A History of Zionism (3 page)

PART ONE

I
OUT OF THE GHETTO

In the history of modern Europe the French Revolution is the great divide; together with all the other changes and movements it ushered in, it also marks the beginning of a new era in the life of the Jews. After centuries of massacres, of persecution, of social ostracism, a new and more humane approach towards the Jews began to prevail with the spread of the ideas of the Enlightenment. But it needed the shock of revolution to give official sanction to the principle of equality before the law. The time would come, Herder predicted, when no one in Europe would again ask whether someone was Jewish or Christian, ‘because the Jews, too, will live according to European laws and contribute their share to the common good’. In the French National Assembly of 1789 Clermont Tonnerre demanded that the Jews as individuals should be denied no rights. Emancipation spread rapidly: the Rome ghetto was opened and even in Germany, where the improvement in the status of the Jews had been discussed inconclusively for many years, there were at long last substantial changes. Between 1808 and 1812 the groundwork was laid for their full legal emancipation in Prussia, the leading German state.

They had waited for the day with impatience and they responded with enthusiasm. When the Prussian king called his subjects to the colours to fight Napoleon, the patriotic response of the Jews was second to none: ‘Oh, what a heavenly feeling to possess a fatherland!’ one of their manifestos proclaimed; ‘Oh what a rapturous idea to call a spot, a place, a nook one’s own upon this lovely earth.’ Until a few years before they had been treated like pariahs. Ludwig Börne, the greatest publicist of the age, has given a graphic description of their position in his native Frankfurt when he was young. They enjoyed, as he put it, the loving care of the authorities: they were forbidden to leave their street on Sundays, so that the drunks should not molest them; they were not permitted to marry before the age of twenty-five, so that their offspring should be strong and healthy; on holidays they could leave their homes only at six in the evening, so that the great heat should not cause them any harm; the public gardens and promenades outside the city were closed to them and they had to walk in the fields - to awaken their interest in agriculture; if a Jew crossed the street and a Christian citizen shouted, ‘Pay your respects, Jud’, the Jew had to remove his hat, no doubt the intention of this wise measure being to strengthen the feelings of love and respect between Christians and Jews.

European Jewry suffered setbacks on the road towards full legal emancipation: Napoleon revoked some of the rights the revolution had bestowed on them, and the Prussian king and the German princes reimposed in 1815 many of the old restrictions. Many professions were still barred to them: only one Jewish officer was retained in the Prussian army, and with the exception of a postman in the city of Breslau there were no Jewish civil servants. A decree issued in the 1820s prohibited them from acting as executioners if any of them had felt the inclination to do so. The veterans of the patriotic war, some of them bearers of the Iron Cross, complained bitterly that they were treated like step-children by their new fatherland. And yet, despite these disappointments, there was little doubt among German Jewry that these setbacks were only temporary. They firmly believed that full citizenship would soon be theirs by right and not on sufferance, and that reason and humanism would eventually prevail in the counsels of their government. The new Jewish establishment that had emerged was confident that they had already joined the mainstream of European civilisation.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the number of Jews in the world was about two and a half million; almost 90 per cent of them lived in Europe. There were roughly two hundred thousand in Germany, one-quarter of them concentrated in Posen, the eastern district recently acquired by Prussia as a result of the partition of Poland. Most of them still lived in the countryside; few had been permitted to reside in the big cities. Berlin, for instance, counted barely three thousand in 1815. The bürger, and especially the city guilds, were strongly opposed to Jews settling in their midst. During the Middle Ages many had engaged in usury and other base forms of trade. During the eighteenth century their occupational range gradually widened but most of them were still small traders, middlemen between the cities and the villages. They frequented the fairs, bought and sold meat, wool, and spirits; in Hesse they traded in cattle, in Alsace they acquired a strong position in the wine trade. In the formerly Polish territories there were many Jewish artisans but their existence was precarious; their position was as remote from the wealth and status of the members of the city guilds as that of the little Jewish hawkers from the ‘royal merchants’ of Hamburg or Lübeck. As a Jew, Moses Mendelssohn wrote to a friend, my son can become only a physician, a trader, or a beggar. True, a few Jewish bankers had become very rich, such as the Eichtals, the Speiers, the Seligmans, Oppenheims, Hirschs, and above all the Rothschilds. There were more Jewish than non-Jewish banking establishments in Berlin in 1807, and it has been said that without them no European government would have been able to float a loan during the first half of the nineteenth century. To quote but one example: more than 80 per cent of the state loans of the Bavarian government during the first decade of the century were provided by Jewish bankers. But this new aristocracy of money was numerically small; a Jewish middle class was just beginning to emerge, while the great majority were living in extreme poverty. Substantial changes in the occupational structure of German Jewry took place only in the following decades with the great influx of young Jews into the professions, wholesale and retail trade, and industry.

