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As we noted at the outset, the term Mitteleuropa designates an area united by German culture: the area of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The specific situation of the Jewish community of the region (and of its intellectuals) cannot be understood without first examining the historical changes that took place in Mitteleuropa from the late nineteenth century onward. And the changes in the cultural and religious forms of life cannot be comprehended without relating them to changes in the economic and social structure. Rather than speak of ‘determination’ by the economy, we should speak, as did Mannheim, of Seinsgebundenheit, the culture’s attachment to (or dependence on) socio-economic reality.

In other words, the starting-point for analysing the figures of the German and Jewish intellectual world during this period has to be a basic social fact: the dizzying growth of capitalism and the rapid industrialization that took place in Germany, Austria and Hungary during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Between 1870 and 1914, Germany was transformed from a semi-feudal and backward country into one of the world’s principal industrial powers. Only one example is needed to illustrate this change: in 1860 Germany was behind France, and far behind England, in steel production (a typical sector of modern industry); in 1910 Germany produced more steel than France and England combined! Banking and industrial capital were concentrated, and powerful cartels were formed in the textile, coal, steel, chemical and electrical industries, among others.¹ A similar process took place in Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, although to a lesser degree. The speed, brutality, intensity and overwhelming power of this industrialization drastically changed Central European societies, their class structures (flourishing bourgeoisies and ongoing formation of the proletariat), their political systems and their hierarchy of values.

In the face of the irresistible rise of capitalism and the invasive development of scientific and technical civilization, of large industrial production and the universe of commodities and market values, there was a cultural reaction – now desperate and tragic, now resigned – in various social milieux, but particularly in the traditional intelligentsia. This reaction could be described as romantic anti-capitalist.

Anti-capitalist romanticism – which, we repeat, must not be confused with Romanticism as a literary style – is a world-view characterized by a (more or less) radical critique of industrial/bourgeois civilization in the name of pre-capitalist social, cultural, ethical or religious values.² In Central Europe, and especially in Germany, this Weltanschauung was, at the turn of the century, the dominant sensibility in cultural and academic life. The academic mandarinate, a traditionally influential and privileged social category, was one of its primary social foundations. Threatened by the new system that tended to reduce it to a marginal and powerless position, it reacted with horror to what it considered a soulless, standardized, superficial and materialistic society.³ One of the principal themes of this critique, recurring like an obsession among writers, poets, philosophers and historians, was the conflict between Kultur, a spiritual universe of ethical, religious or aesthetic values, and Zivilisation, the materialistic and vulgar world of economic and technical progress. If, to use Max Weber’s implacably lucid expression, capitalism is disenchantment of the world (Entzauberung der Welt), anti-capitalist romanticism must be considered first and foremost as a nostalgic and desperate attempt at re-enchantment of the world, one of whose main aspects was a return to religion, a rebirth of various forms of religious spirituality.

The romantic anti-capitalist world-view was present in an astonishing variety of cultural works and social movements of this period: novels by Thomas Mann and Theodor Storm; poems by Stefan George and Richard Beer-Hoffmann; the sociology of Tönnies, Simmel or Mannheim; the historical school of economics; the Kathedersozialismus of Gustav Schmoller, Adolph Wagner or Lujo Brentano; the philosophy of Heidegger and Spengler, the Youth Movement and the Wandervogel, Symbolism and Expressionism. United in its rejection of capitalism in the name of nostalgia for the past, this cultural configuration was totally heterogeneous from a political point of view: reactionary ideologues (Moeller Van der Bruck, Julius Langbehn, Ludwig Klages) as well as revolutionary utopians (Bloch, Landauer) could be characterized as anti-capitalist romantics. It might be said that the main part of literary, artistic and social-scientific (in the sense of Geisteswissenschaften) production in Germany and Central Europe occurred in the magnetic field of this movement.

What consequences did these economic, social and cultural developments have for the Jewish communities of Mitteleuropa? The flourishing of capitalism created a favourable environment in which the Jewish bourgeoisie could blossom. The Jewish population left the ghettos and villages and quickly became urbanized: in 1867, seventy per cent of Prussian Jews lived in small villages; by 1927, the figure had dropped to fifteen per cent.⁴ The same phenomenon occurred in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the Jewish population was concentrated in Budapest, Prague and, above all, Vienna. (I can even cite my own family as an example: towards the end of the nineteenth century, my grandparents left their respective villages in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and settled in the capital of the Empire.) An upper and middle bourgeoisie formed in the cities and took a larger share of business, trade, industry and banking. As this ‘Jewish middle class’ grew richer, and as civil and political restrictions on it were lifted (between 1869 and 1871 in Germany), it set itself only one goal: to be socially and culturally assimilated into the German nation. A letter written in 1916 by the Jewish industrialist Walther Rathenau (who was to become a minister in the Weimar Republic) typified this mentality:

