A History of Zionism (8 page)

Such criticism contained much that was true, but it was not very helpful since it ignored the essential differences between Jews in eastern Europe and their co-religionists in the west. The issue was exceedingly complex. What Weizmann wrote about German Jews is sometimes almost textually identical with the views expressed by Herzen and the Slavophiles a generation earlier about the lifeless, Philistine Germans. Could it be that Russian Jews and German Jews had been infected by the disdain their respective host nations felt for each other? Ahad Ha’am played a central role in the history of the Jewish cultural renaissance, but in his case, too, the ideas he popularised were by no means part of the Jewish tradition but had their roots in the west. Jews in eastern Europe were able to retain their national identity because there were so many of them and it was therefore much easier to preserve their way of life and a folklore of their own. Nor was there a strong temptation to accept Russian, Rumanian, or Galician culture, whereas western Jews, much fewer in numbers, had been strongly attracted by German, French or English civilisation simply because it was so much superior. We cannot and do not want to retreat from emancipation, a Zionist (F. Oppenheimer) wrote; if we analyse ourselves we find that 95 per cent of our culture is composed of western European elements. The Jewish nationalists from eastern Europe had a more acute perception of antisemitism and the limits of assimilation, but they failed to understand the problems facing Jews living in a milieu so unlike their own. Western Jewry, rootless and relatively few in numbers, could not help but be absorbed. History had shown that even big countries have found it impossible to shut themselves off from more advanced cultures and more modern ways of life. Latter-day critics have said that the process of assimilation went too fast and too far: ‘What had begun as furtive glances soon turned into a passionate involvement’ (G. Scholem). This resulted both in a great deal of newly awakened creativity and in deep insecurity. Many Jews, it was further argued, enriched German economics, philosophy, science, literature and the arts, whereas only a very few made a corresponding contribution in the Jewish field. But there was no Jewish science, philosophy, or economics, and it is more than doubtful whether there was room for a specifically Jewish literature or art in western Europe. By and large the love affair between Jews and Germans remained one-sided and unreciprocated; the Jews showed more enthusiasm and understanding for what was best in German culture than most Germans. Regrettably, no one showed much gratitude to the Jews. But assimilation was a natural process, and it was in no way limited to German Jewry.

Elsewhere in western Europe assimilation began later but went further than in Germany. The integration of Italian Jewry was more complete than in Germany, where the constant influx of Jews from the east provided a blood-transfusion - or an irritant, according to the way one saw it. The situation in Britain differed from that in the rest of Europe. There was more intermarriage, in particular with the aristocracy, than anywhere else. Emancipation came to England in the traditional way such issues are resolved in that country - piecemeal, on an empirical basis, not as the result of ideological, abstract debates. After the king had visited a London synagogue one Friday evening in 1809, following an invitation by the Goldsmid brothers, social contacts with Jews became respectable. It took until 1867 for a Jewish Member of Parliament, duly elected, to be permitted to take his seat. Lionel de Rothschild, the first Jewish Member of Parliament, did not make a notable contribution to British politics; in fact he never spoke in a debate. But the ice was broken, and a few years later a Jew became solicitor-general and the last disabilities were removed. There was no danger that Jews would reach a position of cultural pre-eminence in Britain as they had in Germany; their numbers were smaller and their contribution to cultural life much less significant. Moreover, the British did not suffer from feelings of insecurity; there was no fear of ‘racial pollution’. Full assimilation, on the other hand, was not even considered desirable. While Jews had of course to conform to the British way of life, they were at the same time expected to keep some aspects of their individuality. They were considered a race apart, and a country accustomed to ruling an empire saw in this an enrichment rather than a danger to its national existence, provided, of course, Jews did not get too numerous and powerful.

