Jewish European Heritage in the Age of Diasporas by Paideia Institute

Jewish European Heritage in the Age of diasporas Zionism was born in Europe at the peak of its modern nation-statebuilding zeal and imperialist expansion – neither of which was a Zionist invention; the sole contribution of Zionist movement was the combination of the two: the idea that the nation-building tasks could be resolved through imperialist expansion. In the infamous Theodore Herzl formula: ‘meeting of a people without land with a land without people’ brought together the two assumptions, both universally (even if mostly tacitly) accepted at that time, yet normally resorted to separately, in different circumstances and for different purposes. First: to turn into a nation, ‘people’ need a state - that is, undivided and inalienable sovereign rule over a territory ‘of their own’. Second: territories inhabited by people without such a state may be treated as for all practical intents and purposes ‘empty’: a playground, a grazing meadow, a raw stuff waiting to be kneaded and given shape. The original Zionist idea was a product of combination of ideas brandished by the neighbours/hosts as well as the strategies distilled from their practices by the scattered Jewish diasporas, and of the knowledge of educated Jewish elite about the ways in which numerous ‘New Englands’, ‘New South Wales’, or ‘Novae Scotiae’ successfully built from scratch in distant ‘lands without people’ by Europeans; particularly by those among them who failed to make a decent life in their countries of origin or had to leave them because of being supernumerary, unwanted, persecuted or discriminated against. Neither the provincial teachers, shopkeepers or tailors or Russia and Ukraine, nor Theodore Herzl, the sophisticated Parisian correspondent of the Viennese Neue

Freie Presse, needed Hegel (whom they might or might not have read) to arrive at their conclusions and compose their projects (Herzl’s ideas of nations and territories, by the way, were formed in all their essentials during his involvement in his student years in the ‘Burschenschaft’ association, which fought for German unity under the slogan of Ehre, Freiheit, Vaterland - Honor, Freedom, Fatherland; nothing Jewish about it, let alone Palestinian/Israeli…) Perhaps the sole unique contribution of Herzl was swapping places and roles between European metropolis and its overseas outpost/offshoot, but even that is not certain, since the experiences of the United States and the plentiful ‘new nations’ in colonized continents like South America or Australia were already available to scrutiny… As a matter of fact, this was also the prime Zionist blunder that to a large extent pre-determined all the sorry and pitiable sequels: unlike their imperialist archetypes and sources of inspiration, the pioneer Zionist settlers could not count on battleships and expeditionary armies to make their supposition of the colonized lands’ ‘emptiness’ into reality… Another, crucially important, yet by and large forgotten point point: among the educated/assimilated/assimilating Jews of Western Europe a facetious yet well-aimed definition of a ‘Zionist’ was ‘a Jew who for another Jew’s money sends yet another Jew to Palestine’… Gershon Sholem, born in Berlin self-taught giant of Judaist studies, remembers his (uniformly Zionist!) milieu in Germany being horrified by his

early decision to study Hebrew… What for, they ardent German Zionists wondered. Whereas Ben-Gurion, later the founder and the first prime-minister of the State of Israel, had his decision to emigrate to Palestine to carry into effect his Zionist ideas, was greeted with incomprehension and resentment by many a Zionist militant: in the Zionist elite’s view, Zionism was an activity that needed to be pursued and a task that needed to be accomplished at home, inside Jewish diasporas – collecting money for emigration and settlement of the ‘Jewish masses’ from the shtetls and so removing them from European ghettoes… Most spectacularly, this was a major factor in the acceptance of the ‘Jewish national home’ idea by the well-off and keenly assimilating Jewry of Germany, France or England. An important motive was the diversion to Palestine of the influx of poor and persecuted Jews of the East that the well settled Jewry of the West viewed with horror as a major, perhaps the major, threat to undermine their own uphill struggle for acceptance in the countries of their choice; unless diverted from the countries they tried to make their homes, such influx would shatter the still fragile and eminently revocable achievements of their assimilatory labours. The impoverished and ‘uncivilized’ Jewish masses of Eastern Europe were thorn in the flesh of their more fortunate Western brethren, determined to remove that thorn and finance the removal surgery (I described that situation in more detail in my Modernity and Ambivalence). Well, Palestine in which the Jewish immigrants from Europe were to settle was not empty and unlikely to be made empty or allowed itself to be treated as such. It had its own people. And unlike the native Indian tribes of New England or Nova Scotia, aborigines of New South Wales or New Zealand or the dwellers of places where the overseas replicas of Zaragoza or Cordoba were to be erected in Mexico or Argentina, the ‘locals’ of Palestine knew the rules of the game imported from nearby Europe and did not tarry in their efforts to master them and apply. In a bizarre and increasingly explosive mixture, the Europe-born imperialist/colonialist worldperception was superimposed on the practices of ethnicities struggling for promotion, against the competition of their neighbours driven by similar ambitions, to the family of ‘nations’ European style; much like the antagonistic and often gory practices common in the frontier-lands of Hungary, Lithuania, of for that matter Catalonia, Ireland or Basque country… All in all, Zionism in its Herzl’s and the ‘Zionist Congress’ version can be best understood as a reaction to the failure of the assimilationist dream and practice, and to the bitter frustration caused by realization of that failure; perhaps also in some cases as a desperate effort to salvage however slender remnants have been left of assimilationist hopes. Allow me to quote my recent retrospective account, in a lecture given in 2008 at the London Institute of Jewish Affairs, of the origins, convoluted itinerary and posthumous life of the modern ‘assimilationist project’: “Hannah Arendt remembered the public declaration of a highly educated German Jew who had just crossed the Rhine in the company of his listeners:

