-and-half” Jew Leopold Bloom, whose son is dead, whose wife is unfaithful, and whose peripatetic father (a peddler, innkeeper, and alleged “perpetrator of frauds” from Szombathely [“Sabbathville”], Hungary) has changed his name, converted to Protestantism, and—in case more proof were needed—committed suicide. Bloom is a modern Everyman because he is the modern Ulysses, and the modern Ulysses has got to be a Jew: “Jewgreek is greekjew.” Or rather, the modern Ulysses is a modern Jew, who is remorseful but unapologetic about preferring Reason to Jerusalem and “treating with disrespect” such “beliefs and practices . . . as the prohibition of the use of fleshmeat and milk at one meal: the hebdomadary symposium of incoordinately abstract, perfervidly concrete mercantile coexreligionist excompatriots: the circumcision of male infants: the supernatural character of Judaic scripture: the ineffability of the tetragrammaton: the sanctity of the sabbath” (U17:1894–1901).⁵⁸

Thrice converted, Bloom remains a Mercurian among Apollonians (Odysseus among monsters and lesser gods). He “hates dirty eaters,” disapproves of drunkenness, “slips off when the fun gets too hot,” decries the death penalty, “resents violence and intolerance in any shape or form,” abominates the “patriotism of barspongers,” and believes that “if a fellow had a rower’s heart violent exercise was bad.” He is “a new womanly man”: a man of insatiable loquacity and curiosity who journeys ceaselessly in search of lost time, scientific knowledge, personal enrichment, and a social improvement “provocative of friendlier intercourse between man and man.” He is both Homer’s cunning Odysseus and Dante’s tragic Ulysses, both Don Quixote and Faust. He is “a perverted Jew,” as one of his friends and tormentors puts it (U8:696, 979; U16:1099–1100; U15:1692; U12:891–93; U15:1798; U16:1136–37; U12:1635).

But Bloom is not the only Mercurian in the Inferno of modern Dublin. Having buried his son and betrayed his father, he gains immortality by playing Virgil to an Apollonian bard who would redeem and transcend his birthplace by composing the Irish “national epic.” A modern prophet as a young artist, Stephen Dedalus knows that the Word comes before the chosen people: “You suspect . . . that I may be important because I belong to the faubourg Saint-Patrice called Ireland for short. . . . But I suspect . . . that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me” (U16:1160–65). Both Stephen and Ireland (as well as Bloom) will attain immortality when he has written his Ulysses.

Before he can accomplish his mission, however, he must renounce his mother, defy his God, leave his home, and accept Bloom as his father and savior. They need each other, and Ireland needs both of them: “Stephen dissented openly from Bloom’s views on the importance of dietary and civic selfhelp while Bloom dissented tacitly from Stephen’s views on the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature” (U17:28–30). Both were wrong and both knew it. At the end of their Odyssey, Bloom will have become reconciled to his Catholic Penelope, and Stephen will have become anointed as Odysseus (“a perverted Jew”).

What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom and about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen?

He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not. (U17:527–32)

Or maybe he knew that he knew that they were. Stephen was adopted (and symbolically conceived) by Bloom, and Bloom had Swann’s nose as his “endemic characteristic”—and knew that Stephen knew that he knew it. His “nasal and frontal formation was derived in a direct line of lineage which, though interrupted, would continue at distant intervals to more distant intervals to its most distant intervals” (U17:872–74).

But will Stephen the son of Bloom be able to produce the Irish national epic? Ulysses—his creature as well as creator and thus a kind of Bloom in its own right—seems perfectly equivocal on this question. Joyce’s modernist Bible is recognized as such, of course (witness the manner of notation and textual exegesis), but who are its chosen people besides the two Supermen “sensitive to artistic impressions” and skeptical of “many orthodox religious, national, social, and ethical doctrines”? (U17:20–25). It was obviously foolish of Bloom to attempt an earnest conversation with the “truculent troglodytes” of popular nationalism in Barney Kiernan’s public house, and neither Stephen Dedalus nor James Joyce was going to repeat Bloom’s mistake. Ulysses is written by an Odysseus, not by a Homer.

And then there is the question of the lingua Adamica. Ulysses (much of it untranslatable) is as much about the English language as it is about Ulysses. The chapter devoted to Stephen’s conception and subsequent gestation is also a history of English literature, while Bloom the father is also Shakespeare, or perhaps the ghost of Hamlet’s father. The Bible of universal homelessness is an ardent, ambivalent, and mostly unheeded tribute to a bounded speech community. “Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side of idolatry” (U9:43). Perhaps they have created them by now, and have become such figures themselves, but there is little doubt that they have no choice but to inhabit the world fathered and measured by Shakespeare. Hamlet may have had to make some room, but the idolaters of Pushkin and Cervantes only shrugged.

Nationalism—the great reward of the Apollonian odyssey and the nemesis of Jewish emancipation—was not the only modern religion. There were two more, both largely Jewish in their origins: Marxism and Freudianism. Both competed with nationalism on its own turf by offering to overcome the loneliness of the new Mercurian world (and by extension human unhappiness); both countered nationalism’s quaint tribalism with a modern (scientific) path to wholeness; both equaled nationalism in being capable of legitimizing modern states (socialism in one case and welfare capitalism in the other); and both seemed to eclipse nationalism by being able to determine the precise source of evil in the world and guarantee a redemption that was both specific and universal.

In Marxism, the original sin is in the historical division of labor, which leads to the alienation of labor, the enslavement of human beings by their own creations, and the fall of man into false consciousness, injustice, and degradation. The fall itself ensures salvation, however, for History, in its inexorable unfolding, creates a social class that, by virtue of its utter dehumanization and existential loneliness, is destined to redeem humanity by arriving at full self-realization. Proletarian free will and historical predestination (liberty and necessity) will merge in the act of an apocalyptic revolt against History in order to produce communism, a state in which there is no alienation of labor and thus no “contradictions,” no injustice, and no Time. This is collective salvation, in that the reconciliation with the world is achieved by the whole of humanity on Judgment Day, but it is also strikingly modern because it results from technological progress and has been prophesied scientifically. The omnivorous monster of modernity releases its victims by devouring itself.