I have – and I know – nothing but German blood, German ethnicity, and German people. If I were to be driven from my German land, I would continue to be German, and nothing would change that… My ancestors and I have been nourished of German soil and of the German mind … and we have had no thoughts that were not German or for Germany.⁵

This example, of course, represents virtually the outer line, but even for those who continued to think of themselves as Jewish, German culture was the only valid culture. All that remained from Judaism were some ritualistic hangovers (such as a trip to the synagogue on Yom Kippur) and biblical monotheism. The examplars of wisdom were no longer Moses or Solomon, but rather Lessing and Goethe, Schiller and Kant. Schiller in particular was truly venerated: his Complete Works were required in the library of every self-respecting German or Austrian Jew (when my parents left Vienna in 1935, they took their copy with them). In Germany, the most resolute assimilationist current was the Central-Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens [Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Denomination]. Describing this social milieu (to which his own family belonged), Gershom Scholem noted:

Education and readings were oriented exclusively to Germany, and in the majority of cases, any dissidence, notably in the direction of a return to Judaism, was met with decided opposition. Assimilation ran very deep. Each time, they emphasized over and over, albeit with slight differences, that we belonged to the German nation, at the center of which we formed a religious group, like the others. What was even more paradoxical was that in the majority of the cases, the religious element – which was the only difference – did not exist nor did it exert any influence over how they conducted their lives.⁶

None the less, it would be wrong to regard this thirst for cultural integration as mere opportunism: it could also express sincere and authentic convictions. Even as profoundly religious a Jew as Franz Rosenzweig wrote in 1923, shortly after the publication of his great theological work, Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption):

I believe that my return to Judaism (Verjüdung) made me a better and not a worse German… And I believe that Der Stern will one day be duly recognized and appreciated as a gift that the German mind owes to its Jewish enclave.⁷

Assimilation was successful to a certain degree, but it came up against an insurmountable social barrier. According to Moritz Goldstein’s famous lament of unfulfilled love, which he wrote in 1912 (‘Deutsch-Jüdischer Parnass’),

in vain we think of ourselves as Germans; others think of us as completely un-German [undeutsch]… But were we not raised on German legends? Does not the Germanic forest live within us, can we too not see its elves and its gnomes?⁸

Assimilation also came up against de facto exclusion from a series of areas: State administration, the armed forces, the magistrature, education – and after 1890 in particular, against growing anti-Semitism, which had its ideologues, activists and press. For all of these reasons, the Jewish communities in Central Europe did not truly integrate into the surrounding society. To use Max Weber’s classic definition, they shared several of the hallmarks of a pariah people: ‘a distinctive hereditary social group lacking autonomous political organization’, and characterized by endogamy on the one hand and by negative privileges, both political and social, on the other.⁹ Of course, their condition could not be compared to that of the castes in India, or of the Jewish ghettoes in the Middle Ages: economic security and (formal) equality of civic rights had been won through emancipation. But socially, the Jew continued to be a pariah and realized, as Hannah Arendt put it, ‘how treacherous was the promise of equality which assimilation held out’.¹⁰

In Germany and in Central Europe, the university was the royal road to respectability and honour. As Friedrich Paulsen, the neo-Kantian philosopher, wrote, in Germany citizens with a higher education made up a type of intellectual and spiritual aristocracy; not to hold a university degree was a ‘shortcoming’ that neither wealth nor prestigious birth could fully make up for.¹¹ The logic of cultural assimilation and the desire to climb the ladder of prestige led the Jewish bourgeoisie to send its sons to the University, especially towards the end of the nineteenth century:

Just like the majority of German businessmen, Jews wanted to climb socially… They wanted their sons and sons-in-law to be more valued than they were. A career as an officer or as a high-ranking government official, which were the goals of a young Christian man, was closed to Jews … only university studies were open to him.¹²

As a result, in 1895 Jews comprised 10% of the student body in German universities, which was ten times the percentage of Jews in the overall population (1.05%).¹³ This massive presence of bourgeois Jewish youth in higher education quickly led to the formation of a new social category: the Jewish intelligentsia. Jewish intellectuals of German culture had, of course, existed since the late eighteenth century (Moses Mendelssohn), but it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that the phenomenon became so widespread as to constitute a new social fact. These Jewish intellectuals, déclassé, unstable and free of any precise social attachment, were a typical example of the sozialfreischwebende Intelligenz that Mannheim spoke of. Their condition was eminently contradictory: deeply assimilated yet largely marginalized; linked to German culture yet cosmopolitan; uprooted and at odds with their business and bourgeois milieu of origin; rejected by the traditional rural aristocracy yet excluded in career terms within their natural sphere of acceptance (the university). In a state of ideological availability, they were soon attracted to the two principal poles of German cultural life, which could be named after the famous characters from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain: ‘Settembrini’, the liberal, democratic and republican philanthropist, and ‘Naphta’, the conservative/revolutionary romantic.

