________________________________________________________

The push for Jewish assimilation in the 19th century
________________________________________________________

If the 20th century finally gave birth to the modern world, then the 19th was the extended prelude of contractions: a series of social and political upheavals set in motion by the enduring influence of the French Revolution. One consequence of these upheavals was that the political situation of the Jews was gradually liberalized in Europe, and in some countries they were even granted full citizen rights, equal to those of Christians.

“In the course of the nineteenth century, Jews in substantial numbers abandoned Yiddish as their primary language to speak, for example, ‘good’ German, and significant segments of the community succeeded in leaving behind the commercial occupations of their fathers to become poets, composers, philosophers, and intellectuals of various other stripes.”[15]

This new liberal momentum that, in fits and starts, was prying open the legal shackles of the Jews was greeted with a delirious enthusiasm by many Jews, desperate as they understandably were to end their inferior status. Something very interesting and with tremendous consequences now took place: the emancipated Jews made efforts to assimilate to Christian society, and, as they did, they were seduced by antisemitism. This phenomenon made modern antisemitism very difficult to combat, and it would have important negative consequences for the possibility of Jewish self-defense in the context of the German Nazi onslaught.

It is important, especially, to understand the ideology of the German Jewish leaders, and those whom they influenced, because without this context one cannot make sense of the reactions of the Jewish leadership to the Nazi persecution, and therefore neither can one fully understand the Holocaust. I will begin by explaining how the legal emancipation of the Jews during the 19th century produced a great wave of assimilation, and the consequences of that. I will focus first on the grand sweep of the process of assimilation and then on how it affected the German Jewish leadership in particular.
 

Why didn't assimilation happen earlier?
______________________________________

Previously, the Jews could say with confidence that their own civilization was superior to that which surrounded them, for the contrast was dramatic. Jewish society was freer, more socially just, much more ethical, and much, much more alphabetized than Christian society. Historian James Carroll, a Catholic who has studied medieval Judaism in the context of the ecclesiastical attacks of which it became a victim, says:

“Jewish life at the millennium was humane and thriving... I read this history as a Christian, but it seems fair to say that the Talmudic system[16] had shaped a way of thinking by the very seriousness with which the commentary of rabbis was taken. That way of thinking, in turn, shaped Jewish communal life. The problems and crises of Jews were addressed and resolved through commentary and further commentary -- an inbuilt commitment to text, reading, imagination, and community. All of this was organized around an admired collective whose authority was rooted in study and in the proven wisdom of its ‘responsa,’ its responses to questions. Though based on the Law of Moses, Judaism had emerged as a community ordered not by legislation or decree but by the influence of its interpreters, reflecting on a compilation of the commentary of ancestral masters. This is the culture of Talmud, a culture not of codification but of conversation, written and oral; a culture not of hierarchy but of mutuality.”[17]

This obvious superiority of Judaism, I think, contributed greatly to strengthening the commitment of Jews to their religion despite the interminable avalanche of attacks, in this way achieving the spectacular survival -- despite all odds -- of the community. But in the 19th c. the Christian societies in the West became freer than they had been: the press flourished, and a variety of opinions were expressed at the same time that the censoring power of the Church and the monarchies receded. These societies also became less harshly unequal, and education became more widely accessible. Even if these were partial victories, the consequence of hard-won battles fought from below, and resisted bitterly by the aristocratic classes, the palpable gains over the course of the century gave a sense of evolution: the world progressed -- not just in politics, but in science, art, and industry -- and this direction seemed inexorable, inevitable, irresistible. ‘Progress’ -- and consciousness of it -- became one of the obsessions of that generation; the very definition of modernity was this cult of ‘progress’ (this outlook has not altogether disappeared).

To many Jews, this modern world that was coming into being, and which, many promised, would be ever better, shone with a more attractive sheen than the Orthodox community. Many, without coercion, chose to convert to Christianity; others traveled only half-way there, assimilating to Christian culture and abandoning judaism, but -- and here lies the crucial issue -- functioning still as Jews and even as leaders with great influence in their community. This would have certain consequences, because assimilation to ‘modern society’ carried with it the adoption of the Western world's dominant ideology: antisemitism.
 

The new antisemitism, and its appeal for many Jews
___________________________________________________

If the spirit of Judaism was winning -- the universal ethics of the European Enlightenment -- was Jewish Law itself still necessary? Long a refuge and promise of universal liberation, many Jews now felt that they were dragging a heavy ball and chain that kept them in the Middle Ages and precluded full immersion in ‘modern society,’ thus sabotaging the millenarian hope of redemption: the passion to live -- finally! -- in a world where Jews could be ‘normal.’ This was the perception, especially, of wealthy Jews who already had a foot in Christian society and the other foot half outside of Judaism, for they wished to join the European ruling classes as full members. It is they who most found to their taste the old wine that antisemites were now selling in shiny new bottles.

The new attacks against Orthodox Jews represented them as a stubborn resistance, wishing to remain in a retrograde culture, and polluting modern society with their nefarious influences. In those days so-called ‘scientific’ racism was flourishing -- fed as it was by the nationalist eruptions that would then extend themselves over the European continent like brushfires -- so the supposed degeneracy of the Jews was often explained as a product of their objectionable biological nature. Those who pushed these far right arguments were the “traditionalist adversaries of the Jews and of Enlightenment liberalism, [who] maintained that the Jews were a separate nation and so could not be absorbed as citizens into European nations.”[18]

It is well to point out, however, that the ‘liberal opposition’ didn’t speak very differently on the question of the Jews: “Among Enlightenment figures, virtually all insisted that the Jews would need to give up their concepts of Jewish nationhood... Some went further and attacked Judaism at its foundations as immoral, inhumane, and inconsistent with civilized society.”[18a] Those who defended the ‘liberal’ view, then, “advocated [Jewish] integration but typically with limits to the citizen rights to be extended the Jews and with those rights coming only upon the Jews’ renunciation of much of their heritage.”[19]

The ‘right’ hand was a fist and the ‘left’ hand was extended only in exchange for abolishing the Law of Moses. Check mate.