The beginnings of social and cultural assimilation date back to the early eighteenth century. The notion (prevalent for a long time) that the emancipation of German Jews started when Moses Mendelssohn played chess with Lessing does not stand up to investigation. Many Jews spoke and wrote in German in the first half of the eighteenth century; their common language (Yiddish, Jargon), though written in Hebrew letters, became closer and closer to the colloquial German spoken at the time. Many also had a working knowledge of other languages. While Frankfurt and other cities still kept their Jews penned together like cattle in dark overcrowded ghettoes, elsewhere they were not confined to special living quarters and social intercourse with their Christian neighbours was not uncommon. Even in their outward appearance many of them were hardly distinguishable from their neighbours: they shaved their beards and wore periwigs, while young ladies adopted the crinoline and other such fashionable garments. The rabbis complained bitterly about the new freedom in relations between the sexes and other manifestations of moral decline, but their authority and everything they stood for was rapidly declining. The knowledge of Hebrew among their congregations was usually limited to the recital (by rote) of a few prayers; observance of the religious law was, to say the least, imperfect, and the more pessimistic rabbis already lamented the impending end of traditional Judaism.

What gave Moses Mendelssohn his importance was not that he was a great philosopher, major essayist, or revolutionary theologian. His philosophical writings were quickly forgotten and his attempts to prove the existence of God were neither original nor did they have a lasting impact. His main achievement was to show, by his own example, that despite all adversity a Jew could have a thorough knowledge of modern culture and converse on equal terms with the shining lights of contemporary Europe. Born in Dessau in 1729 in abject poverty, he earned his livelihood as a private tutor and later as an accountant. Devouring the libraries to which he had access, his efforts to educate himself attracted the attention of non-Jewish well-wishers; within a few years he had published weighty studies on Leibniz’s philosophy and the problem of evidence in the metaphysical sciences. A hunchback of fascinating ugliness, he stoically bore all the chicanery and degradations to which Jews in his time were still exposed, including, for instance, the famous head tax imposed on Jews and cattle moving from town to town. In his private life - as the letters to his bride bear witness - Mendelssohn was a man of angelic patience and high idealism, a living contradiction of the clichés about the depravity, fanaticism and ignorance of Jews. His name figured prominently in the arguments of those late eighteenth-century reformers who favoured the abolition of the laws and regulations keeping the Jews in a state of semi-servitude.

Mendelssohn’s translation of the Bible into German was welcomed by many Jews in his day as a liberating act, and denounced as an act of betrayal by others. For nineteenth-century liberal Jewry he was the greatest Jew of modern times, whereas later generations have been more critical in their appraisal of his work. A typical son of the Enlightenment, Mendelssohn taught that Judaism was a
Vernunftsreligion
, that there was no contradiction between religious belief and critical reason. This was sweet music to the ears of all the educated Jews who were open or secret admirers of the French Enlightenment; it is said that Voltaire had more supporters in Jewish homes in Germany at the time than anywhere else. At the same time Mendelssohn’s teaching was anathema to many orthodox rabbis who suspected, not altogether wrongly, that his reforms were a half-way house on the road to apostasy. In contrast to the liberal reformers, they believed that in order to survive, Judaism needed the exclusivity of the ghetto. Admired by many, bitterly denounced by others, Moses Mendelssohn became a landmark in modern Jewish history, not so much because of what he did, as for what he was: the very symbol of Jewish emancipation.

