Modern Jewish History - Summary

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Lecture #29 - May 24, 1971 - 47:57 min (mp3)
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Concerning Jewish identity, Mosse says that there are two ways of looking at the history of a minority: from the inside and from the outside. In a sense, we have to do both; the history of the Jews is also the history of Europe. But for a minute, Mosse will have to separate them. For almost everything he has taught has obviously raised the question of Jewish identity; it was easiest to answer for those who still maintained the Jewish religion, especially Jewish orthodoxy. But we must remember that in the West, the orthodox were always a minority, and even in the East, they very rarely comprised the leadership in crisis situations. Among the notables, we find very few orthodox Jews. Moses Mendelssohn had tried to build a balance between orthodoxy and assimilation, and the Haskala in Eastern Europe tried to maintain a similar balance. The problem of identity became therefore involved with the problem of Judaism being one religion among many, and Jews being one national tribe among many. But assimilation had some strengths built into it: it fused with early 19th century liberalism, and envisaged a world of tolerance and the separation of church and state. But the idea of citizenship, of assimilation, of one religion among many, and even of patriotism, was always tied up with a sense of what we call the “mission of the Jews.” It is a mission that goes hand in hand with liberalism and pluralism. As Rathenau said: “It is the task of the Jews to emphasize what binds the nations together during these times of stress, to give its due to the voice of reason; that is above all the mission of the Jews.”  The mission of the Jews became intertwined with the mission of liberalism and the Enlightenment. Though it was tied to the religion of the prophets, the prophets were in a way detached from the rest of the biblical story, and the mission of the Jews, their identity, became a mission defined in terms of liberalism. This was a deep tradition, one which it took the Final Solution to destroy.

But looking back on it one can say that it was only destroyed temporarily by the Holocaust; it did not end in 1945, we find it again after the war, especially in the old communities that reconstituted themselves. With this kind of idea of the mission of the Jews, which continued in France, Italy, and of course in England, the new reality of the state of Israel did not much interfere. The idea of citizenship and assimilation certainly produced some of the most fruitful European thought. According to Mosse, it is still an open question as to whether an embrace of a Jewish nationality will not destroy much of the Jewish creativity that came out of the tension between Jewish identity and assimilation. For even in the East, assimilation meant participation in European culture. This should not surprise us, for after all, the whole world wanted to imitate the culture of Europe, because it seemed to promise economic progress and a higher standard of living. The revival of this tradition of Jewish identity is closely tied up with the revival of liberalism after WWII. Though liberalism was dead before the war, all post-war parties were in fact liberal.

From the beginning, assimilation meant assimilation to a culture and an ideology, which could be the nationalism of the host country, and this was the strongest appeal. But it could also mean assimilation to Socialist universalism from the end of the 19th century onwards. The latter happened in spite of the hostility of Jews to other Jews, or, Mosse suggests, because of it: it meant transcendence into a larger humanity-It was a more profound form of assimilation. How the ethical Socialists envision it is captured in a quotation from Ernst Toller: “A Jewish mother has born me, Germany nourished me, Europe formed me, my home is the earth, and the world is my fatherland.” This type of Socialism also continued after 1945. What did not continue so much was national assimilation; it had shown its true colors. But the Socialist assimilation certainly continued; after the war in the Communist part of Europe, there were a whole series of Jewish communist leaders and theoreticians who surfaced. But did these leaders think of themselves as Jews? Apart from Slansky, the answer must be no. But though the arms for Israel came from Czechoslovakia, what Slansky played out was not really his own preference; he was an instrument of Soviet policy. The purges of the early 1950s and Stalin’s anti-Semitism ended that age, replacing it with the pro-Arab policy of the Soviet Union.

