The End of Jewish Modernity

by Enzo Traverso, David Fernbach (Translator)

Overview

Jewish modernity flourished between the age of Enlightenment and World War II—and in fact was a major driver of intellectual, scientific, social, literary, and artistic progress in that period. But the age of Jewish modernity is over.
            That’s the argument that historian Enzo Traverso mounts in this provocative book. With great sensitivity and nuance, he teases out the fundamentally conservative turn that the mainstream of Jewish thought has taken in the years since World War II, revealing its roots in the Holocaust and the establishment of the United Nations and Israel as the new poles of Jewish communal life. Building his argument on a highly original reading of Hannah Arendt’s writings on Jewishness and politics, Traverso offers both an elegy to a lost tradition and a damning intellectual history of the present.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745336664
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	08/15/2016
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Enzo Traverso is the Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University and the author of many books, including Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-1915 and Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz. David Fernbach is a freelance writer, editor, and translator.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

What Was Jewish Modernity?

The concept of modernity has never enjoyed a clear and strict definition. Its meaning changes from one discipline to another, likewise its temporal divisions. It is more current in the field of literature and the arts than in that of historiography. Political modernity and aesthetic modernity are not simply different objects but also different epochs, even if there has always been some connection between the two. In this book, 'modernity' refers to a phase of Jewish history that is inextricably intertwined with history in general, and the history of Europe in particular. It includes various distinct dimensions – social, political, cultural – which, once again, have to be studied in their mutual relations. Historical periodizations, moreover, always arouse objections. In most cases they are approximate and unsatisfying. Periods are conceptual constructions, conventions, frames of reference rather than homogeneous temporal blocs. Epochs, like centuries, are mental spaces that never coincide with the divisions of the calendar. The same holds likewise for the boundaries of Jewish modernity. A posteriori, however, this appears in our historical consciousness as an epoch of extraordinary cultural richness with a well-defined and coherent profile, somewhat like Hellenism for Droysen, the Renaissance for Burckhardt or the Enlightenment for Cassirer.

According to the historian Dan Diner, Jewish modernity covers the two centuries from 1750 to 1950, from the beginnings of emancipation (the debate on the 'improvement' and 'regeneration' of the Jews) to the immediate aftermath of the genocide. Prepared by the Enlightenment reformers, the decree voted by the French National Assembly in September 1791 set under way a process that, throughout the nineteenth century, transformed Jews everywhere in Europe into citizens – apart from in the tsarist empire, where this was delayed until the revolution of 1917. During the Second World War, the Holocaust violently broke what had seemed an irreversible tendency, then the birth of the state of Israel reconfigured the structure of Jewish modernity. This mutation was already prefigured at the start of the twentieth century, with the great transatlantic migration of Jews from central and eastern Europe; Nazism accentuated it, provoking the exile of German-speaking Jews (which some historians have interpreted as a gigantic cultural and scientific transfer from one side of the ocean to the other); finally, after the war, the exodus of survivors from the extermination camps completed the turn. The axis of the Jewish world was shifted in this way – demographically, culturally and politically – from Europe to the United States and Israel. On the eve of the Second World War, almost ten million Jews had lived in Europe; by the mid 1990s less than two million remained. After the war, Jewry practically ceased to exist in Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Germany and Austria, the countries that had been its main centres. On top of this, between 1948 and 1996 close to a million and a half Jews left Europe to settle in Israel, which also received a massive influx (in equivalent proportions) of Jews from the Maghreb and the Near East, followed by Russian Jews. If the end of the Cold War did not mark a break comparable with that of the years 1945–50, it is because the decades that followed the fall of the Third Reich were those of the dissolution of the 'Jewish question' in Europe. The birth of Israel, on the other hand, generated a 'Palestinian question'. Europe became aware of the riches of a destroyed continent at the heart of its history and culture and sought to rescue this inheritance, but this rediscovery of its Jewish past inevitably crossed with the present of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Emancipation at one end, the Holocaust and the birth of Israel at the other, those are the historical boundaries that frame Jewish modernity. After having been its cradle, Europe became its tomb and its heir.