Freudianism locates the original sin within the individual by postulating a demonic, elusive, self-generating, and inextinguishable “unconscious.” Salvation, or making the world whole again, amounts to individual self-knowledge, or the overcoming of the alienation between ego and libido and the achievement of inner peace (“mental unity”). This cannot be accomplished by “maladjusted” people themselves, because they are, by definition, possessed by the demon of the unconscious. Only professionally trained experts in touch with their own selves can tame (not exorcise!) the unruly unconscious, and only willing patients ready to open their hearts to their analysts can be healed. The séance itself combines features of both Christian confession and medical intervention but differs from them radically (possibly in the direction of greater efficacy) in that the sinner/patient is assumed to possess neither free will nor reason. “The modern malaise” is just that—a sickness that can be treated. Indeed, both the sickness and the treatment are perfect icons of the modern condition: the afflicted party is a lone individual, and the healer is a licensed professional hired by the sufferer (in what is the only certifiably rational act on his part). The result is individual, market-regulated, this-worldly redemption.⁵⁹

Both Marxism and Freudianism were organized religions, with their own churches and sacred texts, and both Marx and Freud were true messiahs insofar as they stood outside time and could not be justified in terms of their own teachings. Marx knew History before History could know itself, and Freud—Buddha-like—was the only human to have achieved spontaneous self-knowledge (through a heroic act of self-healing that made all future healing possible). Both Marxism and Freudianism addressed the modern predicament by dealing with eternity; both combined the language of science with a promise of deliverance; and both spawned coherent all-purpose ideologies that claimed access to the hidden springs of human behavior. One foresaw and welcomed the violent suicide of universal Mercurianism; the other taught how to adjust to it (because there was nothing else one could do). Neither one survived in Central Europe, where they were born: one went east to become the official religion of a cosmopolitan state that replaced the most obstinate ancien régime in Europe; the other moved to the United States to reinforce democratic citizenship with a much-needed new prop. Liberalism had always made use of nationalism to give some life, color, and communal legitimacy to its Enlightenment premise; in America, where nationwide tribal metaphors could not rely on theories of biological descent, Freudianism came in very handy indeed. Besides trying to reconcile individual egoisms with a common interest by means of formal checks and balances, the state undertook, increasingly, to cure individual souls. This was not a new development (as Foucault tried to show, in too many words), but it gained a great deal of support from the psychoanalytic revolution. The Explicitly Therapeutic State—one that dispensed spiritual welfare along with material entitlements—was born at about the same time as its two ugly cousins: Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and Stalin’s “fundamentally” socialist state free from “class antagonism.”

One of the main reasons why Marxism and Freudianism could compete with nationalism was that they, too, endorsed universal Mercurianism even as they condemned it. Freud stood Nietzsche on his head by suggesting the possibility of a well-functioning society of well-adjusted supermen: individuals who, with some help from Freud and friends, could defeat their own strangeness by taking charge of it. It was not a society of slaves or even of Weber’s “specialists without spirit”: it was a world of “freedom as perceived necessity.” As for Marx, not only was communism the only natural offspring, conceived in sin and born in suffering, of capitalism’s Prometheus Unbound; it was the ultimate bourgeois wish fulfillment—Nietzsche’s and Weber’s worst nightmare, the spirit of capitalism without capitalism. It was industriousness as a way of life, eternal work for its own sake. What Marx stood on its head was the traditional Apollonian concept of punishment and reward. Paradise became a place of ceaseless, spontaneous, unforced labor.⁶⁰

Like nationalism (and, indeed, Christianity, which combined the Old and New Testaments), Marxism and Freudianism were greatly strengthened by the creative power of a moral and aesthetic dualism. Marxist regimes could speak the language of prelapsarian nostalgia, romantic rebellion, and eternal life, while also insisting on rigid materialism and economic determinism. In the same way, the Western postindustrial states could draw on Freudian concepts to prescribe—in varying proportions—both civilization and its discontents. On the one hand, instincts were all-powerful and unrelenting (a bad thing because we are their prisoners, or a good thing because to know them is to master them and perhaps to enjoy the consequences). On the other hand, the possibility of treatment suggested the hope for a cure (a good thing because a rational individual could talk his way out of unhappiness, or a bad thing because licensed bureaucrats might mold our souls to fit a soulless civilization). Freudianism never became the official religion of any state, but Freud’s revelation of the true causes of human wretchedness did much to help the actually existing “welfare state” defeat its transcendentally inclined socialist nemesis.

Both Freud and Marx came from middle-class Jewish families. Freud’s was a bit more Jewish (his parents were Ostjude immigrants from Galicia to Moravia), Marx’s a bit more middle-class (his father, Herschel Levi, had become Heinrich Marx, a lawyer, a convinced Aufklärer, and a nominal Christian before Karl was born). Accordingly, each is probably best understood in the light of the other man’s doctrine: Freud became the great savior of the middle class, Marx assailed the world in order to slay his Jewish father (and insisted that capitalism would be buried by its own progeny). “What is the secular basis of Judaism?” he wrote when he was twenty-five years old. “Practical need, self-interest. What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular God? Money. Well then! Emancipation from haggling and from money, i.e. from practical, real Judaism, would be the same as the self-emancipation of our age.” To be more specific,

The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish way not only by acquiring financial power but also because through him and apart from him money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples. The Jews have emancipated themselves in so far as the Christians have become Jews.

Hence,

As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—the market and the conditions which give rise to it—the Jew will have become impossible, for his consciousness will no longer have an object, the subjective basis of Judaism—practical need—will have become humanized and the conflict between man’s individual sensuous existence and his species-existence will have been superseded.⁶¹

Any exploration of the national origins of the two doctrines is necessarily speculative—as are the many theories that try to explain their particular qualities and fortunes by relating them to the Judaic tradition. But it is undeniable that both appealed greatly to more or less middle-class Jewish audiences: Freudianism to the more middle-class, Marxism to the more Jewish (i.e., Yiddish). The two promises of nonnationalist salvation from modern loneliness were heeded by those lonely moderns who could not or would not be helped by nationalism.