The parallels between assimilation in Germany and France are much closer. Almost everything that has been said about both the achievements and the shortcomings of the assimilation of the Jews in Germany applies also to France. If Mendelssohn’s children converted to Christianity, so did the children of Crémieux, the great fighter for the rights of French Jews. It was often said that Jews felt closer to the Germans than to any other European people, and that they became more deeply rooted there than anywhere else. Yet those who made such claims usually did so without much knowledge of the state of affairs of France. During the nineteenth century French Jews were integrated in the social life of their country. The younger ones, whether conservative or radical, an observer noted towards the end of the century, were totally absorbed in their non-Jewish surroundings; they had no philosophy other than that of the camp to which they belonged. To raise the Jewish question would have been considered tactless. Judaism for this generation was no longer a religious, social, or political concept (Tchernoff). Jews were second to none in their French patriotism; many of them left Strasbourg and Colmar and moved to France when these provinces became part of Germany after the defeat of 1870. The hesitancy of French Jews to take collective action during the Dreyfus trial showed that they wanted to believe that the affair had no specifically Jewish aspect. Bernard Lazare, an ardent Socialist who was in favour of full assimilation and of the eventual disappearance of the Jews as a separate people, later on became a Zionist. But he was a rare exception. On the whole the Zionist movement struck few roots in France; the great majority of French Jews always stressed their attachment to the French nation, denying that their feelings differed from those of other Frenchmen. Many a Frenchman of Jewish extraction has described how as a child he wept over French defeats and rejoiced at French victories; Jewish history and traditions had no meaning for him. It was not a question of hiding his Judaism or being ashamed of it. Marc Bloch, the great historian, was anything but a coward or a hypocrite; but he belonged to a generation for which Judaism had lost all meaning. Ahad Ha’am’s strictures against the slavery of western Jews he would have angrily rejected as the misguided, artificial construction of a man who had the misfortune to live under tsarist despotism, and who in his parochialism could not conceive how Jews elsewhere felt. ‘I have felt myself during my whole life above all and very simply - French’, he wrote. ‘I have been tied to my fatherland by a long family tradition; nourished by its spiritual heritage and its history, unable in truth to conceive of any other country where I could breathe at ease, I have loved it very much and served it with all my strength.’ ‘Being a stranger to all confessional formalism and to all racial solidarity’, Bloch requested before his execution by the Nazis that Hebrew prayers should not be said at his grave. Sometimes Judaism was projected on men of this generation from the outside, and their inner harmony and security was disturbed, but this made them at most Jews
par point d’honneur
; only seldom did it mean a return to ‘positive Judaism’. Raymond Aron wrote: ‘I think of myself as a Jew because the world around me wants it that way, but I do not feel that this is really a part of my existence.’ A great deal has been written about the self-hatred of individual German Jews; it is not at all difficult to find it in France; there was no case in the annals of German Jewry as strange and pathological as that of Maurice Sachs.
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The east European critics of assimilation usually forgot that there was a time when in eastern Europe, too, assimilation had been regarded as the wave of the future. It had strong support among Russian Jews during the 1860s and 1870s, and this despite the fact that the prospects for assimilation were, for obvious demographic, social, and economic reasons, far worse than in the west. The editor of the first Jewish journal in Russian, Osip Rabinovich, complained bitterly that the Jews were clinging to their poor, ugly-sounding and corrupt dialect instead of making the ‘wonderful Russian language’ their own: ‘Russia is our fatherland, and its air, its language, too, should be ours.’ The leading Jewish publicist of the period, I. Orzhansky, appealed for the full absorption of the Jews in the Russian nation, and said that they were striving with great energy to acquire the Russian national spirit, the Russian way of life, to become Russian in every respect. These views were shared by leading writers such as A.A. Aordon, who thought that Hebrew ought to be used only so long as the majority of the Jews did not have a full mastery of Russian. Lev Levanda called on Russian Jewry to ‘awake under the sceptre of Alexander II’; Emanuel Soloveichik wrote in 1869 that the fusion of Russian and Jew, the submerging of the Jews in the Russian people, was the new messianic movement awaited by educated Russian Jews with great impatience. After the pogroms of the early 1880s these hopes vanished; there was no longer any reason to assume that the tsarist régime would favour a movement for cultural or social assimilation. Political rights seemed as distant as ever; nor was there much optimism about the attitude of the Russian and Ukrainian people towards the Jews living in their midst. But a new form of assimilation appeared among the many Jews who joined the left-wing movement. For a young revolutionary such as Trotsky his Jewish origin meant nothing; his place was in the ranks of the vanguard of the Russian proletariat fighting for world revolution. There were thousands like him.