Emancipation led to an exit from the ghetto under a two-fold pressure: 'assimilation from without, collapse from within'. It is true that Jews had played a far from negligible role since the Middle Ages, in culture as well as in the economy, being a major factor in the transmission of knowledge from philosophy to medicine. But emancipation secularized the Jewish world, breaking the walls that protected its particularism. By granting them the status of citizens, it forced Jews to rethink their relationship with the world around them. The emancipatory laws, by carrying out the reforms projected by the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century, put an end to a temporality of memory fixed by liturgy and plunged Jews into the new temporality of history, chronological and cumulative. Jewishness was steadily separated from Judaism, coming to be embodied in a new figure, that of the 'godless Jew' (gottloser Jude) or secular Jew, the definition of himself given by Freud. Now emancipated, they became members of a political entity that transcended the borders of the religious community built around the synagogue; they ceased to be an external element, whether stigmatized or tolerated, persecuted or enjoying 'privileges' within society. Before this major turn they led a life apart, despite the generalized lack of political rights – their condition was certainly better than that of enserfed peasants. Accession to citizenship questioned the structure of their community life. From this turn on, the marginality of Jews was more a question of the attitude of the world around them than of their own desire to preserve a separate life. Modern anti-Semitism – the word appeared in Germany in the early 1880s – marked the secularization of the old religious prejudice and accompanied the whole trajectory of Jewish modernity as an insurmountable horizon, sometimes internalized, marking the limits to the dissolution of traditional Jewish communities. This is the source of the mixture of particularism and cosmopolitanism that characterizes Jewish modernity.

During the 'long' nineteenth century, the Jews of western Europe became integrated into the national societies in which they lived, at the price of their collective and community rights (in Clermont-Tonnerre 's famous formulations, the state must 'reject Jews as a nation' and 'grant everything to Jews as individuals'). This set under way a process of confessionalization, which relegated Jewishness to the private sphere, while the myth arose of Jews as a 'state within the state'. They became 'Israélites' or 'of Mosaic faith' (jüdischen Glaubens). With its assimilation into national cultures, Jewishness metamorphosed into a kind of moral substratum, a 'spirit' that rabbis, scholars and notables celebrated as harmonizing with the various European nation-states, from the German Reich to the Habsburg empire, the French republic to the Italian monarchy. In eastern Europe, on the other hand, anti-Semitism posed an obstacle to emancipation. Here, the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) appeared half a century later than in Berlin, Vienna or Paris, and took on a national form: secularization and modernization gave birth to a Jewish nation whose pillars were the Yiddish language and culture. This was an extra-territorial community, as the historian Simon Doubnov has defined it, mingling with the people around it and sharing their own language (Russian or Polish), but with the addition of Yiddish, and certainly not sharing a national identity. Tendentially, Jews remained a community apart, recognizable and distinct from others even if their life no longer (or not only) turned around religion.

The multinational empires of the nineteenth century – in which the Ancien Régime survived in modernizing societies – formed propitious soil for the social and political integration of minorities. The specific features of the Jewish diaspora – textuality, urbanity, mobility, extra-territoriality – adapted better to these (despite tsarist anti-Semitism) than to nation-states. The empires were far more heterogeneous than nation-states, in terms of ethnicity, culture, language and religion, and they tolerated (or even encouraged) the presence of diasporic minorities. Their dynastic legitimacy enabled them to perpetuate the principle of 'royal alliance': the submission of Jews to a protecting power that guaranteed freedom of trade and worship, an old tradition that was only challenged by the advent of absolutism, followed by the nation-states of the nineteenth century. The nation, for its part, viewed every ethnic, linguistic or religious minority as an obstacle that it sought to overcome, by championing policies of assimilation or exclusion. The retrospective and nostalgic idealization of the Habsburg empire that Stefan Zweig celebrates in The World of Yesterday (1942) is the best literary illustration of this love of European Jews for the liberal autocracies that came to an end with the First World War.