For many young Jewish intellectuals, rationalism, progressive evolutionism, Aufklärung and neo-Kantian philosophy became the primary reference, in some cases combined with a Judaism that was diluted or reduced to monotheist ethics (Hermann Cohen). From this world-view several political options were available, ranging from moderate liberalism (the ideology of the Jewish bourgeoisie itself), to social democracy (Eduard Bernstein), Marxism (Max Adler, Otto Bauer and the Austrian Marxists) and even Communism (Paul Levi, Ruth Fischer, Paul Frölich, August Thalheimer).

Nevertheless, at the turn of the century, anti-capitalist romanticism was the dominant movement within the culture of Mitteleuropa. Sociologically speaking, it was inevitable that a significant portion of the new university-trained Jewish intelligentsia would be attracted by the romantic critique of industrial civilization: ‘Naphta!’ The intelligentsia eagerly discovered the nostalgic and anti-bourgeois Weltanschauung predominant in academia – notably in the Geisteswissenschaften (Humanities), where the majority of Jewish students enrolled. These students subsequently rejected their fathers’ business careers, revolted against their bourgeois family milieu and aspired intensely to an ‘intellectual life style’.¹⁴ This generational break, which many Jewish intellectuals speak of in their autobiographies, opposed the anti-bourgeois youth – passionately interested in Kultur, spirituality, religion and art – to their entrepreneurial parents – merchants or bankers, moderate liberals and good German patriots, indifferent to religious matters.¹⁵ In a recent autobiographical interview, Leo Löwenthal, the Frankfurt School sociologist of literature, summarized the feeling that was common among many intellectuals of his generation: ‘My family household, as it were, was the symbol of everything I did not want – shoddy liberalism, shoddy Aufklärung, and double standards.’¹⁶

Mannheim used the term Generationszusammenhang (generational bonding) to designate the concrete link deriving from participation in a common historical-social destiny.¹⁷ In fact, the generational break is not a biological fact: it is only under particular social conditions that a gap or even an abyss develops between generations. And it was a specific type of Generationszusammenhang that was found in the new Jewish intelligentsia, born during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The group of intellectuals whom I shall examine in this work belonged to that generation, as their dates of birth fell during the last twenty years of the century: Martin Buber (1878), Franz Kafka (1883), Ernst Bloch (1885), Georg Lukács (1885), Franz Rosenzweig (1886), Walter Benjamin (1892), Ernst Toller (1893), Gershom Scholem (1897), Erich Fromm (1900), Leo Löwenthal (1900). It should be stressed, however, that the sociological analysis sketched in the preceding paragraphs can only delineate the chances that a certain number of Jewish intellectuals would be attracted to the anti-capitalist romantic pole of German culture; it does not enable us to explain each individual’s personal choice, which also involved psychologic and other variables. I need only mention the example of Scholem’s family: one of the sons (Reinhold) became a German Nationalist and remained so even after 1945; another (Werner) became a Communist deputy; and a third (Gershom) became a Zionist and historian of the cabbala. Obviously the social milieu could not possibly account for such diversity.

For the Jewish intellectual who belonged to the ‘romantic generation’ of the 1880s, who sometimes attended the informal German circles at which romantic anti-capitalist culture was being developed – such as the Max Weber Circle in Heidelberg, frequented by Lukács and Bloch – one problem arose immediately. A return to the past, which was at the heart of the romantic orientation, drew upon German ancestry, medieval aristocracy or Protestant or Catholic Christianity – that is to say, upon national, social or cultural references from which he, as a Jew, was completely excluded. True, some Jewish thinkers (especially in the Stefan George Circle) were able to make the leap and to be transformed into German nationalists (Rudolf Borchardt), conservative German scholars (Friedrich Gundolf, Karl Wolfskehl) or Protestant theologians (Hans Ehrenberg). But these were fairly rare cases which involved a total and rather artificial negation of Jewish identity – the supreme example being the works of the Jewish anti-Semites (Otto Weininger, Theodor Lessing). As for the others, the majority of Jewish intellectuals of German cultural background, only two solutions were possible within the framework of neo-romanticism: either a return to their own historical roots, to their own culture, nationality or ancestral religion; or adherence to a universal romantic-revolutionary utopia. Not surprisingly, given the structural homology between these two paths, a number of Jewish thinkers close to anti-capitalist romanticism chose both simultaneously: on the one hand, a (re-)discovery of the Jewish religion – most notably, the restorative/utopian dimension of messianism; on the other hand, sympathy for, or identification with, revolutionary (especially libertarian) utopias loaded with nostalgia for the past.

