A History of Zionism (5 page)

In Mendelssohn’s days Jews were still Jews and everyone referred to a Jewish nation. But in 1810
Sulamit
, the leading German-Jewish periodical, changed its subtitle to
Israelit
, and a few years later many Jews began to refer to themselves as of the ‘Mosaic confession’. By the 1830s the
Me’assef
, the Hebrew journal established by Mendelssohn’s pupils, had ceased to appear. The knowledge of Hebrew among the general public was by then restricted to a few prayers and some colloquial phrases; even the Jewish scholars used the language only sparingly. Luzzatto, the great Italian-Jewish thinker, said in a letter to Graetz, the historian of the Jewish people, that he regretted very much that neither Graetz nor Zacharias Frankel (the director of the leading Jewish theological seminary) liked to write Hebrew: ‘What will your pupils do, where will the language find a home after the demise of the present generation?’ The complaint was all the more poignant since Graetz and Frankel were fervently opposed to attempts to de-Judaise Judaism.

The religious reform movement gathered momentum throughout the first half of the century; prayers were translated and abridged, those of national rather than religious content or referring to the coming of the Messiah were deleted. Organs and mixed choirs appeared in the synagogues (or ‘temples’, as they were now called). Girls as well as boys went through the ritual of confirmation. The reform rabbis, to the horror of their orthodox colleagues, dropped the provision for the ritual bath and the elaborate mourning and funeral rites; some even introduced religious services on Sunday and left it to the discretion of the parents whether their new-born sons should be circumcised. The curriculum of the Jewish schools changed out of recognition, and it was alleged that in some of them children were singing Christian hymns such as ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’; they were lighting the candles of both the
menora
(the Chanukka candelabra) and the Christmas tree.

A powerful impetus to reform Judaism had been given by Moses Mendelssohn, who saw no contradiction between the essentials of a Jewish religion and his own moral maxims such as ‘Love truth, love peace’
(Jerusalem).
At the same time the scientific study of Judaism
(Wissenschaft des Judentums)
began to prosper, reawakening interest in the Jewish poetry of the Middle Ages, and retracing the development of Jewish prayers and ritual customs. But even those who were deeply convinced of the values of Judaism, its tradition and its contribution to civilisation, regarded it more as an impressive fossil than a living faith. When towards the end of the nineteenth century Steinschneider, a leader of this school, was told by one of his students about early Zionist activities, he looked longingly and sadly at his great collection of Jewish books and said: ‘My dear fellow, it is too late. All that remains for us to do is to provide a decent funeral.’

The German-Jewish
Haskala
(enlightenment) led many Jews away from Judaism and it has come in for bitter attacks from both the orthodox and the latter-day Jewish national movement. Mendelssohn and his pupils had paved the way for de-Judaisation, the argument ran, for the apostasy of individuals, and ultimately for the disappearance of the faith altogether. But such attacks ignore the historical context and therefore usually miss the point. The great decline in faith had set in well before the turn of the century. Judaism had been undermined from inside; the Haskala was not the cause of this crisis but its consequence. Orthodox Jews naturally expressed their horror at the progressive Christianisation of the synagogue, for this, not to mince words, is what it amounted to. But the reform movement was only the reaction to the chaotic state of religious life. The Haskala did not kill religious piety; on the contrary it tried, even if not successfully, to restore dignity to rabbis and synagogues, whose prestige, according to eighteenth-century witnesses, had fallen to an all-time low. Prayers, mechanically recited, were interrupted by social conversation, the exchange of business information, and even occasional brawls and fisticuffs. Such a religion had little attraction for a new generation of educated men and women.