After this shift,  no Jews could or did then have a leading position in the Soviet world. Stalin’s openly anti-Semitic policy, with its accusations of a “world-Zionist conspiracy,” has no roots in Marx and Kautsky. In the East, therefore, the socialist option was rudely cut off for Jews. Jews in the West were under no such pressure; ethical Socialism continued in the post-war world. But was it really transcendent? These Socialists were after all almost all Jews, engaging in an inter-Jewish debate of little interest for the non-Jewish world. They took Kant seriously as part of their transcendence - as part of their powerlessness -  and molded his thought into a common ethic of humanity. Obviously, ideology stood in the forefront, rather than the working classes, with whom they had little in common. This trend continued through Marcuse and Lukacs, but at the same time, it began to have a broader, and also a gentile audience from the mid-1960s in Europe and America, “an audience of course of students, who are also kind of Jews in many ways.” None of the Jewish revolutionaries, however, were defenders of terror. Even those who were involved in the student revolutionary leadership still had an ethical residue, a fear of terror, which is, Mosse thinks, characteristic indeed for many Jewish revolutionaries. He therefore puts Jewish consciousness thus transformed high on his list of Jewish identity, especially for those who avoided Soviet Marxism and indeed the Socialist reality. There, it was not just a matter of dual loyalty, but of an anti-Israel stance, which in the Communist language slid over into anti-Semitism. What Arnold Zweig in Eastern Germany called an “unwritten contract between Jewish intellectuals and the labor movement” was not to be, and the final reason for it was the state of Israel. The line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism was not easily drawn, neither was there an attempt to draw it on the part of the Communist regimes. Still today, for example at the Sorbonne, this is a reality in France. Many French Jews exiled themselves to Israel because they could not stand anti-Semitism in France any more.

Mosse hopes that it is clear by now that the Holocaust did not really deflect the historical alternatives. The tragedy of European Jews meant for many of them a commitment to Zionism, but for many others, it meant the continuation of earlier options. The Zionists remained a minority among European Jews, but the state of Israel now enjoys support, even though mostly in financial and rhetorical form. The reverse effect of the establishment of the state is equally important, because it did something to the Jewish stereotype, Mosse asserts; it made assimilation easier in many ways. Whether it changed anything about anti-Semitism is a harder to say; it certainly did something. In 1948 and again in the 1967 war, twenty former SS-generals wrote a telegram to F. J. Strauss saying they had been wrong about the Jews after all. Still, the stereotype did survive in Europe, for a clear and sharp distinction was made between Israelis and Jews. This distinction is important in the country that has become the inheritor of anti-Semitism, France. It is classic anti-Semitism that now comes forward in France in any crisis. Mosse thinks that anti-Semitism has not changed a great deal, apart from the distinction between Israelis and Jews.  The accusation of the USSR and other Communist countries against Zionism strengthen the old anti-Semitism. The great problem of Zionism is not aggressive nationalism, which can be illustrated by a remark of Max Weber to Buber: “If you found another small state among other small states, you and it will stand at the periphery of history, remain unimportant, and be swept away with the stream of history. But if it happens that you could successfully construct a nation of spiritual power, then it will remain at the center of history, and lasting.”

The accusations against Zionism are opposed by the reality of a then dominant trend of Zionist thought, that of nationalism with a human face, neither explicit nor aggressive. The same kind of ethical concerns that preoccupied liberalism and Socialism prevail in the basic idea of Zionism. This so because Zionism is obviously tied up with a minority; a minority has a greater concern for ethics and universalistic concerns than people who have power. But in the case of Israel, something intervened that has not intervened for Socialists or European liberals: a series of wars. The state, after all, is a state, not a coterie of intellectuals, and a state has to fight for its survival. A state has to use reason of state. This was a reality that defended itself and had an army. Mosse recalls that he for a while supported the Stern Gang financially, “which was bad and idiotic.” He adds at once that this came out of an excitement about a reality. On the whole, Zionist reality and theory did not quite rhyme – it never does, according to Mosse. But even today (1971) it has not yet developed the kind of nationalism that any other state would have developed under the same circumstances. Here, the history of Zionist nationalism comes into play; it was a kind of barrier.  “And that is why I think it is so idiotic when I hear above all people on the left talk about Zionist imperialism and aggression.” All other nations, under these circumstances, would by now have a most aggressive nationalism.

The options of Jewish identity are still open, according to Mosse. The Holocaust did not really change Jewish options. Obviously not, he tells the students: “Here you are! Happy respectable bourgeois, in America, with a great future, I’m sure.” That is why it is so funny to Mosse when the students have such an adverse reaction to Mendelssohn and assimilation. The options are still assimilation, ethical Socialism, and Zionism, but the option of Zionism now becomes bound up with a gap between ideal and reality. Finally, anti-Semitism continues to complicate the situation of Israel. 

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