Once this dilemma is appreciated we can recognize the profound genius of Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism. His strategy recruited, on the one hand, the forces of liberalism because he was proposing a new State where his people could establish themselves as a democracy and be free, but it harnessed also the energies of the racist nationalism that sought to exclude the Jews, for many antisemites found appealing the idea of ridding themselves of the Jews by sending them to the Middle East. But the antisemites had their judo moves, too: by making clear that modern citizenship came with a price -- to proclaim oneself ‘assimilated,’ on the Christian side, and allied with the new antisemitic accusations -- they managed in this way to recruit the energies of many Jews, especially in the upper classes.  The ‘assimilated’ ended up defending the view that in order to resolve the so-called ‘Jewish Problem’ Talmudic Judaism would have to be abandoned, because Christian hate was supposedly a consequence of the ‘primitive’ difference that Orthodox Jews were clinging to with needless obstinacy.

This ‘explanation’ for antisemitism betrayed an almost complete ignorance of history, or at least a denial of it. And it shoved to one side the contemporary evidence: Where is the movement to exterminate the Amish, who represent a resistance to the modern world more extreme than anything in Orthodox Judaism? (As I have argued elsewhere, the fundamental reason for antisemitism is that Jewish Law, the law of liberated slaves, carefully protects the rights of ordinary workers, and this has always been offensive to the Western ruling classes.) But nothing here is sadder than the irony of these ‘new’ attitudes that in fact betrayed the liberal spirit that had produced the opportunity for emancipation in the first place. For if liberalism is not the tolerance of the difference that does not hurt us -- and Jewish orthodoxy, like Amish orthodoxy, does not hurt us (on the contrary, avoiding harm is at the center of both movements) -- then it is nothing. The modernizing Jews -- who benefited from liberalism -- did not defend the liberal and modern principle of religious tolerance, because they did not respect the right of their Orthodox brethren to remain different.

Historian Joseph Dan gives us another clue. There is a “deep ambivalence in the modern Jewish soul,” he says, for it contains “the rejection of the practical norms of traditional Judaism as ‘medieval’ and ‘ignorant,’ on the one hand, and the nostalgic cherishment of the deep roots in the past,” on the other.[20] I think the key here is the nostalgic cherishment of the deep roots in the past. It is quite uncomfortable to affect nostalgia for something that in fact will not consent to disappear, and the Eastern Jews, who inisted on the everlasting relevance of the halachach, were the majority. In consequence, the modernizing Jews, shorn now of the Law that defines Judaism, felt inferior in their authenticity as Jews. The solution? To abolish Jewish Orthodoxy so that it could become the object of a genuine nostalgia.

“In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jews in central Europe were told by much of the surrounding society that Yiddish was a crude, bastardized, unwholesome language that reflected the degenerate nature of the Jews and illustrated their unfitness for citizenship rights. Many Jewish leaders and members of the cultural elite in the Jewish community embraced this attack and urged the abandonment of Yiddish as, in the words of one such figure, ‘a language of stammerers, corrupt and deformed, repulsive to those who are able to speak in a correct and orderly manner.’”[21]

It is interesting and revealing that the derogatory -- in truth condemning -- comment about Yiddish cited above comes from Moses Mendelssohn, the father of the ‘Jewish Enlightenment’ movement known as Haskalah. The leaders of this movement were called maskilim, and Mendelssohn is the father figure. One cannot accuse Mendelssohn himself of antisemitism because he “adhered to the practice of traditional Judaism throughout his life, was concerned about the welfare of his fellow Jews, and extended what help he could to Jewish communities across Europe in distress from the actions of local authorities.”[22] But Mendelssohn’s comment about Yiddish shows that his recommendation to his Jewish brethren to get an education beyond the Jewish language in order to participate more fully in their societies was not simply a practical advice. Mendelssohn had absorbed some of the prejudice of Christians against the Jewish people, whose tongue was simply a language like any other. His followers absorbed much more antisemitism than he did, because “very few, if any, of the maskilim shared Mendelssohn’s commitment to traditional Jewish observance. Rather, there was almost unanimous support for doing away with it.”[22a] As we shall see, it is not a great exaggeration to say that the maskilim represented a Jewish movement to abolish Judaism.

To round out the context, I will cast a brief look at the currents that had been affecting Orthodox Jewish practic.

The Orthodox Jews
___________________

In the 18th and 19th c. there came into being the Hassidic movement, founded by the Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov towards the end of the 18th. “Hasidism undoubtedly was to some extent a revivalistic movement, which brought new enthusiasm and new impetus to the performance of the old traditional ethical and ritualistic traditional norms,” and it has played an important role in the survival of Orthodox Judaism.[23] But from the practical, ethical point of view, it brought nothing new:

“It should be emphasized that it is very difficult, if not absolutely impossible, to point out even one central religious idea which is characteristic of the Hasidic movement as a whole and only to it, one that is not found in any Jewish non-Hasidic or pre-Hasidic movement, which is not part of the concept of the Zaddik and the relationship between the community and its leader. All the rich intellectual and spiritual ideas found in the many hundreds of books written by Hasidic leaders since the last two decades of the 18th century...to this very day are all ideas which can be found in many other Jewish books of ethics and homiletic... -- except the theological ideas concerning the role of the Zaddik.”[24]