The urbanization of Europe gave rise to great metropolises in which Jews formed large minorities. The interstate networks they had established for more than a century had become one of the vectors of the continent's economic integration. Thanks to emancipatory laws, they experienced a marked rise, and the most powerful of their number were welcomed into the European elites. In France, a haute bourgeoisie business class existed already under the July monarchy and was consolidated under the Second Empire, when the Pereire brothers played a major role in the creation of a national railway network. In 1892, the 440 heads of financial establishments included close to 100 Jews. In Germany, in 1910, the 600 richest taxpayers included 29 Jews. Jews were well established at the heart of the industrial, financial and commercial bourgeoisie. Similar tendencies were to be found at the same time in the Habsburg empire. Their culture oriented to writing placed them at the centre of an emerging cultural industry, based around publishing and press. Journalism thus became a 'Jewish' profession, along with commerce and finance. But this was the Indian summer of the aristocracy in a dynastic Europe undermined by the rise of nationalisms, which revealed the fragility of emancipation. In fact, neither the historical experience of Jews nor their diasporic structure corresponded to the lexicon of political modernity, dominated by the triad of state, nation and sovereignty. The concept of the 'Jewish people' defined a religious community and not an ethnic group, and when this people generated a national culture (of Yiddish language in central and eastern Europe), the latter presented a diasporic dimension that transcended state boundaries. This 'ambiguous semantics' inevitably came into conflict with the nation-states born from the treaty of Versailles in the wake of the collapse of the empires. In these states, Jews embodied modernity and polarized the rejection of conservative forces. In France, they became the target of legitimists and nationalists opposed to the Third Republic; in Italy, of Catholics horrified by the Piedmont monarchy that had led the peninsular's unification; in Germany, of conservatives who sought to preserve the Christian character of the Prussian monarchy. After 1918, Jews became a vulnerable minority that, deprived of the heterogeneous, multinational and multi-confessional space of the great empires, were perceived as a foreign body within the new states and exposed to the rise of nationalisms. They became the scapegoat of a European civil war that Nazi Germany brought to a paroxysmic expression.

In the wake of Hegel, for whom the absence of a state past characterized 'peoples without history', Ernest Renan termed the Jews a 'race' recognizable almost exclusively by 'negative features: no mythology, no epic, no science, no philosophy, no fiction, no visual artist, no civic life; in sum, lack of complexity and nuance, exclusive sentiments of unity'. The final version of this thesis was that of the historian Arnold Toynbee who, in 1934, defined the Jews as a 'fossil' and 'petrified' diaspora, the survival of a bygone past. We can understand the difficult task faced by scholars of the 'science of Jewry' (Wissenschaft des Judentum), from Nachman Krochmal, Leopold Zunz and Ludwig Geiger through to Heinrich Graetz, Moritz Güdemann and even Simon Dubnov, their Russian continuer, in demonstrating the existence of a Jewish history. But their efforts came up against the incomprehension of national historiographies for which Jews were no more than an atavism in the modern world. The Jewish historiography of the nineteenth century abandoned the old theological viewpoint and replaced it with a new interpretation centred on a 'spirit of Judaism' that shaped a collective entity (Graetz's Volksstamm), whose accomplishments could be studied in economic, sociological and cultural terms. This collective entity, however, remained excluded from national status, which according to the Hegelian categories could only be granted by a state existence. Wavering between Fichte, Herder and Renan, Jewish nineteenth-century historiography could only conceive of the 'Jewish people' on a national model, by historicizing the biblical story. This 'people' was conceived, in romantic terms, as a kind of innate entity, organic and timeless, whose history illustrated its fulfilment. Caught in the traps of emancipation, this historiography remained captive to its contradictions, despite its tremendous advances. Only Zionism managed to resolve it, by transforming the people of the Book into an ethno-cultural entity and its past into a national epic, through to its coronation as a state.