‘We have been good Germans in Germany and therefore we shall be good Frenchmen in France’. The speaker was warmly applauded by a tightly packed audience, Arendt remembered – and commented: “no one laughed”. But why should they laugh? The speaker Arendt quoted was not joking, whereas his comrades-in-fate packed in the auditorium would not recognize a joke even if he did. Neither he nor his like-minded listeners were quite aware of the neboulousness of the speaker’s audacious precept; and yet what the speaker envisaged was not for them a laughing matter, but a matter of life and death. That they did not feel like laughing, or perhaps forgot how to laugh, was the ultimate triumph of Europe’s great leap into the continent of nations. At the other end of that leap, the incongruous hotchpotch of localities, languages, histories, calendars and customs was expected to be recast once for all into a unified, one-history, one-language, one-tradition, one-fate, and one-loyalty body of the nation. In order to complete that leap, local or ‘merely ethnic’ histories, languages and traditions needed to be effaced and forgotten, local or ‘merely ethnic’ fates streamlined into the national history under the management of one indivisibly sovereign state power, and consequently the heretofore disparate and multi-layer loyalties ought to be converging on one focus and harnessed to one chariot, that of the

nation state. The emergent nation-state was to be the happy land of sameness: a clean home with no strangers inside. As that home rose from its foundation and before it has reached the roof, strangers had to stop being strangers - or to stop being. Indeed, strangers could not be trusted by the spokesmen and aspiring managers of the budding nations. The merit of having Frenchman or Frenchwoman as citizens of France lied after all in their incapacity to become good Germans; he or she were born French, and the act of being born stood out from other acts for the sheer

impossibility of being ever revoked; once French born and bred, always French. The strangers, on the other hand, were and stayed free to embrace or reject the Frenchness or Germanness, and already for that reason their choice of one or the other could not be relied to be secure, let alone to stay unflinching forever. None of his or her choices could be as uninfringeable, let alone as irrevocable, as to preclude further, different choices… The speaker recorded by Hannah Arendt inadvertently, though all the same suicidally, confirmed the good Frenchmen’s and Frenchwomen’s worst suspicions… Even if not by the speaker’s intention, then by the logic of nation-state building, the statement Hannah Arendt quoted was a joke, and a cruel one, though it turned into a joke only at the receiving end of the budding nation-state’s deadly serious message. That message, or command rather, was short and sharp, leaving nothing to imagination: assimilate! Stop being what you are, and become something completely different. Stop being strangers; a demand that contained already the impossibility of fulfilment, since by the nation-building logic to ‘stop being stranger’ meant in the last account to ‘stop ever having been stranger’. By that logic, the rule ‘once a stranger, always a stranger’ is the very essence of strangeness. The act of being born ‘in’ would not make you forever an insider of the nation if those born ‘out’

were not doomed to stay forever outsiders. The stigma of not being born a native couldn’t be washed out. Georg Simmel famously defined the stranger as someone who have come and does not go away. He could have added: and does not stop being a stranger, despite of of decision, and permission, to stay. Let me repeat: the command to assimilate would not revert into a cruel joke, a joke more likely to make listeners sobbing their hearts out than lughing, were it not coming from the spokesmen of the budding nations. Coming from them, it had to turn into a bloody-minded, potentially even a homicidal joke - and it did, because for

