________________________________________________________
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.