No wonder, then, that the wandering Jewish apostate Leopold Bloom, who usually combated nationalism with pedestrian liberalism (“I want to see everyone, . . . all creeds and classes pro rata having a comfortable tidysized income” [U 16:1133–34]), could also envision a “new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the Future”:

I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union for all, Jew, Moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses. Compulsory manual labor for all. All parks open to the public day and night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all, Esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state. (U15:1685–93)

On cooler reflection—and in the overall design of Ulysses—Bloom forswore revolution and sought deliverance through reconciliation with his Penelope and his self, for

There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural as distinct from human law as integral parts of the human whole: the necessity of destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and death; the monotonous menstruation of simian and (particularly) human females extending from the age of puberty to the menopause. (U17:995–1000)

Freud’s science was largely “a Jewish national affair,” as he put it, with the non-Jewish Jung perceived as a stranger and cultivated as a Paradegoy.⁶² Marxism was much more cosmopolitan, but Jewish participation in socialist and communist movements (especially in elite positions) was impressive indeed. Some of the most important theorists of German Social Democracy were Jews (Ferdinand Lassalle, Eduard Bernstein, Hugo Haase, Otto Landsberg), as were virtually all “Austro-Marxists” with the exception of Karl Renner (Rudolf Hilferding, Otto Bauer, Max Adler, Gustav Eckstein, Friedrich Adler). Socialists of Jewish descent—among them the creator of the Weimar constitution, Hugo Preuss, and the prime ministers of Bavaria (Kurt Eisner, 1918–19), Prussia (Paul Hirsch, 1918–20), and Saxony (Georg Gradnauer, 1919–21)—were well represented in various governments established in Germany in the wake of the imperial defeat in World War I. The same was true of the Communist uprisings of 1919: Spartacist leaders in Berlin included Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogisches, and Paul Levi; the Bavarian “Soviet republic” was headed (after April 13) by Eugen Leviné and at least seven other Jewish commissars (including the exuberant Ernst Toller and Gustav Landauer); and Béla Kun’s revolutionary regime in Hungary consisted almost entirely of young Jews (20 out of 26 commissars, or, if one believes R. W. Seton-Watson, who was in Budapest at the time, “the whole government, save 2, and 28 out of the 36 ministerial commissioners”).⁶³

Between the wars, Jews remained prominent in the Weimar Republic’s Social Democratic Party, especially as journalists, theorists, teachers, propagandists, and parliamentarians. Indeed, most professional socialist intellectuals in Germany and Austria were of Jewish descent (mostly children of upwardly mobile professionals and entrepreneurs). The circle around Die Weltbühne, a radical journal that inveighed tirelessly against Weimar philistinism, nationalism, militarism, and overall thickheadedness was about 70 percent Jewish. As István Deák put it,

Apart from orthodox Communist literature where there were a majority of non-Jews, Jews were responsible for a great part of leftist literature in Germany. Die Weltbühne was in this respect not unique; Jews published, edited, and to a great part wrote the other left-wing intellectual magazines. Jews played a decisive role in the pacifist and feminist movements, and in the campaigns for sexual enlightenment. The left-wing intellectuals did not simply ‘happen to be mostly Jews’ as some pious historiography would have us believe, but Jews created the left-wing intellectual movement in Germany.⁶⁴

Probably the most influential (in the long run) left-wing intellectuals in Weimar Germany belonged to the so-called Frankfurt School, all of whose principal members (Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal, and Herbert Marcuse, among others) came from middle-class Jewish homes. Determined to retain the promise of salvation but disheartened by the unwillingness of the German proletariat to bury capitalism (or rather, its apparent willingness to read Marx backward and attack Jews directly), they attempted to combine Marxism and Freudianism by means of psychoanalyzing deviant classes and collectivizing psychoanalytic practice. “Critical theory” was akin to religion insofar as it postulated a fateful chasm between the contingency of human existence and a state of complete self-knowledge and universal perfection; identified the ultimate source of evil in the world (“reification,” or the enslavement of man by quasi-natural forces); foretold a final overcoming of history by way of merging necessity and freedom; and originated as a fully transcendental prophecy (because critical theorists were not subject to reification, for reasons that could not be supported by the critical theory itself). It was a feeble prophecy, however—elitist, skeptical, and totally lacking in the grandeur, certainty, and intensity of its heroic parents: a prophecy without an audience, Freudianism without the cure, Marxism without either scientism or imminent redemption. The critical theorists did not promise to change the world instead of explaining it; they suggested that the world might be changed by virtue of being explained (provided the blindfold of reified consciousness could be magically removed). They were not true prophets, in other words—resembling as they did therapists who had found their patients’ condition to be serious, expressed full confidence in their eventual recovery (as a group), but were unable to either prescribe a course of treatment or present credible credentials. This stance proved productive on college campuses in the postwar United States, but it could hardly sustain the embattled opponents of nationalism in interwar Europe.

Members of the Frankfurt School did not wish to discuss their Jewish roots and did not consider their strikingly similar backgrounds relevant to the history of their doctrines (a perfectly understandable position because would-be prophets cannot be expected to be seriously self-reflective, and critical theorists, in particular, cannot be expected to relativize their unique claim to a nonreified consciousness). If their analysis of anti-Semitism is any indication, the proper procedure is either Marxist or Freudian, with the Marxist strain (“bourgeois anti-Semitism has a specific economic reason: the concealment of domination in production”) fading inexorably into the background. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, anti-Semitism is primarily a “symptom,” “delusion,” and “false projection” that is “relatively independent of its object” and ultimately “irreconcilable with reality” (however defined). It is “a device for effortless ‘orientation’ in a cold, alienated, and largely ununderstandable world” used by the bourgeois self to project its own unhappiness—“from the very basis of which it is cut off by reason of its lack of reflective thought.” One of the reasons for this unhappiness is envy, more specifically the envy of the Jewish nose—that “physiognomic principium individuationis, symbol of the specific character of the individual, described between the lines of his countenance. The multifarious nuances of the sense of smell embody the archetypal longing for the lower forms of existence, for direct unification with circumambient nature, with the earth and mud. Of all the senses, that of smell—which is attracted without objectifying—bears closest witness to the urge to lose oneself in and become ‘the other.’ ” Marcel Proust could not have said it better.⁶⁵