them the ‘nation’ derived its most glorious of glories, its unwavering and unyielding authority, and its unmatched attraction, from setting a ‘home’, the very opposite of a hotel or a camping site, and from becoming the home of all those born of it - but a temporary accommodation at best for all the rest. To assimilate, an alien had to wash off his alien-ness. But the alien-ness he was demanded to wash off was one stain that wouldn’t be wash, however strong the detergent: namely, the blemish of not having

been born native (in application to the Jews, the popular slogan of the time insisted that no bucketfuls of holy water would wash out their Jewishness). No wonder Lev Shestov, a Jew trying to become a Russian first and then a Frenchman, turned to God as his last hope - but to a God miracle-maker, God made to the measure of the exorbitant task of defying the world’s demands impossible for the mortals to fulfil; God potent enough to cancel the past, to obliterate what has been and make it into i

something that never was. In short – a God whose greatness ‘was His inconsistency’ , ii

God who was potent to ‘annul history’ and make history ‘cease to exist’ allowing thereby its victims to live. Shestov’s God was God of a people commanded, goaded, forced to confront and to perform(!) an impossible task. The task with which strangers were faced by the command ‘to assimilate’ was such task - indeed, the impossibility incarnate. A century or so before Shestov, Heinrich Heine did whatever he could to acquit himself from that task: to ‘get rid’ of his Jewishness. Publicly and vociferously, and using all his remarkable writing talents, he lent earnest support to the public conviction that ‘Jewishness’ was a disease in an urgent need of a radical cure, and disowned and disavowed the Judaist lore to which many of his brethren remained stubbornly stuck as a fossil of not just bygone, but shameful past; he used all his uncanny eloquence to deride, ridicule and pillory the qualities stereotyped as ‘specifically Jewish’ - like the ‘physical clumsiness and gracelessness’, the parvenu behaviour of Jewish nouveaux riches, vulgarity of the Fresser (guzzlers) who ‘despised the higher flights of the mind”, or Jewish incapacity to communicate in German iii

without polluting and defacing its beauty with the offensive ugliness of Yiddish. . Heine settled eventually in France, hoping (not without reason, as it transpired) that among Frenchmen it would be easier for him to pass for a German or even for a plenipotentiary of the German Geist – though for the Germans, in spite of his exquisitely German poetry, he was to remain, generation in generation out, unredeemably Jewish.

Unlike Heine, Sigmund Freud never denied his Jewishness, though neither did he make out of it an issue, let alone a problem needing urgent attention. He proceeded with an unclouded and unshakable confidence that his work was simultaneously a part and parcel of German scholarship and a contribution to ‘human science as such’ – only to find out that ‘his efforts to pass unnoticed only attracted attention’ and that ‘he was identified as a Jew by the very effort which he hoped iv

would make him unrecognizable’ . It was perhaps Ludwig Börne, Heine’s contemporary, who first intuited the unavoidable failure of the assimilatory enterprise when he observed that ‘some accuse me of being a Jew; some excuse me v

from being one; some even praise me for being a Jew. But all think about it’ . A th

hundred years passed, and another great German writer of the 20 Century, Jacob Wassermann, would find that however hard he tried to make his oeuvre not just unmistakeably, but in addition superbly and impeccably German, its very perfection was ascribed to his characteristically Jewish zeal, pushiness, cunning and as repulsive vi

as treacherous dissimulation and camouflage . A few years after Wassermann’s public admission of his frightening discovery, Artur Sandauer, a formidable Polish literary historian and critic, would coin the concept of ‘allosemitism’

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(from ‘allus’, the Latin word for the ‘other’), referring

to the gentile practice of setting the Jews apart from all the rest, as people radically different from all and any other people and needing therefore separate concepts to be described and comprehended as well as a special treatment in all or most social and cultural intercourse – since the concepts and treatments usefully deployed when facing or dealing with other people or peoples simply would not do in their case. ’Allosemitism’ is an intrinsically ambivalent attitude, able to move all the way from love and respect to outright condemnation and genocidal hate – and so it reflects faithfully the endemically ambivalent phenomenon of ‘the other’, the stranger (and consequently of the Jew, at least in Europe a most radical incarnation, indeed an epitome, of the stranger as such). If you happened to be cast on the receiving side of assimilation, you are in a no-win position. Tails you lose, heads they win. You may try hard to look ‘one of them’ as ‘naturally’ as they do, only to be told, and belatedly to realize, that contrary yo your belief it is being ‘one of them’ which defines the ‘naturalness’, not the other way round; and that therefore your very diligence, unswerving loyalty, and dedication to the adopted life-style idiom are bound to be taken for symptoms of the falsity of your pretences and perhaps even your malice aforethought. Hermann Cohen could present his Neo-Kantianism as ‘harking back to the original power of the essence of German spirit’, and insist that ‘we German Jews’ think in ‘the spirit of Lessing and Herder, Leibniz and Kant, Schiller and Goethe even in matters of our Jewish faith’