Hannah Arendt, drawing on an intuition of Max Weber and Bernard Lazare, tackled the 'ambiguous semantics' of Jewish political history head-on in order to forge a new concept: pariah Judaism. Invisibility, exclusion from the public space and 'worldlessness' were for her its key features, despite the cultural richness it had demonstrated. She set out on this basis to decipher totalitarianism by analysing its emergence as the product of the crisis of the system of nation-states. In a certain sense, Jewish modernity coincided with the trajectory of pariah Judaism. The obsession of Zionism, the child of nineteenth-century nationalisms, was to put an end to this 'ambiguous semantics', so that Jews would accede to a 'normal' existence: nation, state, sovereignty. Other thinkers, however, assumed this in order to shatter the political semantics of Western modernity itself, which for them was at bottom simply a system of domination. The characteristics indicated above (textuality, urbanity, mobility, extra-territoriality) formed the substratum of Jewish intellectual avant-garde. On the political level, they nourished the internationalism of Marx and Trotsky.

The Jewish anomaly thus lay at the heart of the tensions that marked the process of modernization in Europe throughout the nineteenth century, leading to its crisis between the two world wars. If Judeophobia has a millennial trajectory, anti-Semitism was born in the second half of the historical sequence noted above (1850–1950). During this period, the Jew embodied the abstraction of the modern world dominated by impersonal and anonymous forces. Mass society was perceived as a hostile realm shaped by big cities, the market, finance, the speed of communications and exchange, mechanical production, the press, cosmopolitanism, democratic egalitarianism, culture transformed into an industry by way of the press, photography and the cinema. Amid this upheaval, the Jew emerged as personification of a modernity in which everything was measurable, calculable and yet impossible to grasp, in which everything was removed from nature and annexed to the enigmas of an abstract and artificial rationality. As shown by a vast literature, from Georg Simmel to Moishe Postone, the Jew became a metaphor of the reified world, illustrating the fetishism of a social reality given over to monetary exchange and the phantasmagoria of the commodity.

Anti-Semitism provided a way of rejecting this despised modernity despite a reconciliation with some of its aspects. Industry, trade and technology could be accepted and placed in the service of the concrete national community, rooted in a land, a culture and a tradition, after rejecting their abstract representation embodied by the Jew. Once the latter was eliminated, capital lost its parasitic character and became a productive force for the people. Anti-Semitism was thus one of the keys of a 'reactionary modernism' based on a synthesis of modern rationality and technology with the conservative values of the anti-Enlightenment. In this perspective, the Holocaust was the most acute moment in a historical sequence marked by a discordance of timescales, by the violent confrontation between modernity and its rejection: the destruction of the Jews appeared as a liberatory fight against the group that embodied the abstraction of the modern world. The transformation of Western societies in the latter part of the nineteenth century generated anti-Semitism. The subsequent European crisis exacerbated it, to the point of giving it an exterminatory dimension. The stabilization of the continent and the restoration of a new international equilibrium after 1945 finally began its decline.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The End of Jewish Modernity"
by .
Copyright © 1999 John A. Walker.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Table of Contents

Introduction 
1. What Was Jewish Modernity? 
2. Cosmopolitanism, Mobility and Diaspora
3. Intellectuals Between Critique and Power
4. Between Two Epochs: Jewishness and Politics in Hannah Arendt
5. Metamorphoses: From Judeophobia to Islamophobia
6. Zionism: Return to the Ethnos
7. The Civil Religion of the Holocaust 
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Traverso is without doubt the most gifted historian of his generation. His book on Jewish modernity is, as all his writings, a unique combination of radical commitment and brilliant scholarship."

Michael Löwy

“Provocative . . . . Stimulating. . . Traverso argues that the memory of the Holocaust is the new global civil religion.

Times Literary Supplement