Assimilation, then, was a general problem, a historical phenomenon not confined to countries where Jews constituted a marginal group. True, it made more rapid progress the smaller and the more prosperous the Jewish minority, the higher the culture of the host country, and the closer the economic ties between Jews and non-Jews. Arthur Ruppin, who was the first to study the sociology of the Jews, noted well before the First World War that assimilation was a general process; during the Middle Ages their particular economic and social position had made assimilation well-nigh impossible, but the tremendous changes which had taken place since had weakened the ties between Jew and Jew in every respect. If some viewed this process with unease, Ruppin himself regarded it as a grave danger. Others saw it as an inevitable development to which moral and emotional judgments could not and should not be applied. The orthodox found it easier to resist because most of them were sheltered from close contact with the outside, non-Jewish world. But it was not at all unusual to see the transformation within a very short time, of an orthodox Jew who had ventured outside the ghetto, from Talmudism and strict observance to extreme assimilation. Samuel Holdheim and Moritz Lazarus, leaders of the Reform movement among German Jewry, belonged to this category. Others viewed the gradual disappearance of the Jews as regrettable but inevitable, and some even thought that the vocation of Israel was not self-realisation but self-surrender for the sake of a higher, trans-historical goal. Many liberals and Socialists felt that national distinctions were losing their importance all over the world, and that the Jews, because they had no national home, would be in the vanguard of this movement towards one global culture, one way of life. They did not share the belief that God had created peoples to exist forever and that each of them had an eternal mission. One of the heroes in Gottfried Keller’s
Fähnlein der sieben Aufrechten
, a stalwart Swiss patriot, raised the question in discussion with his friends:

Just as a man in the middle of his life and at the height of his strength will think of death, so he should consider in a quiet hour that his fatherland will vanish one day … because everything in this world is subject to change … is it not true that greater nations than ours have perished? Or do you want to continue existing like the Eternal Jew who cannot die, who has buried Egypt, Greece, and Rome and is still serving the newly emerged peoples?

If even a staunch Swiss patriot could doubt the mission of his people, was it not natural that many Jews, lacking most of the attributes usually marking members of one nation, should have given up the belief in the exclusive character of their group.

This, in briefest outline, was the position of Jews in central and western Europe before the national revival took place; the situation in eastern Europe, on which more below, was totally different. European Jewry west of the tsarist empire and Rumania had made tremendous progress since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The social and economic anomalies of their existence had been reduced, though they had not altogether disappeared. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were a few very rich families while the great majority were desperately poor; three generations later the Rothschilds and the other banking families were no longer pre-eminent; the great national banks which had come into existence in Germany, France, and elsewhere dwarfed even the biggest private banking houses. Many poor Jews had risen on the social ladder and now constituted a substantial middle class. They had also produced a new elite, replacing the old Jewish establishment, which in its majority had abandoned Judaism. They entered a great many professions that had been closed to them before. Very few had taken to agriculture, and not many were employed in industry. But even so their social structure had become much more variegated than in the previous century. As a social problem the Jewish question was far less acute in 1880 than it had been generations earlier; but political and cultural tensions persisted and were the source of the new antisemitism. Zionist critics like Ahad Ha’am argued that assimilation had been pursued too quickly and too relentlessly. England in this respect was a notable exception; there emancipation had been gradual, never too far in advance of public opinion. But such criticism was largely academic. Once the walls of the spiritual ghetto had come down there was no holding back the thousands of eager young men and women who wanted to be submerged in the mainstream of European culture. Assimilation was not a conscious act; it was the inevitable fate of a people without a homeland which had been for a long time in a state of cultural decay and which to a great extent had lost its national consciousness.