But this idea of what it meant to be a Zaddik was certainly new: “The Hasid believes that his leader and teacher, the Zaddik, is divinely inspired, and that his soul is constantly connected with the higher realms of the divine hierarchy of forces (which Hasidism adopted from the symbolism of the Kabbalah). The Zaddik thus represents a divine power, and serves as an intermediary between the worshipper and God himself.”[25]

Because there really are no new ethical concepts that are exclusive to Hasidism as such, there isn’t here a dramatic ‘revelation’: Hasidism is thoroughly conservative. What Hasidism injected into the mystical Jewish tradition of Kabbalah is an element it did not have and which most other mystical movements possess: the saint, defined more than anything as a good man, who in the Jewish version also works for social justice, and whose authority emanates from the perception of his ethics and his presumed direct, often ecstatic, link to God. There is also the detail that a Zaddik’s authority is dynastic, for it is transmitted from father to son (and in some cases to son-in-law). In this manner, Hasidic communities were created around different Zaddik dynasties.

“Never before in Judaism was there such a large movement motivated by the concept of a leadership which serves as a religious, mystical intermediary between Man and God. The only exception is the Sabbatian movement of the 17th and 18th centuries, which believed that its messiah, Shabtai Zvi, was an intermediary between the people of Israel and the Godhead, an idea which was presented especially in the works of Nathan of Gaza, the prophet of Shabtai Zvi.”[26]

Shabtai Zvi had been a complete disaster, for after convincing astonishingly large multitudes all over the Jewish world that he was the long-awaited Messiah, he demonstrated that he was in fact an enemy of Judaism who wanted to abolish Jewish Law, and in the end converted to Islam, a religion that considers it pious to murder recalcitrant Jews or else make them slaves of the Muslims.[26a] It is true that Hasidism shares with the Sabbatean movement the element of charismatic leadership, but in another sense Hasidism is the very antithesis of Shabtai Zvi, for it means to preserve the Jewish Law. In a certain way, the Hasidic movement harnessed the feverish desire of the Jewish masses for a charismatic leadership -- amply demonstrated in the Sabbatean movement -- and used it to preserve traditional Judaism, neutralizing the threat present in Sabbateanism and later reverberations. Orthodox Jews, too, have their judo moves.

Precisely because Hasidism is an injection of charismatic leadership into Jewish mysticism, it went in a direction contrary to rationalism. The traditional rabbis had always been in general rationalists and many of them were passionately in love with science, but science “was notably less popular among the Hasidim.”[27] It should not surprise us that the rationalist currents in Jewish orthodoxy perceived a threat in Hasidic mysticism, thus giving birth to “the struggle of the Mithnaggedim or the traditional Talmudic Jews, against Hasidism.”[28] For example, “Rabbi Elijah [Ben Solomon Zalman],” the Vilna Gaon, a great enthusiast of science, “was the chief figure in the traditionalist campaign against the Hasidim in the late eighteenth century, and one of his major criticisms was what he perceived as Hasidism’s anti-intellectualism. This, he argued, was antithetical to the essential rationalism of Jewish belief and would inevitably lead to a falling away from basic Jewish tenets.”[29]

The reaction of the mitnagdim against the Hasidim “was to be one of the contributory factors of the Haskalah movement” of the maskilim.[30] But whereas the mitnagdim sought to protect the rationalism in Jewish Orthodoxy from the charismatic influences of Hasidism, the Haskalah rationalism of the maskilim, inspired by the European Enlightenment, took from Enlightnment figures their antipathy toward religion as such, launching an attack against Jewish Orthodoxy itself, including the traditional orthodoxy that the mitnagdim were defending. “Maskilim transformed Sabbateanism into a metaphor for Hasidism, the immediate object of their polemics, as well as other aspects of contemporary Jewish life, such as rabbinism and kabbalism, which they regarded as obscurantist, and which they hoped to reshape and reform.”[31] For the maskilim to paint Hasidism with the colors of Sabbateanism was to perpetrate a great injustice. An even greater injustice was to paint in this way the rest of Jewish orthodoxy, which had always been of a rationalist and non-charismatic tendency. Why were the maskilim doing this? Because, they said, they wanted to “restore the Jewish people to the world of reality,”[32] and this position required that Orthodox Judaism be represented as unreal: a mystical outburst of hysterics along the lines of Shabtai Zvi. This is how they justified their alliance with the Christian ruling classes that were working so hard to erase Judaism from the face of the Earth.

These efforts were destroying what had been a Golden Age of Orthodox Judaism in Eastern Europe.

Many Jews took refuge in Eastern Europe, in the 16th and 17th c., from the anti-Jewish mass killings, forced conversions, and expulsions that took place in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. Thanks to the autonomy that the Polish kings allowed, the Jewish comunity in these lands came closer than any other to a complete realization of an Orthodox Jewish society, a full expression of its compendium of Talmudic laws.[33] The beginning of the end came at the end of the 18th c., when the Polish state was dismembered and divided between Prussia, Austria, and Russia (it would not be recreated until after WWI).

There were maskilim -- assimilated, upper class Jews -- who now became leaders of the effort to destroy Jewish Orthodoxy in Russia. The Jewish upper classes avoided having to give their children to the Russian army by kidnapping lots of poor Jewish children who were taken often at the age of 7 or 8, would be educated by the Russian state, and would then begin a 25-year military service. Many were converted to Christianity.[34] The Russian experience was traumatic, especially when the infamous pogroms began. But it was the alliance of the maskilim with the Christian ruling clases in Germany that would have the gravest historical consequences.