Let us examine these two paths more closely. In the atmosphere permeated with neo-romantic religiosity, many Jewish intellectuals revolted against their parents’ assimilation and sought to save the Jewish religious culture of the past from oblivion. As a result, there was a process of de-secularization, partial dis-assimilation, cultural and religious anamnesis, and ‘reculturalization’,¹⁸ which certain circles or literary groups actively promoted: the Bar-Kochba Club in Prague (Hugo Bergmann, Hans Kohn, Max Brod); the circle around Rabbi Nobel in Frankfurt (Siegfried Krakauer, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, Ernst Simon); the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Nahum Glatzer, Margarete Süssmann); Martin Buber’s magazine, Der Jude, among other examples. But ‘re-culturalization’ spread even further to embrace, in varying degrees, a large number of Jewish intellectuals influenced by neo-romanticism. It sometimes took on a national character (especially through Zionism), but the religious aspect predominated. Assimilation ran so deep in Mitteleuropa that it was extremely difficult to break with the German national-cultural identity. As religion was the sole legitimate specific for ‘German citizens of Israelite denomination’, it understandably became the primary means of expression for the movement of cultural anamnesis.

This was, however, a new type of religiosity, charged with German romantic spirituality, which was very different from the traditionalism ritualistically preserved within certain non-assimilated orthodox Jewish milieux. The paradox was that, through German neo-romanticism, these young Jewish intellectuals rediscovered their own religion: their path to the prophet Isaiah went by way of Novalis, Hölderlin or Schelling. In other words, assimilation and cultural integration were the preconditions and the points of departure for their dis-assimilation and re-culturalization. It was not by chance that Buber wrote on Jakob Böhme before he wrote his works on Hasidism;¹⁹ that Franz Rosenzweig almost converted to Protestantism before becoming the reformer of Jewish theology; that Gustav Landauer translated the mystical writings of Meister Eckhart before turning towards the Jewish tradition; and that Gershom Scholem rediscovered the cabbala through the writings of the German Romantic Franz Joseph Molitor. Consequently, the Jewish religious heritage was seen through a grid of romantic interpretation which favoured its non-rational and non-institutional dimension, its mystical, explosive, apocalyptic, ‘anti-bourgeois’ aspects (to use Scholem’s phrase from the first article he wrote on the cabbala in 1919). Messianism is the theme which, as in a pool of radiant light, concentrates all of the Sturm und Drang aspects of the Jewish religion – provided, of course, that it is stripped of the liberal, neo-Kantian and Aufklärer interpretation (in which messianism equals the gradual perfection of mankind) and that the original tradition is re-established in all its eschatological force, from the prophets to the cabbala, from the Bible to Sabbatai Sevi. It is therefore not surprising that the messianic reference, in its double restorative and utopian meaning, became the Shibboleth of the religious anamnesis of the Jewish-romantic generation of the 1880s. On the other hand, it goes without saying that this sort of Jewish messianism, charged with romantic explosiveness, was far more susceptible to political activation than the rabbinical (quietist or abstentionist) messianism of the orthodox milieux.

How did this activation work? Or rather, how can we explain that a large fringe of this generation adhered to the path of revolutionary utopias?

This question must be placed in a broader context: that of the attraction of Jewish intellectuals in general to left-wing movements and socialist ideas. For, as historians have noted, the majority of left-wing Jews in Central Europe (the situation was different in Eastern Europe, with its Jewish proletariat) were intellectuals.²⁰

Anti-Semites had their own ‘explanation’: the stateless and cosmopolitan Jews tended instinctively towards red internationalism. This platitude is obviously false – the majority of Jews were good-and-proper German or Austrian patriots – but probably the situation of national assimilation/rejection/marginalization of the Jewish intellectuals made them potentially more sensitive than their non-Jewish counterparts to the internationalist themes of socialism. The intelligentsia felt more directly than did the bourgeoisie and the business class the pariah condition of the Jew in Central Europe, the pervading anti-Semitism, the professional and social discrimination. As Hannah Arendt wrote, this new stratum of intellectuals, which had to find both their daily bread and their self-respect outside of Jewish society, was particularly exposed (‘without shelter and defence’) to the new wave of Jew-hatred at the turn of the century, and it was within the intelligentsia that a rebel ‘pariah consciousness’ developed in opposition to the conformist posture of the parvenu.²¹ There were only two possibilities for the pariah: either radical self-negation (Otto Weininger!) or radical questioning of the societal values that devalued his otherness. The pariah consciousness, by definition marginal or outside, tended to be critical and could become, in the words of Elisabeth Lenk, ‘the quintessential mirror of society’.²²