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but all that to no avail; if anything, provoking responses opposite to his expectations. Cohen’s appeal to the preordained symbiosis of ‘Judentum’ and ‘Deutschtum’ and their prospective dissolution in the new ‘human, all human’ universality knowing of no national and religious parochialisms (‘There are a number of social and intellectual

forces at work in both the German and the Jewish historical cultures which can and should be used so as to advance as much and as quickly as possible whatever dynamic force they possess toward the goal of cosmopolitan, humanistic, ethical world ix

society’ ) would chime well with the hosts and regular guests of the intellectual salons run by Rahel Varnhagen, Dorothea Mendelsohn or Henriette Herz, where ‘Germanness’ was defined as an aptitude to articulate ideas valid for ‘the whole of humanity’ and as an attitude of openness to the ‘universally human’, or with Georg Jellinek, Eduard Lasker, Eduard Gans or Hugo Preuss, prophets and heralds of the rationalist school of law that traced the German juristic usages to the universal human reason – but Cohen’s romance with universality would hardly endear him to the rising numbers of German patriots/nationalists, by whom it would not and could not be taken for anything else than a vicious sabotage of the strenuous effort of national selfassertion. Not without good reason, Cohen and others who shared his hopes saw in the universality of humanity the sole chance of success of the assimilatory drive; after all, the pressure to assimilate was lived through as a pressure ‘to be like anyone else’, ‘to stop being odd, to renounce one’s identity’ – which sounded uncannily as a call to smite and obliterate idiosyncrasies and embrace a one-for-all pattern… But assimilatory pressures of the nation-building era were aimed in exactly the opposite direction – not towards effacing, but sharpening the differences between identities. Assimilation was a profoundly ambivalent idea, but its inner ambivalence looked very differently depending on the pole from which it was contemplated – and the clash between the two incompatible sightings, experiences and intentions was impossible to avoid. The era of nation building that gave birth to the ‘assimilation problem’ is, in most of Europe, by and large over. There was however an additional, gruesome reason why the challenge, the glory and the misery of assimilation ceased to be a problem for the European Jews. That reason was the dissipation of the unique social/political/ cultural Central European setting which originally gave Jewish assimilation its romantic appeal and bore a good deal of responsibility for its tragic course. Until the last World War, East-Central Europe was a bottomless reservoir of the Ostjuden, the shtetl and ghetto Jews – who, when moving West where their more affluent and enlightened co-religionists hoped to win shortly their struggle for the admission into societies of their chosen homelands, scratched open the halfhealed wound of strangeness and continuously recharged, inflamed, and re-toxicated the ‘assimilation problem’ keeping it perpetually unresolved and in all probability unresolvable. This part of Europe however was also a veritable cauldron of aspiring or budding would-be ‘native’ nations and conflicting nationalist pressures and demands. Facing the yet un-practiced tasks which the ‘primitive accumulation of legitimacy’ of the incipient nation-states posited, and unsure of their chances of survival, let alone of guaranteed success - the old and new nationalisms spattered all