Jewish assimilation in German lands
____________________________________

The Jews in Prussia and Austria were all that remained after the humble Jews in whom the government saw no great utility had been expelled, and after various policies had abolished the independence of the rabbis in German lands, forcing the Jews to integrate into the legal framework of the state. So the German Jewish communities “typically remained small and relatively affluent and their leading figures tended to be well connected with centers of power and other elite elements in the surrounding society.”[34a]

From this position resulted certain pressures: “contacts with the higher echelons of the larger society, and the allure of those echelons, unhappiness with the disabilities that followed on being Jews, and the absence of a sizable and strong Jewish community with communal institutions...led a number of Jews to abandon their Judaism and either themselves convert or baptize their children,” in this way completing their integration with the German elites.[35] “Philosophically, assimilationists no longer considered themselves Jews living in Germany. Instead, they saw themselves as Germans who, by accident of birth, were Jewish.”[36]

The consequences of adopting this vision quickly made themselves felt: of the 550,000 Jews who were emancipated between 1869 and 1871 in German lands, by 1930 a total of 60,000, or 10%, had relinquished all ties to Judaism either through apostasy, by being raised without any Jewish identity in mixed marriages, or simply by turning away completely from the Jewish community.[37] And many of those who retained some form of Jewish identity were assimilating anyway. The German Jewish minority viewed the recently annexed Polish Jews -- Orthodox, comparatively poor, and Yiddish speaking -- with horror, for they considered them “obstacles whose reform was necessary to win over the surrounding society to a more benign attitude toward Jews.”[38] They looked at Polish Jews and thought: ‘No wonder Christians hate us.’ And this meant that “they were predisposed to blame ‘Polish’ Jews for the persistence of anti-Jewish prejudice and Jewish disabilities should they reject proffered programs of self-reform.”[39]

“The support given by Prussian and Austrian maskilim to Joseph II’s efforts to push Jews out of their established occupations was aimed essentially against the Jews of Galicia, or Austrian-controlled Poland. And these pro-reform Jews did not perceive reform of Polish Jewry as simply a pragmatic step but chose to construe it rather as the exchange of an intrinsically primitive, corrupt, degenerate life for a better, more wholesome one.

...various maskilim worked to advance Prussian, Austrian, and even Russian steps to dismantle the vestiges of autonomy that persisted in the formerly Polish territories, impervious to the damage they were doing to the Jewish communities in those regions.”[40]

The maskilim didn’t merely advocate state education for the Jews but wanted to restrict their religious education, and beyond this “embraced the attacks on Talmudic studies that had for centuries figured prominently in anti-Jewish indictments of Jewish religious learning and practice,” representing the study of the Talmud like the Christian antisemites did: as “primitive, arcane, and even corrupting, and certainly inconsistent with Jewish entry into the modern world and participation in the surrounding civil society.” In the maskilim’s conception of Judaism the Jews had, as before, the obligation to enlighten the world with their ethics, but this would no longer make reference to the Talmudic system of laws; the Jews would simply practice better than anybody the universal humanitarian ethics of the European Enlightenment (which, ironically, had been inspired by a Talmudic scholar: Baruch Spinoza).[41] In this way, the assimilated Jews would become energetic defenders of the rights of everybody except their Orthodox brethren. For the maskilim were not looking to enrich Judaism but “to woo non-Jewish opinion and win assimilation into surrounding cultures and societies.”[42] Because the maskilim wanted to feel ethical and at the same time satisfy the antisemites with whom they were assimilating, they had to represent the destruction of Judaism as a way to better the modern world. In this way, they adopted practically all of the prejudices of the Christians against the Jews, including those accusations concerning their occupations, which would become the central axis of modern antisemitism: the Jews love money, and their money gives them power.

It is absurd, in principle, to fault a people for earning their life in a particular way so long as this is not a criminal endeavor, and the Jews were not criminals. But it is an even greater absurdity here because the Jews had been forced to earn their living as moneylenders. There was no choice involved. The artisan guilds of the Middle Ages excluded the Jews, and the political class forbade them from owning land. How were they supposed to earn a living if they could be neither farmers nor artisans? The Church did not allow Christians to lend money, because this was supposedly a sin, and the moral censure of the Church made it convenient to force the Jews into this profession, as it generated another structural advantage for the mobilization of antisemitism. This is how many Jews became moneylenders.

“Moneylending became the occupation of Jews at all financial levels. Wealthier Jews were the financiers of royalty, nobility, and even churches and monasteries; poorer Jews forced out of trade and crafts turned to extending small loans to the traders and craftspeople...”[43]

Given that moneylending was a sin to Christians, it isn’t very difficult to see where the prejudice against the supposed ‘capitalist materialism’ and ‘lack of productiveness’ or ‘parasitic nature’ of the Jews came from. (In any case, it was a Western European phenomenon; the Eastern European Jews, the great majority, were in fact overwhelmingly artisans because of the greater liberties that had traditionally existed in the East under the Polish kings.)

But even though the accusations were absurd, the maskilim embraced them, alleging that their Jewish brethren had supposedly been corrupted by their trade in money. One assimilated and ‘modernizing’ German Jew who made this argument a pillar of his philosophy was Karl Marx. “Marx argued, along with various Jew-baiters at the time, that it is not simply that Jews are coarsened by their involvement with commerce but, rather, that the Jews and their religion are immutably materialistic and degenerate and this drives them to engage in trade.”[44] It is hardly a coincidence that Marx’s father should have converted to Christianity, baptizing young Karl when he was six. We have here the prototype of the assimilated Jew, who wants to demonstrate to Christians that he is truly on the other side, a ‘good Jew,’ acceptable because he attacks his ‘former’ people. Marx was quite loud and proud in his displays of antisemitism.