Those who left Judaism have been harshly judged by later generations for the lack of dignity they displayed and their craving for recognition by the outside world; they were dying to become the monkeys of European civilisation (as Luzzatto put it), aping all the intellectual fashions of a rotten age. The resentment is only too intelligible; deserters from a fortress under siege - and the Jews were still subject to discrimination and even persecution - are never looked upon with favour. Of those at the time who chose baptism, many did so no doubt in the hope of material gain or social recognition; others simply grew away. But it is doubtful whether those who accepted Christianity did so only for material advantage. The sad truth which most defenders of traditional Judaism have always been reluctant to face was that it had become meaningless for many people. This was the age of the decline of traditional religion; with the disappearance of this common tie many educated Jews no longer felt any obligation, moral or other, to their community. These lapsed Jews admitted to a common ancestry and tradition. But what did this tradition amount to when compared with the overwhelming attractions of European civilisation, the Enlightenment, the classic and Romantic Movement, the unprecedented flowering of philosophy and literature, music and the arts? The crisis of religion was less acutely felt in the non-Jewish world, for both Catholicism and Protestantism showed themselves far more adaptable than orthodox Judaism to the winds of change. Even if a German ceased to believe in Christian dogma he still remained a German, whereas a non-believing Jew had no such anchor. It was not just that Judaism had nothing to put against the powerful influence of the Encyclopedists, of Kant and Hegel, Goethe and Beethoven. These, it could be argued, belonged to all mankind. The real problem was that Judaism as a religion (and few at the time regarded it as anything else) had little if any attraction for western-educated people. The last movement that had stirred the Jewish world, the messianism of Shabtai Zvi and his pupils, had long ago petered out; some of its offshoots, such as the Dönmeh in Turkey and the Frankists in Galicia, had ended up by adopting Islam and Christianity respectively. Throughout the eighteenth century the leading German rabbis had been engaged in perpetual internal strife, suspecting each other of various heresies. Rabbi Emden of Altona claimed that the amulets sold by Rabbi Eybeschütz of Hamburg to pregnant women (they were supposed to have a magic effect) included a reference to Shabtai Zvi; this was the great confrontation shaking central European Judaism for many years. With the keepers of the faith engaged in disputations of this kind, was it surprising that the Jewish readers of Voltaire had little but derision for what they regarded as the forces of obscurantism? Much of the influence of the Enlightenment was shallow and its fallacies were demonstrated only too clearly in subsequent decades. But in the clash between secularism and an ossified religion based largely on a senseless collection of prohibitions and equally inexplicable customs elaborated by various rabbis in the distant past, there was not the slightest doubt which would prevail. It was a conflict between a modern philosophy and a moribund religion.

Both the apostates and the advocates of assimilation were later accused of seeking to emancipate themselves as individuals instead of fighting for the emancipation of their people. German Jews in particular have been severely criticised for their pusillanimity. But those who opted out (it cannot be emphasised too often) did not feel themselves at all members of a people; at most they sensed that they were members of a community of fate whose destiny had been fulfilled. Nor was assimilation confined to Germany; the idea that the Jews were no longer a people had been given official sanction by the Sanhedrin convened by Napoleon in 1807. What happened in Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century was by no means unique; it simply predated developments elsewhere in Europe by several decades.

And yet, of those who opted for conversion, some took the decision with a heavy heart. They had ceased to believe in Judaism but they still felt that open dissociation from the ancestral faith was a cowardly act. Shortly after he was baptised Heine wrote to a close friend referring to the members of their own circle - the Association for Culture and Science among the Jews - that no one should be called an honest man before his death: ‘I am glad that Friedlaender and Ben David are now old, and they at least are safe, and no one will reproach our age that we did not have a single one among us who was without blame.’

For the majority of Jews there was less temptation. The orthodox, the many small-town Jews, and those who did not have constant professional or social contact with the gentile world, were held together by tradition and inertia. Their family ties had always been closer than was customary among the surrounding gentile world. They were distinguished by certain common traits of mentality and character, often but not always by their looks, by a certain affinity they felt for each other, by memories and traditions which went far back. They were not always aware of these common traits; the outside world frequently saw them much more clearly. Marx felt himself anything but a Jew; so did Lassalle whom he loathed. Marx’s exchange of letters with Engels is replete with references to the ‘Jewish Nigger’ Lassalle, his lack of tact, his vanity, impatience, and other ‘typically Jewish’ traits of character. But to the outside world men like Marx and Lassalle remained Jews, however ostentatiously they dissociated themselves from Judaism, however much they felt themselves Germans or citizens of the world. Well-wishers saw in Marx a descendant of the Jewish prophets and commented on the messianic element in Marxism; enemies dwelt upon the Talmudic craftiness of the Red Rabbi; there was no getting out of Börne’s ‘magic circle’. It was above all this hostility on the part of the outside world, and in particular Christian opposition to emancipation and later on the antisemitic movement, that prevented the total disintegration of the Jews as a group.