over the East-Central Europe’s multi-dimensionally heterogeneous demographic mixture were particularly bigoted and ruthless; all the more so for the irritating fact that practically none of their demands went uncontested. As surrender to any of the competing nationalisms was bound to antagonize all its competitors, the populations cast at the receiving side of mutually incompatible claims while deprived of, and denied, a prospective homeland of their own, were doomed – whatever response to the pressures they might have contemplated and attempted to put in practice. Their declarations of loyalty to any of the competing ethnicities aspiring to the status of a nation were bound to make more enemies than friends, while even the friends could not be relied upon as they would forever remain suspicious of the duplicity of the new converts’ allegiance to their cause and likely to drop their allies once their aims are achieved. Since no step taken on the road to assimilation was under such circumstances conclusive, hardly any step would be accepted by the watchful and distrustful examiners as a clinching proof of the converts’ loyalty, and hardly any verdict pronounced by the judges would stay uncontested for long – the assimilation would have been an unending process; a task not just life-long, but stretching all over the posthumous life of the defendants and permanently eligible for re-trial. Squeezed among the conflicting territorial and cultural claims, the Jews were denied the prospect of a successful (final, ultimate, un-contestable) disappearance act elegantly called ‘assimilation’ even before they – whether by design or by default – surrendered to the terms set by the powers-that-be. There was no way they could do reach the goal they were nudged to strive for - even with the maximum of skill and dedication. As the most perceptive among them, like Gustav Mahler, were sooner or later to discover, they were ‘thrice homeless: as Bohemians among Austrians, Austrians among Germans, and Jews everywhere’. National claims were incompatible, and no one exemplified that incompatibility more blatantly than the Jews, these ubiquitous, supra-national, all-European strangers. True, the aspiring nations were all too often quite eager to employ Jewish services in the pursuance of their proselytising crusades. The Jews were bearers of Magyarhood among the peasant Slavs, carriers of German culture among the Czechs of Prague, the prophets of German Geist in the multilingual capital of the Hapsburg empire, allies of the Polish patriots fighting to pull the peasants earmarked for future Polish citizenship out of Russian or German embraces. One can suspect, however, that Jewish services were willingly resorted to mostly because these servants could be so easily dismissed once their services were no longer needed. It all happened exactly as another perceptive East-Central European, Arthur Schnitzler of Vienna, prophesized: ‘Who created the German Nationalist Movement in Austria? The Jews. Who left the Jews in the lurch and indeed despised them as dogs? The German nationals. And just the same thing will happen with the socialists and the communists. x

Once the dinner is ready to be served, they will chase you from the table.’

Not every assimilation story must be however uniformly tragic, and not every assimilation is necessarily culturally creative. As a matter of fact, the opposite

seems to be nowadays the case – and ever more so, as throughout the ‘established’ Western world (as different from the currently ‘westernizing’ sectors of the planet) the crusading spirit of nationalism dissipates into vague historical memories dusted off during one-day celebrations of independence or victory anniversaries, week-long cricket test matches or the fortnights of football world cup; and as do-it-yourself, shop-supplied and personally assembled from caps and tee-shirts identity kits replace the blood-soaked flags while making redundant etiological myths of common fate, blood, soil, and collective missions. The daily life of assimilation tends to be dull and uninspiring. It is hardly a source of agony and certainly not a stimulus to iconoclasm and intellectual adventurism. But with the exit of the tragedy and cruelty of politically inspired homogenization, the cultural explosiveness of the assimilatory episode is also all but gone. For the great majority of diasporic Jews, comfortably settled now in the middle classes of their respective countries, ‘assimilation’ means no more than keeping up with Joneses. ‘Thou shalt not step out of line with thy neighbour’ is assimilation’s sole commandment, one easy to observe, as Cynthia Ozick caustically xi

commented , by ‘rushing out to buy a flag to even up the street’. Assimilation is by now dissolved in a generalized conformity of public appearances peacefully cohabiting with a mind-boggling variety of privatized contents. Overt conformity is all the easier to maintain, since diversity has been recognized as the foremost of personal virtues, a duty and a matter of pride. Amidst the cornucopia of class, generational, gender, occupational, or just socially free-floating and territorially unbound, electronically travelling and freely boundary-jumping lifestyles, it is difficult to set apart as particularly problem-laden and especially challenging such forms of life as may be ethnicity-linked and thus subject to the rules strikingly different from those guiding other dimensions of diversity. On the whole, it seems, attention is focused, rather undramatically, on the efforts of affluent Jewish residents of affluent streets to be ‘like’ the rest of their affluent residents, of Jewish youth to absorb and duplicate the latest lifestyles of the young yet seasoned fashion addicts, of Jewish professionals to live and dress and decorate their offices in the way most recently recognized as right and proper for professionals of their standing, of Jewish academics to act in accordance with the most up-to-date among the fast changing campus fads and foibles. The sting has been taken out of assimilation not because the Jews have acquitted themselves perfectly from the task it imposed, having performed what the homogenizing pressures of assimilation pressed them to perform - but because such pressures are not there anymore: not in the liquid modern world of universal, and fluid, and short-lived particularities, a world integrated through the common participation in the diversity game, resigned to ambiguity and no longer struggling for