“In his essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1844), Marx argues that the Jewish mind is too limited and Jewish thinking too concrete to have fashioned a true religion. Instead, it produced a pseudo-religion whose practical expression is materialism and occupation in trade. Also as a consequence of their limited nature, the Jews are incapable of creativity and lack aesthetic sensibility... Marx writes in the essay, ‘What is the worldly cult of the Jews? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money... That which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion -- contempt for theory, for art, for history, and for man as an end in himself -- is the real, conscious standpoint of the man of money.’”[45]

Naturally Marx blamed the Jews for the very capitalism that his ideology was meant to extirpate from the world, so the essence of Marx’s program was actually the “liberation of the world from the ethos of the Jews!”[46] And the more Marx was attacked for being a Jew, the more he strove to demonstrate that he really wasn’t, ramping up the volume of his antisemitic attacks.

I hardly find it a coincidence that Marx, founder of a false ‘left’ that was thoroughly anti-liberal and would re-enslave the workers wherever it succeeded, murdering them also by the millions, should have been a ferocious antisemite. The Law of Moses that Marx so thoroughly despised, after all, was born, according to Exodus, in a slave revolution against an oppressive Egyptian kind, and is therefore designed with great care to protect the rights and liberties of ordinary workers.[47] Judaism is the real left, if anything is. If Marx was an enemy of the Jewish constitution, he couldn’t really be a friend of the workers, and the trajectory of his ideology stands in evidence: hardly anything in history has been worse for the workers than Marx’s ideology.

The biggest irony of all this is that by the end of the 19th c. and beginning of the 20th, “[the] Jewish pursuit of assimilation was being met with the shrill antisemitism purveyed by the new antisemitic political parties in Germany and Austria,” showing that assimilation was not actually the panacea against anti-Jewish hatred that the proponents of assimilation imagined.[48] Theodore Herzl, an assimilated Jew, reacted to this reality by becoming a nationalist Jew and launching the Zionist movement as a worldwide and politically relevant phenomenon. But many other assimilated Jews, finding themselves in limbo, rejected by the Christian society they had tried to assimilate to, and incapable of solidarity with a traditional Jewish community they had abandoned and attacked, concluded that they must really be plagued by an intrinsic inferiority that could not be shaken. Coming thus to the logical end of their ideology, they arrived at that singular phenomenon: hatred of their own selves, culminating in the pathos of that absurd -- though ideologically consistent -- curtain call of suicide. It was the case, for example, of Otto Weininger, who converted to Christianity in 1902, followed by his family. A year later he argued in Sex and Character that women were inferior in everything, devoting also a chapter to Jewish inferiority. He went out of his way to point out that he was a Jew and not excluded from his own condemnations. A year later he took the logical step and killed himself.[49]

Once the preceding context has been digested, it is possible to understand what follows. The great pressures on the Jews during the 19th c. that produced the above processes of assimilation -- especially in German lands -- sliced in two the Zionist movement. This rupture, as we shall see, made very difficult the defense of the Jewish people when, in the context of the German onslaught, patriots confronted traitors in the Jewish leadership.

________________________________________________________

The Zionist movement splits
________________________________________________________

Those most in danger from the growth of so-called ‘political antisemitism’were the more traditionalist Jews of the East, the great majority (90%). We should not be surprised, therefore, that support for the Zionist movement came especially from the masses of the Russian and Polish Jews. But those who were in a position to lead the movement were the assimilated upper class Jews in Western Europe, people such as Theodore Herzl. The founder of the Zionist movement worried especially about the Eastern European Jews, but he was an exception, and the growing dispute between assimilated and Orthodox Jews would pruduce a gash in the Zionist movement separating the two sides. This was to be expected because everybody was conscious that the future was being constructed, and those who militated for modernizing assimilation did not want Orthodoxy in the Jewish future.

The first great seismic movement would come when Chaim Weizmann and Theodore Herzl threw their weight in opposite directions, each on his tectonic plate.
 

“Chaim Weizmann was a member of the community of young Russian Jews who had been locked out of universities in Russia because of czarist numeri clausi and had gone to Germany to study,” where the assimilationist movement among ‘educated’ Jews was strongest. Weizmann had joined the Zionist movement but, influenced by the Russian socialists -- ‘modernizing’ Marxists with a fiercely anti-religious ideology drenched in antisemitism -- allied with other Zionists of equal temperament, broke with Herzl, and split the Zionist Organization, creating the so-called Democratic Faction. “Herzl,” though not himself a religious Jew, “was worried about the potential large-scale defection of Orthodox Russian Jewry from the Zionist cause in the face of the Democratic Faction’s anti-religious agenda, [so he] hurriedly organized a meeting of supportive Russian Zionists, both Orthodox and nonreligous, in Vilna in February, in 1902. A religious Zionist party, Mizrachi, was formed at the meeting as a counterweight to the Democratic Faction within the Zionist Organization.” Soon this party gained the allegiance of many Zionists groups all over Russia, something that Weizmann didn’t like at all, and which led him to declare: “The rabbinical party is organizing itself in Jesuit fashion, and I think of their machinations with disgust. Everything is vulgar and foul.”[50]