The ‘negative privileges’ (to use Max Weber’s phrase) of Jewish pariah intellectuals in Central European societies took various forms. At the socio-professional level, civil-service and (to a large extent) academic positions were closed to Jews – a situation which condemned them to marginal intellectual occupations such as ‘freelance’ journalist or writer, independent artist or researcher, ‘private’ educator, and so on. According to the German sociologist Robert Michels, it was this discrimination and marginalization which explained ‘the Jews’ predisposition to joining revolutionary parties’.²³ Analysing this same phenomenon in Hungary, Karady and Kameny underscored that

the formation of a hard revolutionary core within the liberal intelligentsia seemed directly indebted to the rigidities within the marketplace of intellectual occupations, in which institutionalized anti-Semitism within certain professional bodies (such as higher education) was but one aspect … that could only reinforce the conviction held by the excluded that ‘normal’ integration into the intellectual marketplace required subversion of its ground-rules.²⁴

Now, the importance of this point should not be underestimated. But it seems to me that the revolutionary radicalization of a large number of Jewish intellectuals – be it in Hungary or Germany – cannot not be reduced to a problem of the job market or career opportunities. Other factors must be taken into consideration in order to explain why the son of a Jewish banker (Georg Lukács) became a People’s Commissar in the Budapest Commune, or why the son of a rich Jewish merchant (Eugen Leviné) led the Bavarian Soviet Republic.

In an attempt to understand why Jews turned to Socialism, Walter Laqueur wrote, in his book on the Weimar Republic:

They gravitated towards the left because it was the party of reason, progress and freedom which had helped them to attain equal rights. The right on the other hand, was to varying degrees anti-semitic because it regarded the Jew as an alien element in the body politic. This attitude had been a basic fact of political life throughout the nineteenth century and it did not change during the first third of the twentieth.²⁵

Such an analysis certainly helps to clarify why many Jewish intellectuals in Germany and especially in Austria joined social democracy. However, it does not explain the radicalization of the romantic Jewish generation of the 1880s, which was distrustful of rationalism, industrial progress and political liberalism – and none of whose members was attracted by social democracy.

What was the spiritual road that led a part of this current to socialist ideas – or, more precisely, to the revolutionary socialist version of anti-capitalism? Why was it, for example, that in one of the main discussion centres of the neo-romantic world-view, the Max Weber circle of Heidelberg, it was precisely the Jews (Lukács, Bloch, Toller) who opted for revolution?

As noted earlier, their social condition as pariahs, their marginalization and uprooting clearly made Jewish intellectuals receptive to ideologies that radically contested the established order. But other motivations entered into play, which were specific to the anti-capitalist romantic milieu. Jewish national/cultural romanticism (i.e. Zionism) did not gain the support of the majority. Assimilation was too deep for Jewish intellectuals to be able to identify with a rather abstract Jewish nation in Central Europe (unlike in Eastern Europe). It is, therefore, understandable that most of them refused all nationalism and opted instead for an internationalist, anti-capitalist romantic utopia, in which social and national inequalities would be completely abolished: in other words, anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, or a romantic and libertarian interpretation of Marxism. The attractive power of this ideal was so great that it even influenced Zionists such as Buber, Hans Kohn or Gershom Scholem.

There are various reasons why, above all before 1917, libertarian utopia held a particular attraction: first, as we have already seen, of all socialist doctrines, libertarian utopia was the one most charged with anti-capitalist romanticism – while orthodox Marxism, then identified with social democracy, appeared as a more left-wing version of liberal/rationalist philosophy and worship of industrial civilization (Gustav Landauer’s criticism of Marxism as the ‘son of the steam-engine’ typifies this attitude). On the other hand, the authoritarian and militarist character of the German imperial state also stimulated the libertarian anti-authoritarianism of the rebel intelligentsia, especially after 1914, when it appeared to the intelligentsia like a Moloch avid for human sacrifices. Finally, anarchism corresponded better to the intellectual’s posture of being ‘without social attachments’, uprooted and marginal, especially in Germany where (unlike in France, Italy or Spain) the libertarian current was not an organized mass social movement.

It was the combination of all these economic, social, political and cultural conditions which made it possible – at a specific moment in history, and within a specific generation of Central European Jewish intellectuals – for the correspondence between Jewish messianism and libertarian utopia to become dynamic and to turn into a relationship of elective affinity. It is hard to know which of the two was the primordial or determining element: what is important is that they sustained, reinforced and stimulated each other. This was the context, then, in which a complex network of links took shape, between anti-capitalist romanticism, Jewish religious rebirth, messianism, anti-bourgeois and anti-statist cultural revolt, revolutionary utopia, anarchism and Socialism. To this socio-historical process, which began to unfold in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, must now be added the concrete political conjuncture of a revolutionary upsurge without precedent in modern European history, stretching from the Russian Revolution in 1905 to the final defeat of the German Revolution in 1923. It was not by chance that the main works displaying the Wahlverwandtschaft between messianism and utopia were written in this period, from Landauer’s ‘Die Revolution’ (1907) to Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness and the second edition of Bloch’s Geist der Utopia [Spirit of Utopia], both published in 1923. It was not by chance, either, that the writings in which this affinity was the most intense and profound, and in which both messianism and libertarian utopia were expressed most completely and explosively, dated from the crest of the revolutionary wave: 1917–21. These were the years that saw the publication of: Buber’s ‘Der heilige Weg’ (‘The Holy Way’), the Preface to the re-issue of Landauer’s Aufruf zum Sozialismus [Summons to Socialism], Benjamin’s ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ (‘Critique of Violence’), Bloch’s Geist der Utopie [Spirit of Utopia, first edition 1918], Lukács’ ‘Bolshevism as a Moral Problem’, and Toller’s two great plays, Die Wandlung [The Transfiguration] and Masse Mensch (Man and the Masses). This does not mean, of course, that the problematic did not survive after 1923, although it changed in form, character and intensity. It reappeared most notably during certain periods of catastrophe – for example, between 1940 and 1945, when Walter Benjamin wrote the Theses on the Philosophy of History, Martin Buber his Pfade in Utopia (Paths in Utopia), and Ernst Bloch the main portion of Das Prinzip Hoffnung [The Principle of Hope].