Eindeutigkeit or believing in its feasibility. Social, political and cultural success of Jews in the countries secure in their identity, and no longer afflicted by the nationbuilding obsessions and nation-protecting hysteria, has by now broken all the records

of Jewish socio-cultural advancements in the East-Central Europe - while provoking relatively little resentment and no retaliatory pressures. As, for instance, David Biale xii

calculated in 1986 , in the USA Jews constituted 20.9 per cent in top university faculties, 11.4 % of the elite of government, business and labour unions and 25.6 % in the media. And let me note that the media in question, a relatively recent invention, made the Jews and their astounding success more visible and accessible to public scrutiny than ever before – no comparison with the notorious ‘jüdische Presse’ rumours that a century or so ago put so much ammunition and poisoned arrows in the hands of the leaders and ideologues of the budding German nationalism… We may say retrospectively that the agony and the splendour of assimilation was a relatively brief and relatively localized episode in the history of the modern world. It encompassed but a few generations spanning the stormy yet short period needed by the modern states to entrench themselves in their historically indispensable yet perhaps transitory nationally uniform renditions. It also encompassed just a few generations thrown into the cauldron of seething nationalist passions: generations already cut off from their roots but yet un-absorbed by the new compound and so forced to stretch their talents, ingenuity and the drive-to-excel to the utmost - in order to build for themselves a domicile that others around viewed and enjoyed as their natural and unproblematic heritage. It is of such generations that Kafka spoke as of four-legged animals, whose hind legs had already lost touch with the ground while the forelegs sought a foothold in vain. The empty, no-where space in which those Menschen ohne Eigenschaften, or more to the point people with no socially

recognized (and approved of) qualities were suspended, felt like an uncanny half-way inn between paradise and hell; the paradise of infinite chances of self-creation, the hell of perpetual contingency and unredeemable inconclusiveness. For a few generations, the travellers - forced to take off yet forbidden to land - had no other place to inhabit. The agony and splendour of assimilation was confined to that brief flight through the no-man’s space of non-identity in a world otherwise neatly divided into fenced-off homesteads, each earmarked for one and only one of many rigid and pugnacious, quarrelling identities. Enticed, blandished or coerced to take to the air, the flyers – whether keen or resentful – made an easy target and prey for gamekeepers and poachers alike. But they also shared with other flying creatures the privilege of that vast and sharp vision called, with more than a touch of awe and jealousy, the ‘birds eye view’. The splendours of the ‘bird’s eye view’ grew from the same roots from which the agony sprouted. The game of assimilation proved to be exceedingly fertile as it went, even if ultimately un-winnable. Although, as Max Frisch put it, always and for everybody ‘identity means refusing to be what the others want you to be’ - the decree to assimilate meant refusal of the right to refuse; one did not have that right, not in this game and not as long as the umpires had the last say. Frustrated, dedication of the ‘assimilants’ turned time and again into a mutiny. The myth of belonging was exploded, and the dazzling light of the explosion

drew out of its exilic darkness the truth of the incompleteness, frailty and endemic until-further-notice mode of the wanderer’s existence. Being in the world in the way in which one is chez soi, at home, could be attained solely in another world – perhaps a world wholly different from the world that sent the assimilants on the voyage of their unwitting, frustrating discovery. One could seek that another world, like Gyorgy Lukacs tried, in an authority bold and mighty enough to dismiss the ruling judgements of today and proclaim its own judgment as if it were to become and remain the last; in the absolute and un-contestable authority of, for instance, aesthetic perfection, or in the invincible power of the ‘historically inevitable’ alliance between the suffering proletarians and the bearers of universal truth. Or one could, on the contrary, like Walter Benjamin did, seek consolation in the image of ‘new angels created each moment in countless hosts, so that after they have sung their hymn before God, they cease to exist and pass away into nothingness’ and so to be, as Theodore Adorno xiii

pointedly commented , one of the first thinkers to note and to accept that the ’individual who thinks becomes problematic to the core, yet without the existence of anything supra-individual in which the isolated subject could gain spiritual transcendence without being oppressed’ though also without gaining immunity to that ‘horror of loneliness’, the proof of which Gershon Sholem found in ‘many of Benjamin’s writings’.

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One can say perhaps that the more uncompromising and vicious was the assimilatory zeal of aspiring nation-builders and self-appointed nation-guardians, and the more ham-fisted were the agents of conversion, the more spacious and culturally vigorous tended to become life at ‘the other side of assimilation’. The episode of the astonishing cultural creativity of the Jews was born of agony and suffering, much like the universality of modern culture was born of the fustiness of parochialism. It was perhaps necessary first to agonize at the receiving end of the modern thrust to order, certainty and uniformity, in order to see through the lie of the privilege masquerading as universality and learn to live with difference, ambivalence, contingency and infinity of possibilities crowded inside the un-decidable being. In the event, the pole of the pillory went down in history as the crow’s nest from which the land at the other end of the long modern voyage was first sighted. It so happened that – not necessarily by their choice – Jews of Europe were the first to experience the harrowing dilemmas, in-eradicable ambivalence and indeed the awesome aporias of modern life – and so enjoyed the doubtful privilege to be the first, perhaps also the keenest people to try, experiment with, and expose as deceitful the whole spectrum of individual remedies and collective therapies hoped to defuse them and detoxify. From that site on which contradictory pressures of modern imperatives met and clashed, modern ambitions could be – and were - put to an