When Herzl died in 1904, at age 44, Weizmann managed to become the leader of the Zionist Organization because Max Nordau, Herzl’s ally, refused to take the helm. This was a catastrophe. In line with his Marxist ideology, Weizmann began working to purge the Zionist Organization of anything that was “clerical, bourgeois, and conservative.”[51] He wanted to import into Palestine only “an elite... uninfected with the dross of Jewish bourgeois capitalism or traditional religiosity [in order to] construct a Jewish socialist utopia in Eretz Israel.”[51a] This left out the Eastern European Jews who most needed a place of refuge, the majority, and stood Herzl on his head. Weizmann was quite explicit in a letter he wrote in 1918 that he didn't want any Eastern Jews in Palestine and worried that if the Jews were forced out of Europe, “we shall have all the miserable refugees who will be driven out of Poland, Galicia, Rumania, etc., at the doors of Palestine. We shall be swamped in Palestine and shall never be able to set up a community worth having there.” Later he would declare publicly that the Jews of Europe, whom Herzl had founded the Zionist movement to save, were “economic and moral dust in a cruel world.” He did not mean to save them: “The old ones will pass; they will bear their fate or they will not... Only a branch will survive” (his branch).[51b]

The leader of the rebellion against the policies of Weizmann and his ally David Ben-Gurion was Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky wanted to organize, under protection of an imperial power, and fast, the immigration of many Jews to Palestine so that they could make them a majority there and declare a state that would protect the Jews who were being attacked with violent pogroms in Eastern and Central Europe. This was, precisely, Theodore Herzl’s strategy. But Jabotinsky injected a thoroughly military spirit. He had begun by organizing Jewish self-defense forces among the Russian Jews so they would not be passive victims of the pogroms. When WWI exploded, “he was convinced that Jews’ participation in the armed struggle” -- a Jewish Legion contributing to the conquest of the Middle East -- “would give them a claim to the spoils of war” after the victory, and they would be able to build their state.[52] “It took almost three years of single-minded effort on the part of Jabotinsky and much agitation on the part of others to bring the Jewish Legion into being,” a force that rose to 5000 Jewish soldiers.[53] But the British rapidly disbanded the Jewish Legion when they created the British Mandate and the Jews were once again without defense. When, with British encouragement, the Arabs launched a wave of terrorism against the Jews in 1920, “Jabotinsky again organized the Haganah self-defense forces which, many years later, became the nucleus of the Israeli army.”[54]

Whereas Weizmann wanted, in his words, nothing more than “a place where they [his Jews] formed an important part of the population... however small this place might be. For example, something like Monaco, with a university instead of a gambling-hall,”[62a] condemning once a gain a handful of Jews to live without protection in antisemitic lands, Jabotinsky wanted lots of Jewish immigration to Palestine, and fast, in order to acquire as much land as possible and create there a militarily capable majority that could declare a State.

Whereas Weizmann was a Marxist who rubbed shoulders with, and waxed sycophantic towards, anti-Zionist millionaires whom he wanted to include in an expanded Jewish Agency to help him develop Palestine, Jabotinsky was “unalterably opposed” to any such ideological oxymoron, and though he much preferred the free market to socialism, he “did not embrace capitalists -- especially the very rich -- without reservation,” the way Weizmann did.[62]

In historical context it is obvious that Jabotinsky was right about everything. In Palestine Hajj Amin al Husseini, the local Arab leader, created by the British as a tool of oppression against the Jews, was already intimidating or murdering all opposition to him among the Arabs, leaving only those who allied with his project of extermination. The Jewish immigrants who escaped the Russian pogroms had merely come to the Palestinian pogroms. The exile (Galut) had not ended. Without a policy to create a true Jewish state with a Jewish majority, and a military self-defense policy to confront the violence of Husseini, there would not be a long-term solution. This was Jabotinsky's argument.
 

The Jewish Agency
___________________

The main problem for Jewish security was that Weizmann and Co. were allied not with the Jewish people but with the British elite. “The Jewish Agency, led by [David] Ben-Gurion, [Moshe] Sharett et al.,” had been created by the British, in 1923. Ostensibly the British had done this to implement the mandate given by the League of Nations: “to prepare a homeland for Jews in Palestine.”[55] But “in reality, the Jewish Agency simply acted as an alter ego of the Zionist Organization, coordinating most of its important policy decisions in advance with London.”[56] The Jewish Agency didn't have any authority that the British Government didn't choose graciously to concede: “The Mandate authorities did not recognize the Jewish Agency as having any governmental authority in Palestine, but the Agency was widely viewed by the Jews of Palestine as their de facto government.”[56a] In Perfidy, Ben Hecht explains it like this:

“The British government asked the leaders of Zionism to submit for British approval a coterie of Jews who would be acceptable as chiefs of the new Jewish Agency. The coterie was submitted and blessed with British sanction. Thereafter the Jewish Agency became the Jewish face for the British rule of Palestine -- a sort of caricature of authority to which Jews could give their loyalty... It was not an elected body, but an appointed one. And just as it had been established by British approval it could be dissolved by British disapproval... [and] it remained unwavering in its loyalty to British policy.”[57]

What was this British policy to which the leadership of the Jewish Agency would remain “unwavering in its loyalty”?

This British policy did not limit itself to sabotaging the project of creating a Jewish state, creating for this purpose the terrorist Hajj Amín al Husseini and assisting his attacks against innocent Jews in Palestine, then using this violence as an argument to restrict Jewish immigration and reduce radically the territory where Jews had a right to settle.[58] Neither did this policy stop at forbidding entry to Palestine to any Jew who didn’t possess the equivalent of £1000 ($5000), which closed the doors to the impoverished Russian and Polish Jewish masses, many of them Orthodox.[59] Beyond this, the British ruling class, allied with other European elites, would set in motion a policy of so-called ‘appeasement’ that would allow Hitler to take over the European continent practically without having to draw his sword, producing a pan-continental right-wing coup that would lead to an anti-Jewish genocide whose chief architect would be, precisely, the British creation Hajj Amin al Husseini.[60] And the British would assist this genocide, closing the doors of Palestine to the desperate European Jews, and condemning the Hungarian Jews whom it could have easily saved to die in Auschwitz, in addition to doing all sorts of diplomacy to prevent, in general, the rescue of Jews.[61] The loyalty of Weizmann and his allies to British policy would extend even to cooperating with the destruction of Hungarian Jewry the last point.