What remains to be explained is why this phenomenon – the emergence of a ‘metaphysical-anarchist’ or revolutionary-messianic movement inspired by romanticism – should have been confined almost exclusively to Central Europe.

The figure of the Jewish revolutionary had been virtually non-existent in the political and cultural arena of Western Europe. In England and the United States towards the end of the nineteenth century, Jews originating from Eastern Europe came to form a super-exploited proletariat, a breeding ground for anarchist and socialist militants. But Jews with their origins in the West were completely assimilated, both nationally and culturally, and quite conformist in social and political terms. Intellectuals stemming from this milieu identified in their whole being with the prevailing bourgeois liberalism. The roots of this were to be found in the bourgeois revolutions of sixteenth-century Holland, seventeenth-century England and post-1789 France, which had emancipated the Jews and made possible their economic, social and political integration into capitalist society. If the revolutionary Jew appeared in Central and Eastern Europe, this was principally due to the delay or failure of bourgeois revolutions – and the lagging development of capitalism – in that part of the continent, which restricted the emancipation/assimilation of Jews and maintained their pariah condition.

Romantic/revolutionary messianism never attracted the West European and American Jewish intelligentsia: on the contrary, the most important liberal rationalist polemics against utopias of religious inspiration were written by Jewish intellectuals of Anglo-Saxon cultural origins – for example, the well-known book by Norman Cohn (born in London in 1915), The Pursuit of the Millennium. Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1957); or that of Jacob Talmon (former Foreign Office official), Political Messianism. The Romantic Phase (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960).

The Dreyfus Affair was (prior to the Second World War) the only rift in the Western system of assimilation/integration, but even this traumatic event could not shake the patriotic, bourgeois-republican faith of French Jews. However, it did make possible the emergence of an exceptional messianic/libertarian revolutionary figure: Bernard Lazare. He may be the only Western Jewish thinker who can be compared to Buber or Landauer. But he was doomed to remain isolated, rejected and misunderstood by the great majority of the French Jewish community.²⁶

The situation was completely different in Eastern Europe, notably in the Russian Empire, which, prior to 1918, included Poland and the Baltic countries. Here the Jews’ participation in revolutionary movements was far greater than in Central Europe, and unlike in Germany, not limited to intellectuals: an entire Jewish proletariat organized itself within the Bund or joined the Bolshevik or Menshevik faction of the RSDLP (Russian Social/Democratic Labour Party). This can easily be explained by the qualitatively higher degree of oppression, the different social composition of the Jewish population (with its working-class and/or impoverished mass) and the strength and violence of anti-Semitism; in short, by the much more directly pariah condition of the Jews living in the tsarist Empire. As a result, a huge and varied mass of Jewish intellectuals was present in all East European revolutionary movements, be they socialist, Marxist or anarchist, including in leadership positions as organizers, ideologists and theoreticians. As Leopold H. Haimson noted, the major role of Jews within the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia was out of all proportion to their numerical weight in the population.²⁷

The most well-known were but the tip of the iceberg: Leon D. Trotsky (Bronstein); Rosa Luxemburg; Leo Jogiches; Julius Martov (Tsederbaum); Raphael Abramovich; Lev Deutsch; Pavel Axelrod; Mark Liber (Goldman); Fyodor Dan (Gurvytch); Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld); Karl Radek (Sobelsohn); Grigory Zinoviev (Radomylsky); Yakov Sverdlov; David Ryazanov (Goldendach); Maxim Litvinov (Wallach); Adolf Joffe; Mikhail Borodin (Grusenberg); Adolf Warski; Isaac Deutscher, and so on. In addition, of course, there were the leading figures of specifically Jewish socialist organizations, such as the Bund and the left-wing Zionists, and the numerous Jews originally from the East who participated in the revolutionary workers’ movement abroad; in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches, Parvus (Israel Helphand), Arkadi Maslow (Isaac Chereminsky), August Kleine (Samuel Haifiz), among others; in England (Aron Lieberman, Lazar Goldenberg); or in the United States (Emma Goldmann, Alexander Berkman, S. Yanofsky).