If one were to use a similar procedure in an attempt to examine Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s struggle with their own Jewishness, the most appropriate symptom would probably be their analysis of Homer’s Odyssey, which they, revealingly (and apparently without the benefit of reading Ulysses), considered to be the foundational story of the modern self, “the schema of modern mathematics,” the Genesis of the all-enslaving Enlightenment. Odysseus, they claim, is “the prototype of the bourgeois individual” who forever betrays himself by tricking others. Physically weaker than the world he confronts, he “calculates his own sacrifice” and comes to embody deception “elevated to self-consciousness.” The hero of “sobriety and common sense” as the highest and final stage of mythological cunning, he restrains himself “merely to confirm that the title of hero is only gained at the price of the abasement and mortification of the instinct for complete, universal, and undivided happiness.” “Mutilated” by his own artifice, he pursues his “atomistic interest” in “absolute solitude” and “radical alienation,” with nothing but the myth of exile and family warmth to keep him afloat. In other words, he has a pronounced “Semitic element”—especially because “the behavior of Odysseus the wanderer is reminiscent of that of the casual barterer” who relies on ratio in order to vanquish “the hitherto dominant traditional form of economy.”⁶⁶

The wily solitary is already homo oeconomicus, for whom all reasonable things are alike; hence the Odyssey is already a Robinsonade. Both Odysseus and Crusoe, the two shipwrecked mariners, make their weakness (that of the individual who parts from the collectivity) their social strength. . . . Their impotence in regard to nature already acts as an ideology to advance their social hegemony. Odysseus’ defenselessness against the breakers is of the same stamp as the traveler’s justification of his enrichment at the expense of the aboriginal savage.⁶⁷

Odysseus the clever barterer is thus the prototype of “the irrationalism of totalitarian capitalism, whose way of satisfying needs has an objectified form determined by domination which makes the satisfaction of needs impossible and tends toward the extermination of mankind.” Marx and Freud meet Sombart (again). The theorists of “bourgeois self-hatred” and capitalist domination appear to be the grave diggers of their fathers’ weakness and cunning.⁶⁸

But that is not all. Enter the Nazis as man-eating Cyclopes, and Odysseus, “who calls himself Nobody for his own sake and manipulates approximation to the state of nature as a means of mastering nature, falls victim to hubris.” Unable to stop talking, he invites death by tauntingly revealing his true identity to the blind monster and his wrathful divine protector.

That is the dialectic of eloquence. From antiquity to fascism, Homer has been accused of prating both through his heroes’ mouths and in the narrative interpolations. Prophetically, however, Ionian Homer showed his superiority to the Spartans of past and present by picturing the fate which the cunning man—the middleman—calls down upon himself by his words. Speech, though it deludes physical force, is incapable of restraint. . . . Too much talking allows force and injustice to prevail as the actual principle, and therefore prompts those who are to be feared always to commit the very action that is feared. The mythic compulsiveness of the word in prehistory is perpetuated in the disaster which the enlightened world draws down upon itself. Udeis [Nobody], who compulsively acknowledges himself to be Odysseus, already bears the characteristics of the Jew who, fearing death, still presumes on the superiority which originates in the fear of death; revenge on the middleman occurs not only at the end of bourgeois society, but—as the negative utopia to which every form of coercive power always tends—at its beginning.⁶⁹

It may not be entirely clear how the loquacious progenitors of “totalitarian capitalism” bring about their own destruction; how deserved—considering their tendency “toward the extermination of mankind”—that destruction may be; or where the modern Cyclopes not blinded by Odyssean reason can possibly come from. But perhaps this was never meant to be history, anthropology, or even moral philosophy. Perhaps this was self-critical theory. Perhaps this was their way of saying, with Brenner, that their function was “to recognize and admit,” through speech incapable of restraint, the “meanness” of their ancestors “since the beginning of history to the present day, and the faults in [their] character, and then to rise and start all over again.” They did claim to hope, after all, that “the Jewish question would prove in fact to be the turning point of history. By overcoming that sickness of the mind which thrives on the ground of self-assertion untainted by reflective thought, mankind would develop from a set of opposing races to the species which, even as nature, is more than mere nature.”⁷⁰ Leopold Bloom agreed: “All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up bad blood, from some bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag, were very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of everything greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop” (U16:1111–15).

Whether such statements are examples of self-assertion or reflective thought, the statistical connection between “the Jewish question” and the hope for a new species of mankind seems fairly strong. In Hungary, first- or second-generation Magyars of Jewish descent were overrepresented not only among socialist intellectuals but also among communist militants. In Poland, “ethnic” Jews composed the majority of the original Communist leadership (7 out of about 10). In the 1930s, they made up from 22 to 26 percent of the overall Party membership, 51 percent of the Communist youth organization (1930), approximately 65 percent of all Warsaw Communists (1937), 75 percent of the Party’s propaganda apparatus, 90 percent of MOPR (the International Relief Organization for Revolutionaries), and most of the members of the Central Committee. In the United States in the same period, Jews (most of them immigrants from Eastern Europe) accounted for about 40 to 50 percent of Communist Party membership and at least a comparable proportion of the Party’s leaders, journalists, theorists, and organizers.⁷¹

Jewish participation in radical movements of the early twentieth century is similar to their participation in business and the professions: most radicals were not Jews and most Jews were not radicals, but the proportion of radicals among Jews was, on average, much higher than among their non-Jewish neighbors. One explanation is that there is no need for a special explanation: in the age of universal Mercurianism, Mercurians have a built-in advantage over Apollonians; intellectualism (“cleverness” and “reflective thought”) is as central to traditional Mercurianism as craftsmanship and moneylending; and in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe, most intellectuals were radicals (intelligentsia members) because neither the economy nor the state allowed for their incorporation as professionals. According to Stephen J. Whit-field, “if Jews have been disproportionately radicals, it may be because they have been disproportionately intellectuals”—the reason being either traditional strangeness or a newfound marginality. Whitfield himself preferred the “Veblen thesis” as formulated by Nikos Kazantzakis (the author of new versions of the Bible and the Odyssey, among other things): the “Age of Revolution” is a “Jewish Age” because “the Jews have this supreme quality: to be restless, not to fit into realities of the time; to struggle to escape; to consider every status quo and every idea a stifling prison.” Or rather, Marx and Trotsky are to politics what Schoenberg and Einstein are to the arts and sciences (“disturbers of the peace,” in Veblen’s terminology). As Freud put it, “to profess belief in a new theory called for a certain degree of readiness to accept a position of solitary opposition—a position with which no one is more familiar than a Jew.”⁷²