The demand for emancipation had been first advanced by a few humanists; the majority were either indifferent or actively hostile. Contemporary sources relate that peasants who had killed a Jew near Elmsbeck were most indignant when arrested and brought to trial; after all the victim was only a Jew. The inhabitants of Sachsenhausen (a suburb of Frankfurt) threatened revolt when one of them who had killed a Jew was about to be executed. Many leading spirits of the age were anything but philosemites. Goethe said the Jews could not be given a part in a civilisation whose very origins they negated. Fichte was against making Jews fully fledged citizens because they constituted a state within the state, and because they were permeated with burning hatred of all other people. He would much rather have them sent back to Palestine or, as he once wrote, cut off their heads overnight and replace them with non-Jewish heads. According to official Christian theology, Jews as individuals could be redeemed if they wholeheartedly embraced Christianity, shedding their superstitions and improving themselves morally and culturally. But in practice this positive approach was by no means generally accepted, whether by the state or even within the Church. It was argued both that the Jews had sunk so low that they were incapable of moral improvement, and that while cultural assimilation was possible it was by no means desirable.
Sulamit
, the leading Jewish journal, wrote in 1807 that even the more sympathetic gentile preferred the ‘real Jew’ to the westernised Jew whom he loathed: ‘the average Christian prefers the dirtiest orthodox to the cultured man’. Grattenauer, a leading antisemitic pamphleteer, jeered in 1803 at those Jews who, to demonstrate their cultural level, publicly ate pork on the Sabbath, promenading noisily in the city streets, reciting aloud Kiesewetter’s ‘Logic’ and singing arias from ‘Herodias before Bethlehem’ (a contemporary opera). Grattenauer much regretted that honest Christians were no longer permitted to kill Jews; Hundt-Radowski, his most widely read successor, argued in 1816 that the murder of Jews was neither a sin nor a crime but at most a disturbance of public order. Since, however, public order was not to be disturbed, he proposed the castration of all male Jews, the sale of females to bordellos, and the disposal of the rest as slaves to the British for work in their overseas plantations.

These were extreme voices but they were by no means uninfluential, and some of these pamphlets were frequently reprinted. A slightly more moderate form of antisemitism found expression in the writings of university professors such as Rühs and Fries. They argued that Judaism was
odium generis humani
, a pest that should be exterminated though not necessarily by fire and sword; it was not just a confession but a nation and a state within the state. Jews should not be given equal rights; on the contrary, they should be compelled to wear certain distinguishing marks so that the unsuspecting gentile would be able to recognise the enemy without difficulty. These writers usually struck a note of alarm: half of the wealth of Frankfurt was already in Jewish hands; in another forty years the children of the leading Christian families would be reduced to the status of servants in Jewish houses unless drastic measures were taken in time.

These attacks created deep consternation among German Jewry and produced a sizable counter-literature. The Jews had been oppressed for many centuries, the apologists argued; but given a few decades of unfettered development they would be indistinguishable from the rest of the people - honest, industrious, good citizens making their full contribution to society. They explained that the antisemitic pamphleteers were wholly ignorant of the facts of Jewish history; Spain had not been ruined by the Jews, but on the contrary by their expulsion. They also stressed that the recent antisemitic writings were simply a rehash of the literature of bygone centuries which had been frequently and conclusively refuted. Such well-meaning defence of Judaism and the Jews was bound to be ineffective because it ignored the irrational origin of the attacks. Rational arguments, however logically marshalled, were bound to make no impact in these conditions. How could Fries be refuted when he said: ‘Go out and ask anyone, peasants as well as townspeople, whether they do not hate the Jews who take away their livelihood and corrupt the German people’. With all the exaggeration in statements of this kind there was this kernel of truth: Jews were disliked. Individual Jews could pass and were occasionally accepted and respected, but there was a deep-seated feeling that as a whole they were undesirable, a danger to the German people and its development.