Читать книгу If I Am Not For Myself - Mike Marqusee - Страница 12

What is the great task of our age? It is emancipation. Not only that of the Irish, the Greeks, the Frankfurt Jews, the blacks in the West Indies and such oppressed peoples; it is the emancipation of the whole world, especially of Europe, which has come of age and is now tearing itself free from the iron leading-strings of the privileged class, the aristocracy.

Heinrich Heine, Pictures of Travel¹

In Sunday school, we learned about Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn, two in a long series of Jewish geniuses, and about Napoleon tearing down the ghetto walls. But overall the story of Jewish emancipation in Europe was sadly neglected. Compared to the saga of Israel or the memory of the shtetl or the progress of the Jews in the USA, not to mention the chronicles of the Bible, it was a footnote. More time was spent on Chasidism than Haskalah. Yet here we were, the beneficiaries of emancipation, Western Jews sitting in a Reform synagogue whose history was inseparable from that development.

In popular Jewish consciousness, Jewish emancipation has steadily lost ground. There are a number of reasons for this. It’s a protracted, fragmented process, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, and for the next 150 years moving in small eddies back and forth across the European continent. There is no emancipation proclamation, no moment of freedom at midnight, no May 15, 1948. Though individual Jews and Jewish groups played a significant role in shaping it, there was no mass Jewish agitation for emancipation until the Bund. The deliverers of Jewish emancipation were wars and revolutions, crises and upheavals in which, for the most part, the Jews themselves played only a marginal role.

The awkward fact about emancipation is that it was always in part a struggle within Jewry, a struggle against Jewish authority, against rabbis, who even in our Reform milieu were treated with a deference that rarely appears in the literature of the Haskalah. Most significantly, emancipation has become tainted by association with “assimilation” and “self-hatred.” The story is not only one of the emancipation of Jews from the legal restraints imposed on them for centuries, but emancipation of Jews from the rule of other Jews, and even sometimes from the constraints of Judaism or Jewishness.

In 1655, even before he’d published a word, Spinoza was accused of heresy (materialism and “contempt for the Torah”), and at the age of twenty-four he was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Synagogue. Spinoza was the son of Portuguese Jews, a lens grinder who wrote in Latin and spoke Dutch, Hebrew and Ladino, and his view of Jewishness was of a piece with his broader rationalism, with his insistence that “no one is bound to live as another pleases, but is the guardian of his own liberty.” In 1660 the synagogue petitioned the municipal authorities to declare Spinoza a “menace to all piety and morals.” In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, denounced by the Calvinist Church Council as a “work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil,” he argues:

As men’s habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another only to scoff, I conclude . . . that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honoured save justice and charity.²

Spinoza was one of the first modern critics of scripture, subjecting the Hebrew text to the kind of analysis previously reserved for secular works. “I learnt that the the law revealed by God to Moses was merely the law of the individual Hebrew state, therefore it was binding on none but the Hebrews, and not even on Hebrews after the downfall of their nation.” He was also a pioneering, pre-Freudian student of the emotions, which he identified as the source of human conduct. Above all, he was a stubborn prophet of intellectual freedom. “Religious and political prejudices are the cause of all tyranny,” he wrote. “As a negation of reasonable thoughts, the fruit of a terrible fear, prejudice obliges the people to believe blindly in the tyrant, to adore him as a god.” His studies led him to conclude that “in regard to intellect and true virtue, every nation is on a par with the rest, and God has not in these respects chosen one people rather than another.” As for the Jews, “their continuance so long after dispersion . . . [has] nothing marvellous in it.” They “have been preserved in great measure by Gentile hatred.”

Moses Mendelssohn was dubbed a “second Spinoza,” but his impact on Jewish—and European—life was much greater. A rabbinical scholar from a humble Yiddish-speaking home in Dessau, he made his way to Berlin and taught himself European culture, mastering German, French, English, Greek and Latin. Under Frederick the Great, Prussia was emerging as an economic, military and intellectual powerhouse, and with the support of elite Christians, Mendelssohn established himself as a renowned essayist and a major theoretician of the German Enlightenment.

Like other advocates of Jewish equality at the time, Mendelssohn saw legal emancipation as going hand in hand with internal reform. He called upon Jews to renounce those customs—notably usury—that gave them a bad name. He belittled Yiddish as a “jargon” that “has contributed more than a little to the uncivilized bearing of the common man,”³ and he urged Jews to speak German, embrace German culture and German patriotism. At the same time he called for and encouraged a revival of classical Hebrew. His German translation of the Hebrew Bible was banned by the rabbis, who also resisted his attempts to reform Jewish education. He argued for an end to the communal and commercial licenses enjoyed by a minority of Jews, but for which the majority took the blame.