The “marginality” argument was not the only one that fit revolution as nicely as it did entrepreneurship and science. Most explanations of the Jewish affinity for socialism mirrored the explanations of the Jewish proclivity for capitalism. The Nietzsche-Sombart line (with an extra emphasis on “ressentiment”) was ably represented by Sombart himself, whereas the various theories involving Judaic tribalism and messianism were adapted with particular eloquence by Nikolai Berdiaev. Socialism, according to Berdiaev, is a form of “Jewish religious chiliasm, which faces the future with a passionate demand for, and anticipation of, the realization of the millennial Kingdom of God on earth and the coming of Judgment Day, when evil is finally vanquished by good, and injustice and suffering in human life cease once and for all.” No other nation, according to Berdiaev, could ever create, let alone take seriously as a worldly guide, a vision like Isaiah’s:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like an ox. And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’s den. (Isa. 11:6–8)

Add to this the fact that Jewish liberty and immortality are collective, not individual, and that this collective redemption is to occur in this world, as a result of both daily struggle and predestination, and you have Marxism.

Karl Marx, who was a typical Jew, solved, at history’s eleventh hour, the old biblical theme: in the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread. . . . The teaching of Marx appears to break with the Jewish religious tradition and rebel against all things sacred. In fact, what it does is transfer the messianic idea associated with the Jews as God’s chosen people to a class, the proletariat.⁷³

Or maybe it was the other way around, as Sonja Margolina has argued recently (echoing Isaac Deutscher’s genealogy of the “non-Jewish Jews”). Maybe Marx appeared to preserve Judaism in a new guise while in fact breaking with the Jewish religious tradition—in the same way as the most famous, and perhaps the most Jewish, Jew of all.

His name is Jesus Christ. Estranged from orthodox Jews and dangerous to the rulers, he dispossessed the Jewish God and handed him over to all the people, irrespective of race and blood. In the modern age, this internationalization of God was reenacted in secular form by Jewish apostates. In this sense, Marx was the modern Christ, and Trotsky, his most faithful apostle. Both—Christ and Marx—tried to expel moneylenders from the temple, and both failed.⁷⁴

Whatever their thoughts on Christianity as a Jewish revolution, some Jewish revolutionaries agreed that they were revolutionaries because they were Jewish (in Berdiaev’s sense). Gustav Landauer, the anarchist, philosopher, and martyred commissar of culture of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, believed that the Jewish god was a rebel and a rouser (Aufrührer and Aufrüttler); that the Jewish religion was an expression of the “people’s holy dissatisfaction with itself”; and that it was “one and the same to await the Messiah while in exile and dispersed, and to be the Messiah of the nations.” Franz Rosenzweig, who considered “a relinquishing of the free and unrestricted market” a precondition to the coming of the Kingdom of God, rejoiced that “liberty, equality, and fraternity, the canons of the faith, have now become the slogans of the age.” And Lev Shternberg, a onetime revolutionary terrorist, a longtime Siberian exile, and the dean of Soviet anthropologists until his death in 1927, came to see modern socialism as a specifically Jewish achievement. “It is as though thousands of the prophets of Israel have risen from their forgotten graves to proclaim, once again, their fiery damnation of those ‘that join house to house, field to field’; their urgent call for social justice; and their ideals of a unified humanity, eternal peace, fraternity of peoples, and Kingdom of God on earth!” Let anti-Semites use this in their arguments: “anti-Semites will always find arguments” because all they need are excuses. The important thing is to nurture and celebrate “what is best in us: our ideals of social justice and our social activism. We cannot be untrue to ourselves so as to please the anti-Semites—we could not do it even if we wanted to. And let us remember that the future is on our side, not on the side of the dying hydra of the old barbarism.”⁷⁵

Chamberlain and Sombart seemed to be right, according to Shternberg, in describing Judaism as a peculiar combination of relentless rationalism and exuberant messianism, for it was this very combination that had assured the final liberation of humanity.

The first heralds of socialism in the nineteenth century were non-Jews, the Frenchmen Saint-Simon and Fourier. But that was utopian socialism. . . . Finally, the time was ripe for the emergence of scientific socialism. It was then that the rationalist Jewish genius arrived on the scene in the shape of Karl Marx, who alone was capable of erecting the whole structure of the new teaching, from the foundation to the top, crowned by the grandiose monistic system of historical materialism. But what is particularly striking about the Jewish socialists is a remarkable combination of rationalist thinking with social emotionalism and activism—the very psychic peculiarities of the Jewish type that we see so clearly in all the previous periods of Jewish history, especially in the prophets. Nowhere is it more evident than in the cases of Marx and Lassalle. Marx combined the genius of theoretical, almost mathematical, thinking with the fiery temperament of a fanatical fighter and the historical sense of a true prophet. The works of Marx are not only the new Bible of our time, but also a new kind of book of social predictions! Even now, the exegetics of Marx’s teachings and social predictions exceeds all the volumes of the Talmud. Lassalle, though of a different caliber, belonged to the same psychological type, with the addition of a great talent as a popular tribune and political organizer.⁷⁶

Another political organizer, perhaps the most efficient of them all, was Stalin’s “iron commissar,” Lazar Kaganovich, who remembers having to divide his early education between the Russian poets and Jewish prophets. According to his Reminiscences of a Worker, Communist-Bolshevik, and a Trade Union, Party, and Soviet-State Official,

We used to study the Bible when we were children. We sensed that Amos was denouncing the tsars and the rich people, and we liked it very much. But, of course, we had an uncritical attitude toward the prophets who, while expressing the dissatisfaction of the popular masses and criticizing their oppressors, urged patience and expected salvation from God and his Messiah instead of calling for struggle against the oppressors of the poor people. Naturally, when I was a child, I did not understand the correctness of this conclusion, but I remember how in 1912 in Kiev, when I had to speak against the Zionists, I used Amos’s words well and with great success, this time drawing appropriate Bolshevik conclusions.⁷⁷

Possible Jewish origins of important Communist rituals and styles (as well as words) were widely alleged by contemporaries, many of them Jewish, Communist, or both. Ilya Ehrenburg, who was a certified fellow traveler when he published The Stormy Life of Lazik Roitshvanetz, caricatured early Soviet orthodoxy by making it seem indistinguishable from Talmudic exegesis. Both were built around the division of the world into “clean” and “unclean” spheres, and—as Lazik the Wandering Jew was meant to discover—both pursued purity by multiplying meaningless rules and by pretending to reconcile them to each other and to the unruly reality of human existence.