Jabotinsky's Revisionists, by contrast, launched a passionate resistance against British policies. Natually, the British wanted to be rid of them, so Weizmann and Ben Gurion, always faithful to their masters, launched one attack after another against Jabotinsky's movement. And so it came to pass, in the same year of 1923 in which the British asked Weizmann to create the Jewish Agency, that Jabotinsky “dramatically resigned not only from his executive position, but from the Zionist Organization in a dispute over Weizmann’s leadership.”[63] He would later return to dispute the leadership of the Zionist Organization.
 

The Zionist Organization
________________________

The Zionist Organization was a king of landless State containing various parties that disputed among themselves the government of the Organization; Zionist Jews all over the world, so long as they contributed the symbolic shekel, had a right to vote, and the votes decided the proportional representation of the various parties in the Zionist Executive. One important party was the General Zionists, where “Faction ‘B,’ identified with Chaim Weizmann, worked closely with the Labor Zionists.”[66] The main labor party was David Ben-Gurion's Mapai, which began to dominate the entire political structure of the Zionist Organization and he Jewish Agency in Palestine. The only Zionist parties that consistently and doggedly opposed the policies of the Weizmann/Ben-Gurion/Mapai axis were Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Party and the religious Mizrachi Party.

That Jabotinsky had the right idea was demonstrated in the tremendous terrorist wave of 1929, when it became clear that the Zionist leaders in Palestine would not aggressively use the Haganah that Jabotinsky had created to defend the Jews from Husseini's attacks, and that they were giving in to the British policy that used that violence -- which the British themselves encouraged -- to tell the League of Nations that building a Jewish homeland was impractical. So, “from 1929 on, a fundamental change occurred in the organizational structure of the Zionist movement... [with a] consolidation of political parties,” with the Revisionists on one side and the labor movement on the other.[64]

“...the schocking impact of the 1929 riots bestowed an advantage on Jabotinsky’s militant opposition... [for] Jabotinsky could remind the voters of his previous cautions that the Zionist leadership was leading the movement into a blind alley, and the voters could see for themselves the truth of his statements. As the leader of the fighting opposition, he was now at the height of his renown, while Weizmann, the President of the Zionist movement, had been obliged to resign.”[65]

From the beginning, Jabotinsky had wanted his Revisionists to secede from the Zionist Organization and form their own, but in spite of the Revisionist Party being his creation, and himself a very popular leader, the majority of his followers wanted to stay and dispute the leadership. At the 17th Zionist Congress, in 1931, Jabotinsky formulated a platform he called the ‘ultimate objective’ which demanded that the Congress commit to the establishment of a Jewish state, on both banks of the Jordan, with a Jewish majority. If the Congress accepted this, he had won, “if not, then this was not a true Zionist movement and the Revisionists would draw the appropriate conclusion and secede.”[67]

In the elections that decided the proportional representation of the deputies to the 1931 Congress, the Revisionists won 21% of the vote, tripling their support -- a consequence of the blow to the Weizmann/Labor Zionist prestige after the 1929 debacle. But Weizmann and his allies had much support still. Because Jabotinsky had promised that the Revisionists would leave the Zionist Organization if his ‘ultimate objective’ were rejected, and because Weizamnn, Ben-Gurion, and allies, despite the risks, preferred that they leave,

“Ben Gurion had summoned up all his persuasive powers to prevent Mapai delegates from supporting [Jabotinsky’s] proposal. ...[then,] at the height of the tension, a cable arrived from Palestine, sent by Eliyahu Golomb and Saadia Shoshani, stating that the acceptance of the ‘ultimate objective’ proposal could spark an Arab pogrom in Palestine. The timing of the cable aroused suspicion, particularly among the Revisionists. However, it helped sway the vacillators, and the proposal was rejected.”[68]

It was of course false that the Arab pogroms against the Jews had anything to do with the policies of the Zionist Organization (unless we should speak of the positive incentive for Arab pogroms in the near-total inaction of the Jewish Agency when Arabs came to kill Jews). Hajj Amin al Husseini wanted to exterminate Jews: period. If 10,000 more came to Palestine, or 10,000 fewer, to him it was the same: he wanted to kill them all. If they established a state or merely came to till the land, it was the same: he would kill them all. So the only way to protect the Jews was to follow Jabotinsky’s lead: create a Jewish majority, and be well armed and prepared in order to defend from the inevitable antisemitic attacks. But Mapai had defeated this option. “[Jabotinsky] expressed his deep contempt for the Congress by the dramatic act of tearing up his membership card after the vote, declaring: ‘This is not a Zionist Congress.’” But his followers didn’t want to leave the Zionist Organization, arguing that, since they had just tripled their support, they would soon have control of the movement. At the same time that the Labor movement was unifying, consolidating and organizing, the dispute over what to do divided the Revisionists.[69]

There would be a high price to pay for this, for two years later, in 1933, Adolf Hitler would rise to power in Germany, and the Revisionists, despite their best intentions, would fail -- partly thanks to their internal divisions -- to save the boycott movement against the Germans that came within an inch of destroying Nazism. Mapai, partly thanks to its superior organization, successfully sabotaged the boycott and saved the Nazis (as we shall see). But Mapai didn't do this all by itself -- the Jewish leaders in the United States and Europe contributed enormously. These were for the most part assimilated Jews, and in particular Reform Jews, so to round out the context we will cast a look upon the main characteristics of the Reform movement.