Mendelssohn blended caution and boldness. “I am a member of an oppressed people that finds itself compelled to appeal to the good will of the authorities for protection and shelter,” he reminded readers. In 1763 the king granted Mendelssohn, then aged thirty-five, the status of Protected Jew (Schutz-Jude)—under which he was permitted to continue to live and work in Berlin. His discretion and reluctance to engage in full-tilt public combat over the Jews now make him seem, to some, an Uncle Tom, overeager to make concessions to the enemy. But for Mendelssohn, Jewish emancipation—and his own intellectual freedom—required a change in the place of religion in general in society. “I hate all religious disputes, especially those conducted before the eyes of the public,” he explained. “Experience teaches that they are useless. They produce hatred rather than clarification.”⁴

In 1769 he was called upon to defend and define himself by the Protestant cleric-scientist Johann Kasper Lavater, who challenged Mendelssohn either to refute what Lavater considered the rationalist arguments for Christianity or to convert. Mendelssohn was affronted by Lavater’s demand: “Among all the heretics known to him personally, I cannot be said to be his one and only friend.” He acknowledged that Judaism like Christianity and other religions was swathed in a “pestilential vapor of hypocrisy and superstition.” In particular, he sought to rid rabbinism of the tradition of disputatious “pilpul,” which he regarded as a “a sterile sort of acumen.” He could see little benefit in extending its competitive spirit into Christian—Jewish relations. As for himself, he intended to “change the world’s despicable image of the Jew not by writing disputatious essays but by living an exemplary life.”⁵

In Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, published in 1783, three years before his death, Mendelssohn subjects clericalism (of whatever denomination) to corrosive scrutiny, while at the same time arguing that Judaism has a place in the modern world. He reminds the reader how shocking is “that inadmissible idea of the eternality of punishment in hell—an idea the abuse of which has made not many fewer men truly miserable in this life than it renders, in theory, unhappy in the next.”⁶ Conflict between state and religion gives rise to “immeasurable evils,” but worse comes when the two are in agreement: “for they seldom agree but for the purpose of banishing a third moral entity, liberty of conscience, which knows how to derive some advantage from their disunity.”⁷ Both religions and states should be stripped of coercive, punitive powers over citizens’ minds. If beliefs, or rituals, are forced on individuals, they cease to be truly religious:

Reader! To whatever visible church, synagogue or mosque you may belong! See if you do not find more true religion among the host of those excommunicated than among the far greater host of those who excommunicated them.⁸

As someone who believed that “not a single point in the entire sum of human knowledge . . . is to be placed beyond question,”⁹ Mendelssohn asked of Judaism the same question he asked of Christianity. He argued that Judaism was based on laws, rules of life, not a revealed theology, and to that extent was in conformity with reason and had a right to be considered a distinct faith with its own merits. He believed the Hebrew Bible was “an inexhaustible treasure of rational truths,” but that with the destruction of the temple, and the end of the ancient Judaean state, many of its prescriptions no longer pertained. “The civil bonds of the nation were dissolved” and as a result Judaism “as religion, knows no punishment, no other penalty than the one the remorseful sinner imposes on himself.” As for “the Mosaic constitution” adumbrated in the Torah, “it has disappeared, and only the Omniscient knows among what people and in what century something similar may be seen.” Mendelssohn kept the sabbath, observed kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) and attended synagogue, but dispensed with customs he considered relevant only to the Hebrews’ ancient experience as a nation-state. “Adapt yourselves to the morals and constitution of the land to which you have been removed,” he advised his fellow sons of Jacob, “but hold fast to the religion of your fathers, too.”¹⁰

Mendelssohn’s life overlaps by thirty years that of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Chasidism. Both were products of the intersection of Jewish life with the larger historical forces of migration and modernity (and the very different ways these were experienced in Germany and in eastern Europe). Yet where the Baal Shem Tov is considered a touchstone of Jewish folk authenticity, entirely intrinsic to Jewry, Mendelssohn is tainted with cosmopolitan inauthenticity, seen as extrinsic to Jewishness (after all, his grandchildren converted to Christianity). The Baal Shem Tov, whatever his merits as a storyteller and dispenser of proverbial wisdom, and his significance as the progenitor of an enduring religious movement, never once raised his voice for the freedom of Jewry from legal oppression, a public cause to which Mendelssohn was unwaveringly steadfast.

In Sunday school we certainly never learned the name Zalkind Hourwitz, though we should have. Born in 1751 in a Polish village, he somehow made his way to Paris and in 1774 was living in a hovel on the Rue St Denis, one of a small, impoverished community of about 1,000 Parisian Jews—all present in the city on sufferance, since the fourteenth-century edict of expulsion had never been overturned. Later, Hourwitz recalled that he learned his ABCs from a Hebrew—German dictionary, and that at the age of twenty-two he was unfamiliar with the use of a fork. He makes his first appearance in print in 1783, responding to criticisms of the alleged ill-behavior of Polish Jews: “The Polish, French, English, Irish and Portuguese, are they all responsible for the massacres and regicides committed by some scoundrels of their nation? . . . Why not permit the same equity to the Jews?”¹¹ What’s bracing even now in Hourwitz’s advocacy for the Jews was his insistence that Jews have as much right to be rogues and fools as members of any other group. In the context of a debate in which it was widely assumed that Jews collectively required either vindication or reform, his unapologetic and realistic response to criticisms of Jews (and ethnic or national groups in general) was a liberating step forward, one that many in Europe and North America have yet to take.

In 1787, the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Metz posed a question for a public essay competition: “Are there means for making the Jews happier and more useful in France?” Hourwitz’s entry, his Apologie des Juifs, was ultimately one of three joint prize winners published in 1789. What’s stunning about Hourwitz’s essay is his critique of the assumptions buried in the question:

Are so many verbiages and citations necessary to prove that a Jew is a man, and that it is unjust to punish him from his birth onward for real or supposed vices that one reproaches in other men with whom he has nothing in common but religious belief? And what would the French say if the Academy of Stockholm had proposed, twelve years ago, the following question: “Are there means for making Catholics more useful and happier in Sweden?”