experimentum crucis, explored, tested and seen through. Out of that experience the vision of the modern contradictions and the dialectics of modern life were to be moulded. European Jews, one is tempted to conclude, were cast by the drama of modern nation-building into the role of the pioneers of modern thought.

There are ample, and in my view convincing, reasons to surmise that here lies the secret of what is commonly perceived as the uniquely creative contribution of European Jews to modern culture - and above all to the modern selfawareness and self-understanding. I also believe, though, that this unique creativity, as well as the nation-building drama that gave it the first push and maintained its animus over a century or two, was an episode of European history which is now by and large over. On that north-western peninsula of the Asiatic continent called ‘Europe’ identity is no longer the frontline along which coercion and freedom, imposition and choice, inclusion and exclusion confront each other in a war of attrition. In our part of the world ‘identity’ became, for all practical intents and purposes, an ‘identainment’: it moved from the realm of physical and spiritual survival to that of entertaining recreational play, and turned into concern and one of the principal pastime of homo

ludens rather than homo politicus. It has been also largely privatized, having been shifted from the area of ‘Politics’ (with a capital ‘P’) into the poorly structured and volatile realm of individually run ‘life politics’. As most functions that have moved or can be moved into that space, it also undergoes a fast and thorough process of

commercialization. The play titled ‘identity-search’ or ‘identity-building’ is nowadays variously staged, spanning the whole spectrum of theatrical genres from epic drama to farce or grotesque, though tragedy-style productions are rather few and far between. And as tragic versions become less and less epic, so the Jewish presence in the culture of modernity loses much of those distinction and heroic flavour that were its trademarks in the times of the Jewish modern awakening. If being forced to struggle for keeping identity alive and facing point blank all the contradictions and inanities of ambivalence and of the interplay of continuities and discontinuities was a

differentia specifica of Jews on the continent obsessed with self-assertion of nations, then on the planet of diasporas all its inhabitants whether they know it or not and whether they enjoy or detest the news, are Jews… * Just how much the advancing modernity was sincere in its declared intention to promote the cause of freedom is a moot and to this day debatable issue, but beyond dispute is its proclivity to cultural intolerance – indeed the inseparable other face of the “nation-building” project. It was indeed the undetachable part and parcel of the twin, mutually supporting and reinforcing nation-and-state building projects that national languages were to be formed through suppressing and delegitimizing communal “dialects”, state churches put together through discrimination and extermination of “sects”, or national memory composed through demoting and forgetting “local follies and/or superstitions”. One part of Europe – closest than any other to its “geographical centre” – resisted however also that massive assault on the idea of culture as the matter of individual self-assertive choice and the foundation of individual autonomy. This was

Austro-Hungary, ruled from Vienna, not by chance the greenhouse of cultural creativity and incubator of the by far the most exciting and seminal contributions to European philosophy, psychology, literature, music, visual and stage arts… It was also the area in which the practice of equality and self-government of cultures was raised, by most insightful minds of the time, to the rank of a model for the future of Europe; model constructed with the intention, and hope, of cleansing the coexistence of European nations from the ghastly merger of cultural identity with territorial sovereignty. The principle of national personal autonomy ("personal principle") was elaborated at length by Otto Bauer in his 1907 book Die Nationalitätenfrage und die

Sozialdemokratie. That principle was seen by him a way to "organize nations not in territorial bodies but in simple association of persons", thus radically disjoining the nation from the territory and making of the nation a non-territorial association (this idea was offered to public discussion eight years earlier by another “Autro-Marxist”, Karl Renner, in his 1899 essay Staat und Nation, and three years after that by a Jewish Bund’s leader Vladimir Medem in his 1904 essay Social democracy and the

national question (written and published in Yiddish), a text bringing together and synthesizing historic experiences of the Polish-Lithuanian Union and Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: Let us consider the case of a country composed of several national groups, e.g. Poles, Lithuanians and Jews. Each national group would create a separate movement. All citizens belonging to a given national group would join a special organisation that would hold cultural assemblies in each region and a general cultural assembly for the whole country. The assemblies would be given financial powers of their own: either each national group would be entitled to raise taxes on its members, or the state would allocate a proportion of its overall budget to each of them. Every citizen of the state would belong to one of the national groups, but the question of which national movement to join would be a matter of personal choice and no authority would have any control over his decision. The national movements would be subject to the general legislation of the state, but in their own areas of responsibility they would be autonomous and none of them would have the right to interfere in the affairs of the others.xv