Yet all of these Jewish revolutionary ideologues, militants and leaders, who had widely different if not conflicting political orientations, and whose relationship to Judaism went from complete and deliberate assimilation in the name of internationalism to proud affirmation of a national/cultural Jewish identity, still had one element in common: rejection of the Jewish religion. Their world-view was always rationalist, atheist, secular, Aufklärer, materialist. The Jewish religious tradition, the mysticism of the cabbala, Hasidism and messianism were of no interest to them. In their eyes, these were but obscurantist relics of the past, reactionary medieval ideologies which they had to be rid of as quickly as possible in favour of science, Enlightenment and progress. When a revolutionary Yiddish writer such as Moishe Kulback wrote on messianism (with a mixture of attraction, repulsion and nostalgia), it was mainly to show the sad role of false messiahs like Jakob Frank, who had led their followers to catastrophe.²⁸ An anarchist of Russian origins, such as Emma Goldmann, had nothing in common with the mystical spiritualism of someone like Landauer: in her libertarian universalism, there was no room for Jewish particularity, and religion (Jewish or Christian) belonged to the realm of superstition. In the best cases, as with the Bundist Medem, the first visit to a synagogue ‘made a deep impression’ because of the ‘great beauty present in the passion of mass feeling’: the actual religious content of worship was alien to him.²⁹ The passion of revolutionary Jewish intellectuals for atheism and science is marvellously illustrated by the story that Leo Jogiches, organizer of the first Jewish workers’ circles in Vilna, began his activities as a political educator by bringing along a real skeleton and lecturing on anatomy.³⁰

Many historians believe that, in the socialist and revolutionary convictions of Russian Jewish intellectuals, they can discern a secularized expression of messianism, a manifestation, in atheist and materialist form, of mental attitudes inherited from millennia of religious tradition. This hypothesis may prove to be applicable in certain cases. But for most of the Marxist or anarchist leaders mentioned above, it is implausible because their education and their familial and social milieux were so assimilated, so unreligious, that a real cultural link with the messianic heritage would be sought in vain. In any case, the writings of radical Russian-Jewish intellectuals, unlike those of many Central European Jewish revolutionaries, did not make the least reference to religion, nor did they display the least trace of a messianic/religious dimension.

How can this marked difference in world-view between the Jewish intelligentsia of German cultural origins and the Jewish intelligentsia of the tsarist Empire be explained?

Let us first note that the great majority of Jewish revolutionary intellectuals from the East came from ‘enlightened’, assimilated and religiously indifferent families; several were born or grew up in three cities that were the bastions of the Haskala in Russia: Odessa (Martov, Trotsky, Parvus); Vilna (Jogiches); Zamosc (Rosa Luxemburg). This was the movement that advocated opening the Jewish world to rationalist culture and the Enlightenment, which Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish philosopher from Berlin, had inaugurated in the late eighteenth century. But the difference between the Haskala in Germany and Russia needs to be considered. As Rachel Ertel showed so well in her study on the Shtetl, the Haskala and the emancipation of the Jews ‘in a Western Europe made up of nation-states, required a “denominationalization” of the Jewish religion stripped of all its national characteristics’. On the other hand, ‘the East European Haskala had deeply national characteristics. If, in the West, the movement aspired to denominationalization, in the East it aimed at secularization.’³¹

The national content of emancipation was an outcome both of the nature of the tsarist State – a multinational, authoritarian and anti-Semitic Empire – and of the situation of the Jewish communities: a pariah condition characterized by segregation, discrimination, persecutions and pogroms; territorial concentration in ghettos and in the Shtetl, cultural and linguistic unity (Yiddish).

Of course, many Marxist Jewish intellectuals (unlike the Bund and socialist Zionists) rejected any and all national or Jewish cultural references. One need only recall Trotsky’s famous response to questioning by the Bundist Medem at the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party: ‘I assume that you consider yourself to be either a Russian or a Jew?’ ‘No’, replied Trotsky, ‘you are wrong. I am nothing but a Social Democrat.’ In any event, whether the Jewish identity was accepted or rejected, it was – at least after the terrible pogroms of 1881 – a national/cultural and not merely a religious identity. Unlike in Germany, there were very few Jews in the tsarist Empire who thought of themselves merely as ‘Russian citizens of Jewish denomination’.