Now I see that the Talmudists were the most ridiculous of pups [says Lazik on being asked to purge the library in the manner of the “spring cleaning before Passover”]. For what did they think of? That Jews shouldn’t eat sturgeon, for example. Is it because sturgeon is expensive? No. Is it because it doesn’t taste good? Not at all. It’s because sturgeon swims around without the appropriate scales. Which means that it’s hopelessly unclean and that the Jew who eats it will desecrate his chosen stomach. Let other, lowly people eat sturgeon. But, Comrade Minchik, those pups were talking about meals. Now, at last, the real twentieth century has arrived, men have become smarter, and so instead of some stupid sturgeon we have a man like Kant and his 1,071 crimes. Let the French on their volcano read all those unclean things. We have the chosen brains and we cannot soil them with insolent delusions.⁷⁸

Jaff Schatz, in his study of the generation of Polish Jewish Communists born around 1910, reports that some of them (with the retrospective perspicacity of political disgrace and ethnic exile) considered their Marxist education to have been primarily Jewish in style. “The basic method was self-study, supplemented by tutoring by those more advanced. Thus, they read and discussed, and if they could not agree on the meaning of a text, or when issues proved too complicated, they asked for the help of an expert whose authoritative interpretation was, as a rule, accepted.” The mentors were more experienced, erudite, and inventive interpreters of texts. “Those who enjoyed the highest respect knew large portions of the classical texts almost by heart. In addition, those more advanced would frequently be able to quote from memory statistical data, for example, on the production of bread, sugar, or steel before and after the October Revolution, to support their analyses and generalizations. . . . ‘We behaved like yeshiva bokhers and they like rabbis,’ one respondent summed up.”⁷⁹ True knowledge was to be found in sacred texts, and “consciousness” depended, in part, on one’s ability to reconcile their many prescriptions, predictions, and prohibitions. “The texts of the classics were regarded with utmost veneration, as the highest authority in which all the questions that could possibly be asked were answered. The practical difficulty was to find the most suitable fragment of the texts and to interpret it correctly, so that the hidden answer would appear. In discussing such texts, as well as in debating social or political questions, there was the characteristic, hair-splitting quality of analysis that many respondents themselves today call ‘Talmudic.’ ”⁸⁰

“Talmudic” was a label widely used by Eastern European Communists to refer to sterile theorizers of all backgrounds (and of course there were more than enough non-Jewish hairsplitters to make the connection dubious), but it does seem possible that Jews were overrepresented among Communist writers and ideologues because they were, on average, better prepared than their non-Mercurian comrades for the work of scriptural interpretation (the non-Jewish workers’ circles were similar in style to the Jewish ones but much less successful at producing professional intellectuals). It is also quite possible that the beneficiaries of a “Jewish education,” religious or secular, were likely to introduce some elements of that education into the socialism they were building (or journalism they were practicing). What seems striking, however, is that many Jewish radicals associated their revolutionary “awakening” with their youthful revolts against their families. Whatever the nature of their radicalism, their degree of assimilation, or their views on the connection between Judaism and socialism, the overwhelming majority remember rejecting the world of their fathers because it seemed to embody the connection between Judaism and antisocialism (understood as commercialism, tribalism, and patriarchy).⁸¹

All revolutionaries are patricides, one way or another, but few seem to have been as consistent and explicit on this score as the Jewish radicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Georg Lukács, the son of one of Hungary’s most prominent bankers, József Lőwinger, was probably as typical of the wealthier rebels as he was influential among them.

I come from a capitalist, Lipótváros [a wealthy district of Pest] family. . . . From my childhood I was profoundly discontented with the Lipótváros way of life. Since my father, in the course of his business, was regularly in contact with the representatives of the city patriciate and of the bureaucratic gentry, my rejection tended to extend to them, too. Thus at a very early age violently oppositional feelings ruled in me against the whole of official Hungary. . . . Of course nowadays I regard it as childishly naÏve that I uncritically generalized my feelings of revulsion, and extended them to cover the whole of Magyar life, Magyar history, and Magyar literature indiscriminately (save for Petoőfi). Nonetheless it is a matter of fact that this attitude dominated my spirit and ideas in those days. And the solid counter-weight—the only hard ground on which I then felt I could rest my feet—was the modernist foreign literature of the day, with which I became acquainted at the age of about fourteen and fifteen.⁸²

Lukács would eventually move from modernism to socialist realism and from a formless “revulsion” to membership in the Communist Party; only his love for Petoőfi would prove lifelong. This, too, is typical: national gods, even those most jealously guarded, were by far the most potent of the age. So potent, in fact, that their cults were taken for granted and barely noticed as various universalist creeds asserted their transcendental claims. Communists, among others, did not associate Petoőfi with the “bourgeois nationalism” they were fighting and saw no serious contradiction between the veneration of his poetry and proletarian internationalism. Petoőfi—like Goethe-Schiller, Mickiewicz, and others—stood for “culture” in his own domain, and culture (the “high” kind—i.e., the kind defined by Petoőfi et al.) was a good thing. All communism started out as national communism (and ended up as nationalism pure and simple). Béla Kun, the leader of the 1919 Communist government in Hungary, the organizer of the Red Terror in the Crimea, and a top official of the Communist International, began his writing career with a prizewinning high school essay titled “The Patriotic Poetry of Sándor Petoőfi and Janós Arany,” and ended it, while waiting to be arrested by the Soviet secret police, with an introduction to a Russian translation of Petoőfi’s poems. And Lazar Kaganovich, who probably signed Kun’s death sentence (among thousands of others), reminisced at the end of his life about beginning to acquire culture “through the independent reading of whatever works we had by Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, L. Tolstoy, and Turgenev.”⁸³