Despite the reimposition of restrictive laws, social assimilation made rapid progress during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Many Jews moved from the villages into larger towns, where they could find better living quarters; they sent their children to non-Jewish schools and modernised their religious service. Among the intellectuals there was a growing conviction that the new Judaism, purged of medieval obscurantism, was an intermediate stage towards enlightened Christianity. They argued that the Jews were not a people; Jewish nationhood had ceased to exist two thousand years before, and now lived on only in memories. Dead bones could not be exhumed and restored to life. Jewish spokesmen claimed full equality as German citizens; they were neither strangers nor recent arrivals; they had been born in the country and had no fatherland but Germany. The messianic and national elements in Jewish religion were dropped in this rapid and radical
aggiornamento.
Towards the middle of the nineteenth century Gabriel Riesser, the most eloquent and courageous advocate of emancipation, suggested that a Jew who preferred a nonexistent state and nation (Israel) to Germany ought to be put under police protection not because his views were dangerous but because he was obviously insane. About the depth of patriotic feeling and of commitment of men like Riesser there could be no doubt: ‘Whoever disputes my claim to the German fatherland’, he said on one occasion, ‘disputes my right to my thoughts and feelings, to the language that I speak, the air that I breathe. He deprives me of my very right to existence and therefore I must defend myself against him as I would against a murderer.’ On another occasion he declared that the ‘forceful sounds of the German language, the poems of German writers have kindled in our breast the holy fire of freedom. We want to adhere to the German people, we shall adhere to it everywhere.’ Riesser summarised his philosophy, the spiritual marriage of Judaism and Germany, in a rhymed device:
Einen Vater in den Höhen, eine Mutter haben wir, Gott ihn, aller Wesen Vater, Deutschland unsere Mutter hier.
(We have one father in heaven and one mother - God the father of all beings, Germany our mother on earth.) He was by no means in favour of abandoning Judaism as he understood it; on the contrary, he never for a moment considered baptism, the easy way out chosen by so many of his contemporaries, and this despite the many bitter disappointments he suffered as a Jew. Riesser had to leave Altona because he was not permitted to pursue his professional work as a lawyer in his native town. He was refused a teaching position in Heidelberg, and in Hesse, where he went next, he was even refused citizenship. But like many other of Germany’s step-children he did not give up the struggle; the inner alliance of the liberal Jew with German civilisation (as one historian has put it) had become so firmly rooted within a few years that his instinctive answer to any setback, to him individually, or to the community, was to seek deeper and closer assimilation.

But why should Jews have wanted to remain Jews? During this second stage of transformation Judaism became a religion of universal ethics and it was not readily obvious why they should be so reluctant to give up what divided them from their Christian neighbours. Jewish spokesmen provided various explanations: some argued, in the true spirit of the Enlightenment, that religion was the individual’s private affair. Others, like Riesser, maintained that Christianity as well as Judaism was in urgent need of reform and purification; Christianity’s record in recent centuries had not exactly been that of a religion of love. It had ‘throttled generations and drowned centuries in blood’; by what moral right could it demand the baptism of the Jews? But a critique of Christianity did not necessarily involve an attachment to Judaism. Free-thinking attitudes spread among those who came after Mendelssohn, and the third generation was even more remote from established religion. A leading orthodox rabbi wrote in 1848 about the young Jews of his time, that nine-tenths of them were ashamed of their faith. Statements like these abound; they were perhaps not meant to be taken literally but they indicated a general trend. Of Mendelssohn’s children all but one changed their faith, and many of his pupils, too, converted. David Friedlaender, the most important among this group, enquired in a public manifesto published anonymously about the possibility of a mass conversion of leading Berlin Jews and their families. This overture was rejected, for Friedlaender had some mental reservations (‘Christianity without Jesus’, his critics claimed); subsequently he retreated with some of his friends into Reform Judaism. Others, less scrupulous, discarded their reservations and embraced Christianity. For baptism, as Heine said, was the entrance ticket to European civilisation, and who would let a mere formality stand between him and European civilisation?