The atheist and secular orientation of the Eastern European revolutionary intelligentsia will be better understood if we look more closely at the religious aspect proper of the Haskala movement. In Germany, the Haskala actually did succeed in ‘enlightening’, modernizing, rationalizing and ‘Germanizing’ the Jewish religion. The movement of religious reform led by Rabbi Abraham Geiger (1810–74) and the more prudent reformist current (‘the historical school’) of Rabbi Zacharias Frankel (1801–75) gained hegemony in the religious institutions of the Jewish community. Even the minority neo-orthodox movement founded by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88) accepted certain reforms and values of the German secular culture.

Such was not the case in Russia where reform synagogues had few followers except in a small layer of the Jewish haute bourgeoisie. The iconoclastic attack of the maskilim (‘enlightened’) on the dogmas of orthodoxy only caused traditionalists to burrow into the most dogged immobility: ‘Before Haskala … rabbinic Judaism had been more worldly, more tolerant, and more responsive to social change. After the Haskala, rabbinic Judaism became conservative, inflexible, and repressive; Hasidism, too, followed suit.’³² While in Germany (and to a certain extent, in all of Central Europe) the Jewish religion was reformed and became more flexible and receptive to outside influences – neo-Kantian (Hermann Cohen) or neo-romantic (Buber) – in Eastern Europe, the traditional religious cultural universe remained largely intact, rigid, closed, impervious to any outside cultural input. The quietist and politically indifferentist messianism of orthodox circles (rabbinical or Hasidic) could not combine or link up with a secular utopia, which these circles rejected as a foreign body. One first had to be freed of religion, to become atheist or ‘enlightened’, in order to accede to the ‘outside’ world of revolutionary ideas. It was not surprising, therefore, that such ideas chiefly developed in Jewish concentrations furthest from all religious practices, as in Odessa, for example, which the orthodox considered a true den of sinners.

Another aspect to be taken into consideration is the immense authoritarian power of the orthodox Rabbis and Hasidic Zadikkim in the traditionalist communities, for which there was no equivalent in Central Europe. As a result, there was open conflict between the rebellious youth, be it Bundist, socialist or anarchist, and the religious establishment:

Feeling threatened, the traditional circles often responded with open or insidious violence, trying to maintain their hold by all means, including moral pressure and intellectual terrorism. … The youth was completely moulded by the traditional heritage … but it no longer wanted to be subjected to its law, and did not accept its restrictions. Therefore, the youth violently rejected this heritage and built its own culture against it: it was its inner enemy.³³

This was the context in which a virulent ‘anti-clericalism’ developed among progressive Jewish intellectuals, leaving countless evidence in the shape of polemical articles, autobiographical works and imaginative literature.

Directly confronted with the most conservative and authoritarian traditionalism, the young Jewish rebel from Russia (or Poland) could not ‘romanticize’ it in the way his German or Austrian counterpart could. There was not the distance that favours what Benjamin called an auratic perception of religion.

Isaac Deutscher was educated in a heder (religious school for children) in the Polish Shtetl Kranow. But although his family intended him to become a rabbi in the Hasidic sect of the Zaddik of Gere, he broke with religion as a teenager and became a leader of Polish Communism (and later the biographer of Leon Trotsky). Contrasting his attitude to religion with that of the German Jews, he described it as follows:

We knew the Talmud, we had been steeped in Hasidism. All its idealizations were for us nothing but dust thrown into our eyes. We had grown up in that Jewish past. We had the eleventh, and thirteenth and sixteenth centuries of Jewish history living next door to us and under our very roof; and we wanted to escape it to live in the twentieth century. Through all the thick gilt and varnish of romanticists like Martin Buber, we could see, and smell, the obscurantism of our archaic religion and a way of life unchanged since the middle ages. To someone of my background the fashionable longing of the Western Jew for a return to the sixteenth century, a return which is supposed to help him in recovering, or re-discovering, his Jewish cultural identity, seems unreal and Kafkaesque.³⁴

This striking passage reveals in the clearest and most concise way what motivated the Eastern European revolutionary intelligentsia; it shows why a spiritualist movement, like the one spreading throughout Mitteleuropa, could not emerge from within its ranks.

It is a striking fact that the only Jewish socialist intellectual within the Russian Empire who was attracted by the powerful movement of religious/revolutionary rebirth that developed in Petrograd at the turn of the century around D. S. Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius, Nikolai Berdyaev and S. N. Bulgakov (not to mention the ‘God-builders’ within the Bolshevik Party, Bogdanov and Lunacharsky) was someone who converted to orthodox Christianity: Nikolai Maksimovich Minsky (N.M. Vilenkin). A member of the Philosophical-Religious Association of Petrograd and of Gorky’s socialist journal Novaya Zhizn [New Life], Minsky was inspired by Russian-Orthodox spirituality and seemed not to have any ties to Judaism.³⁵

Were there no revolutionary Jews in Eastern Europe who were an exception to the rule – such as Bernard Lazare in Western Europe? Probably yes, but in all my research to date, I have yet to find one.³⁶