________________________________________________________

Reform Judaism
________________________________________________________

The militant assimilationists wanted “to bring Jewish religious practice more into conformity with Christian practice,” and so they shoved the Talmud to one side and placed a greater emphasis “on the Hebrew Bible, which is sacred to both faiths.” They also wanted “to reform the book of prayer and to replace Hebrew with German,” and “sought to impose on Jewish religious practice at least a superficial resemblance to Protestant practice, with the expectation that this would make the Jews’ religion seem less alien to their neighbors and thereby win Jewish acceptance.” They represented all this as a way of “shedding the primitive and tainted for the progressive and modern and good.” They were also in favor of “removing from the liturgy all reference to Zion and Jerusalem and anything else that might suggest Jewish nationhood” in conflict with patriotism toward the countries they were living in.[70] Many assimilated German Jews thought that “Jewish ethnic identity” -- the very thing that made Jews a distinctive culture: their adherence to the system of Talmudic laws -- “should be denied”; at the same time, however, they “saw quintessential value in the tenets of Moses. These German Jews developed Reform Judaism.”[71]
 

The consequences of Reform Judaism
______________________________________

In 1922, in an article entitled ‘The Mission of Reform Judaism,’ Samuel Cohon, a defender of this movement, explained it like this:

“Reform Judaism represents the latest phase in the evolution of Jewish religious thought. It grew out of the post-Mendelssohnian intellectual endeavor to adapt the historic faith of Judaism to the changed conditions in Jewish life, following the French Revolution. Its pioneers, Jacobson, etc., were called upon to fight apostasy on the one hand and rigid orthodoxy on the other. Originating in Germany, the Reform Movement spread to other West European countries, and found an especially congenial home in democratic America. Its theology, as formulated by Abraham Geiger and his followers, is based on reason and on the scientific study of the Bible, Talmud, and Jewish tradition. Through its renewed emphasis on the ethical side of life, Reform Judaism has added new vigor to the age-old religion of Israel.”[72]

As we see in Samuel Cohon’s defense, officially Reform Judaism was supposedly opposed not only to orthodoxy but to apostasy. In other words, it represented itself as the way to save Judaism: “Advocates of reform often argued against critics that reform was necessary to retain Jews who found traditional Orthodoxy incompatible with the demands of modernity and would otherwise be lost to the community.”[73] But obviously, there was something else, here. As Cohon explains, Reform Judaism was a “post-Mendelssohnian intellectual endeavor,” meaning that it was inspired and led by the maskilim who followed Moses Mendelssohn and who, unlike him, didn’t feel any love for traditional Judaism. Max Lilienthal, for example, the main maskil allied with the Tsarist government to destroy Jewish orthodoxy in Russia, “emigrated to the United States in 1845 and became a prominent Reform rabbi there.”[74]

“Certainly,” concedes another defender of Reform Judaism, “some of the changes made Jewish life look more Christian: the organ music, the new synagogue architecture, [and] the regular sermon.”[75] The vestments of Reform rabbis also imitate the garb of Protestant pastors. So in the superficial details as in the deeper questions -- such as the removal of the Talmud -- Reform Judaism was going in the direction of Protestant Christianity. Was this really the way to prevent apostasy to Christianity? Or was this, more likely, an intermediate step that facilitated conversion? The statistics speak for themselves: today more than 50% of Jews raised in Reform Judaism marry gentiles, and in general they do not educate their children in Judaism -- not even Reform Judaism.[76] This trend could be seen from the very start: “even many of Reform Judaism’s pioneers ultimately converted to Christianity.”[77]

Cohon explains above that the theology of Reform Judaism was “formulated by Abraham Geiger and his followers.” Certain aspects of Abraham Geiger’s ideology are made clear by his reaction to what happened in 1840, when the medieval blood libel -- the accusation that the Jews were supposedly in the habit of stealing Christian children to torture them to death and perhaps eat them in satanic rituals that celebrated the murder of Jesus -- was revived against the Jews of Damascus, who were accused of murdering a Capuchin monk and his Muslim servant to use their blood in their rites.

“A number of prominent European Jews spoke out forcefully against the libel and several joined a delegation to Egypt to bring their concerns to the authorities there, as Damascus was then under the control of the Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ali. Among the delegates were Moses Montefiore, a leading figure in British Jewry, and the French Jewish statesman Adolph Cremiuex. But Abraham Geiger, a key founder of Reform Judaism, was critical of the delegation. Geiger declared: ‘For me it is more important that Jews be able to work in Prussia as pharmacists or lawyers than that the entire Jewish population of Asia and Africa be saved, although as a human being I sympathize with them.’”[78]

Geiger worked very hard to demonstrate to the ruling class in Prussia that he didn’t have any interests that could be interpreted as pan-Jewish, going to the extreme of opposing an international effort to defend the Damascene Jews from lies that had produced antisemitic mass killings in the Middle Ages. The Jews in the Muslim world were Orthodox, not reformed; Geiger did not care whether they were saved -- or at least their very lives were less important to him than the freedom of a Prussian Jew to open a pharmacy. One is entitled to wonder what this ‘sympathy’ was that Geiger claimed to feel, “as a human being,” for the Jews of Asia and Africa.
 

Reform Judaism in the United States
____________________________________

As Cohon also explains, Reform Judaism flourished especially in the United States, when many German Jews immigrated there during the 19th c. The three most important Jewish organizatio