Such hopes were shattered and such blueprints drown in blood spilt in the trenches of the Great War. Came Versailles Peace Conference, and Woodrow Wilson’s memorable verdict that sovereignty of nations is the universal precept of humanity and needs to be accepted as the key to the post-war reconstruction – a verdict that famously left Hannah Arendt bewildered and horrified, painfully aware and mindful as she was of the “belts of mixed population” being singularly unfit for the application “ein Volk, ein Reich” criterionxvi. Even Wilson’s ignorance (or was it disdain or arrogance?) was not enough however to prevent yet another (though half-hearted, to be sure) attempt at seeking and finding a mode of cohabitation better suited to the condition of overlapping and crisscrossing archipelagoes of diasporas, in the shape of Yugoslav multi-ethnic state. A side remark casually dropped by Helmut Kohl’s in a moment of heedlessness (implying that Slovenia deserved independence because it was ethnically homogenous) was yet needed to open another Pandora box of neighbourhood massacres and ethnic cleansings…

We, Europeans, are facing today, in the emergent era of diasporas, the prospect of Europe being transformed into a steadily widening and lengthening “belt of mixed population”. Unlike the previous direction of pendulum, this present process is not (state)power-assisted; quite on the contrary, state powers try as much as they can to slow down the process or grind it to a halt altogether – but the capacity at their disposal is ever more evidently much short of what stemming the tide of the fast and unstoppable globalization of inter-human dependence would require. The “proactive” responses to the “diasporization” of social settings are slow, half-hearted, lacking in vision, and above all much too few and far between, if measured by their import and urgency: and yet this is precisely the context in which the prospects of Europe as a political and cultural entity, and the exact location of Europe’s “centre”, need to be deliberated and debated. It is in the part of Europe claiming the qualifier “Central” that the experience of communal identity separated from the issue of territorial administration is relatively fresh in memory, and (perhaps) the habits acquired, practiced and enjoyed in the era of cohabitation free from Kulturkämpfe and assimilatory pressures are recent enough to be recalled and re-embraced. It is the Central Europe’s memory that shows Europe’s future… Can you imagine a centrality more central than that?!

Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, transl. Bernard Martin, Ohio UP 1966, p.69. Ibid., p.68. iii See S.S.Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, Clarendon Press 1986, pp.760-1. iv Martha Robert, From Oedipus to Moses; Freud’s Jewish Identity, Anchor Books 1976, p.17. v Quoted after Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the hidden language of the Jews, John Hopkins UP 1986, p.162. vi See Jacob Wassermann, My Life as German and Jew, Allen & Unwin 1934, p.72. vii See Artur Sandauer, ‘O sytuacji pisarza polskiego pochodzenia żydowskiego w XX wieku;Rzecz, którą nie ja powinienem był napisać (‘On the plight of the Polish wroter of Jewish origin in the 20th Century; an essay which not I should have written), in Pisma Zebrane (Collected Works), vol.3, Czytelnik 1985. viii See David Baumgardt, ‘The Ethics of Lazarus and Steinthal’, in Leo Beck Institute Yearbook, vol2, pp213-4. ix See Steven S.Schwartzschild, ‘Germanness and Judaism – Hermann Cohen’s Normative Paradigm pf the German-Jewish Symbiosis’, in Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933., x Quoted after Michael Ignatieff, ‘The Rise and Fall of Vienna’s Jews’, New York Review of Books 29 June 1989, p.22. xi Cynthia Ozick, Art and Ardour, Dutton, p.159. xii See David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish history, Schocken Books 1986, p.180). ii

xiii

Theodor W.Adorno, ‘Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften, in On Walter Banjamin. Critical ssays and Recollections, MIT Press 1988. p.14. xiv See Gerschon Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of Friendship, Faber & Faber 1982, p.234. xv As recently quoted in Wikipedia after Yves Plassereaud, "Choose Your Own Nationality or The Forgotten History of Cultural Autonomy", in English edition of Le Monde diplomatique of May 2000. xvi

See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Andre Deutsch 1986, p.270.