Whereas national pantheons derived their power from their apparent transparency, family rebellions were significant because they were experienced and represented as epiphanies. Franz Boas remembered the “unforgettable moment” when he first questioned the authority of tradition. “In fact, my whole outlook upon social life is determined by the question: How can we recognize the shackles that tradition has laid upon us? For when we recognize them we are also able to break them.” Almost invariably, that first recognition occurred at home. As Leo Löwenthal, the son of a Frankfurt doctor, put it, “My family household, as it were, was the symbol of everything I did not want—shoddy liberalism, shoddy Aufklärung, and double standards.”⁸⁴ The same was true of Schatz’s Polish Communists, most of whom were native speakers of Yiddish who knew very little about liberalism or Aufklärung: “Whether they came from poor, more prosperous, assimilated, or traditional families, an important common element in their situation was an intense perception of the differences separating them from their parents. Increasingly experienced as unbridgeable, expressed on the everyday level as an inability to communicate and a refusal to conform, these differences led them increasingly to distance themselves from the world, ways, and values of their parents.”⁸⁵

The wealthier ones bemoaned their fathers’ capitalism, the poorer ones, their fathers’ Jewishness, but the real reason for their common revulsion was the feeling that capitalism and Jewishness were one and the same thing. Whatever the relationship between Judaism and Marxism, large numbers of Jews seemed to agree with Marx before they ever read anything he wrote. “Emancipation from haggling and from money, i.e. from practical, real Judaism, would be the same as the self-emancipation of our age.” Revolution began at home—or rather, world revolution began in the Jewish home. According to the historian Andrew Janos, Béla Kun’s young commissars “sought out traditionalist Jews with special ferocity as targets of their campaigns of terror.” According to the biographer Marjorie Boulton, Ludwik Zamenhof was not free to devote himself to the creation of Esperanto until he broke with his “treacherous” father. And on December 1, 1889, Alexander Helphand (Parvus), a Russian Jew, world revolutionary, international financier, and future German government agent, placed the following notice in the Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung: “We announce the birth of a healthy, cheerful enemy of the state. Our son was born in Dresden on the morning of November 29th. . . . And although he was born on the German land, he has no Motherland.”⁸⁶

The tragedy of Parvus’s son, and the children of so many other Jewish scholars, financiers, and revolutionaries, was that most other Europeans did have a Motherland. Even capitalism, which Parvus milked and sabotaged with equal success, was packaged, distributed, and delivered by nationalism. Even liberalism, which regarded universal strangeness to be a natural human condition, organized individuals into nations and promised to assemble them de pluribus unum. Even “La Marseillaise” became a national anthem.

When the uprooted Apollonians arrived on new Mercurian shores, they were told they were at home. Some had to wait, perhaps, or move next door, or slaughter false suitors first, but one way or another, every new Ulysses was to end up on his very own Ithaca—except the original one, who, as Dante alone had divined, could never go home. Jews were no longer allowed to be a global tribe (that was “disloyalty” now, not normal Mercurian behavior), but they still were not welcome in the local ones. According to Hannah Arendt, “the Jews were very clearly the only inter-European element in a nationalized Europe.” They were also the only true moderns in Europe, or at any rate spectacularly good at being modern. But modernity without nationalism is cold capitalism. And cold capitalism by itself is, according to so many Europeans, a bad thing. As Karl Marx put it, “The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general. . . . The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”⁸⁷

As Jews emerged from the ghetto and the shtetl, they entered a new world that seemed like the old one in that their skills were seen as highly valuable but morally dubious. There was one crucial difference, however: the Jews were no longer legally recognized professional strangers and thus no longer possessed a special mandate to engage in morally dubious occupations. The new license for immorality was nationalism, and Jews were not eligible. Every Jew’s father became immoral—either because he was still a professional stranger or because he was a modern without a legitimate tribe. Both were capitalists and both belonged to a chimerical nationality.

The two great modern prophecies offered two different answers to the question of Jewish patricide. Freudianism claimed that it was a universal human affliction and that the only way to save civilization-as-liberalism was to control the urge therapeutically (and grow up gracefully). Marxism attributed it to the proletariat and urged the killing (more or less metaphorical) of the bad fathers, so as to emancipate the world from Judaism and make sure that no sons would have to kill their fathers ever again.

But there was a third prophecy, of course—as patricidal as the other two but much more discriminating: modern Jewish nationalism. Could not the Jews be transformed from a chimerical nationality into a “normal” one? Could they not have a Motherland of their own? Could they not be protected from capitalism in their own make-believe Apollonia? Could they not be redeemed like everyone else—as a nation? Perhaps they could. A lot of Jews thought it an eccentric idea (the Chosen People without a God? A Yiddish Blood and Soil?), but many were willing to try.⁸⁸

“Normal” nationalisms began with the sanctification of vernaculars and the canonization of national bards. Accordingly, in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, Yiddish acquired the status of a literary language (as opposed to a shtetl jargon or Mercurian secret code); incorporated, through translation, the “treasury of world culture” (i.e., other modern nations’ secular pantheons); accommodated a great variety of genres (so as to become a universal, all-purpose vehicle); and produced its own Shakespeare. It went through the same pangs of rebirth, in other words, as Russian a hundred years earlier or Norwegian at about the same time. Homer, Goethe, and Anatole France were being translated simultaneously, as if they were contemporaries; the beauty and suppleness of Yiddish were found to be remarkable; and Mendele Mokher Sforim (Sholem Yakov Abramovich, 1835–1917) was discovered to have been “the grandfather of Yiddish literature.” And then there was Sholem Aleichem. As Maurice Samuel put it, on behalf of most readers of Yiddish, “It is hard to think of him as a ‘writer.’ He was the common people in utterance. He was in a way the ‘anonymous’ of Jewish self-expression.”⁸⁹

All the elements of “normal” nationalism were there, in other words—except the main one. The point of nationalism is to attach the newly created national high culture to the local Apollonian mythology, genealogy, and landscape; to attribute that high culture to the “spirit of the people”; to modernize folk culture by folklorizing the modern state. Very little of this enterprise made sense in the case of the Jews. They had no attachment or serious claim to any part of the local landscape; their symbolically meaningful past lay elsewhere; and their religion (which stigmatized Yiddish) seemed inseparable from their Jewishness. No European state, however designed, could possibly become a Jewish Promised Land.

Perhaps most important, Yiddish-based nationalism did little to alleviate the problem of unheroic fathers. One could sentimentalize them, or craft a powerful story of their unrelieved martyrdom, but one could not pretend that they had not been service nomads (i.e., cobblers, peddlers, innkeepers, and moneylenders dependent on their “Gentile” customers). One could not, in other words, help Jewish sons and daughters in their quest for Apollonian dignity by arguing that the Yiddish past had not been an exile. Why should one, in fact, if unimpeachably proud and universally recognized biblical heroes were easily available in the dominant and still vibrant Jewish tradition? Having started out as normal, Yiddish nationalism proved too odd to succeed as a movement. In the all-important realms of politics and mythmaking, it could not compete with Hebrew nationalism and global socialism. Most Jews who were ideologically attached to Yiddish (the “language of the Jewish masses”) were socialists, and the languages of socialism in Europe—the Bund’s efforts notwithstanding—were German and Russian.

In the end, it was the Hebrew-based nationalism that triumphed and, in alliance with Zionism, became the third great Jewish prophecy. Strikingly and defiantly “abnormal” in its premises, it looked forward to a full and final normality complete with a nation-state and warrior dignity. It was nationalism in reverse: the idea was not to sanctify popular speech but to profane the language of God, not to convert your home into a Promised Land but to convert the Promised Land into a home. The effort to turn the Jews into a normal nation looked like no other nationalism in the world. It was a Mercurian nationalism that proposed a literal and ostensibly secular reading of the myth of exile; a nationalism that punished God for having punished his people. Eternal urbanites were to turn themselves into peasants, and local peasants were to be seen as foreign invaders. Zionism was the most radical and revolutionary of all nationalisms. It was more religious in its secularism than any other movement—except for socialism, which was its main ally and competitor.

But Jews were not only the heroes of the most eccentric of nationalisms; they were also the villains of the most brutally consistent of them all. Nazism was a messianic movement that endowed nationalism with an elaborate terrestrial eschatology. To put it differently, Nazism challenged modern salvation religions by using nationhood as the agent of perdition and redemption. It did what none of the other modern (i.e., antimodern) salvation religions had been able to do: it defined evil clearly, consistently, and scientifically. It shaped a perfect theodicy for the Age of Nationalism. It created the devil in its own image.

The question of the origins of evil is fundamental to any promise of redemption. Yet all modern religions except Nazism resembled Christianity in being either silent or confused on the subject. Marxism offered an obscure story of original sin through the alienation of labor and made it difficult to understand what role individual believers could play in the scheme of revolutionary predestination. Moreover, the Soviet experience seemed to show that Marxism was a poor guide in purging the body politic. Given the assumption of Party infallibility, society’s continued imperfection had to be attributed to machinations by ill-intentioned humans, but who were they and where did they come from? How were “class aliens” in a more or less classless society to be categorized, unmasked, and eliminated? Marxism gave no clear answer; Leninism did not foresee a massive regeneration of the exterminated enemies; and Stalin’s willing executioners were never quite sure why they were executing some people and not others.

Freudianism located evil in the individual human soul and provided a prescription for combating it, but it offered no hope for social perfection, no civilization without discontents. Evil could be managed but not fully eradicated. A collection of cured individuals was not a guarantee of a healthy society.

Zionism did foresee a perfectly healthy society, but its promise was not universal and its concept of evil was too historical to be of lasting utility. The evil of exile was to be overcome by a physical return home. The “diaspora mentality,” like Soviet bourgeois consciousness, would be defeated by honest toil for one’s own healthy state. Its persistence in Eretz Israel would not be easy to explain.

Nazism was unique in the consistency and simplicity of its theodicy. All the corruption and alienation of the modern world was caused by one race, the Jews. The Jews were inherently evil. Capitalism, liberalism, modernism, and communism were essentially Jewish. The elimination of the Jews would redeem the world and usher in the millennium. Like Marxism and Freudianism, Nazism derived its power from a combination of transcendental revelation and the language of science. Social science could draw any number of conclusions from the statistical data on Jewish overrepresentation in the critical spheres of modern life; racial science undertook to uncover the secrets of personal ethnicity as well as universal history; and various branches of medicine could be used to provide both the vocabulary for describing evil and the means of its “final solution.” Nazism rivaled Zionism (and ultimately Judaism) by casting redemptive messianism in national terms; compared favorably to Marxism (and ultimately to Christianity) in its promise of cathartic apocalyptic violence as a prologue to the Millennium; and equaled Freudianism in its use of modern medicine as the instrument of salvation. Ultimately, it surpassed them all in being able to offer a simple secular solution to the problem of the origins of evil in the modern world. A universe presided over by Man received an identifiable and historically distinct group of human beings as its first flesh-and-blood devil. The identity of the group might change, but the humanization and nationalization of evil proved durable. When the Nazi prophets were exposed as impostors and slain in the apocalypse they had unleashed, it was they who emerged as the new devil in a world without God—the only absolute in the Post-Prophetic Age.

Thus, in the wake of World War I, Jews had found themselves at the center of both the crisis of modern Europe and the most far-reaching attempts to overcome it. Strikingly successful at the pursuits that made up the foundations of modern states—entrepreneurship (especially banking) and the professions (especially law, medicine, journalism, and science)—they were excluded from the modern nations that those states were supposed to embody and represent. In a Europe that draped the economy of capitalism and professional expertise in the legitimacy of nationalism, Jews stood abandoned and unprotected as a ghostly tribe of powerful strangers. In one nation-state, their exclusion would turn into the main article of nationalist faith and a methodical extermination campaign. But exclusion could also become a form of escape and liberation. For most European Jews, this meant three pilgrimages to three ideological destinations. Freudianism became associated with a nonethnic (or multiethnic) liberalism in the United States; Zionism represented a secular Jewish nationalism in Palestine; and Communism stood for the creation of a nation-free world centered in Moscow. The story of twentieth-century Jews is a story of one Hell and three Promised Lands.