Abstract
In 1956 Hannah Arendt proclaimed: “The German-speaking Jews and their history are an altogether unique phenomenon; nothing comparable to it is to be found even in the other areas of Jewish assimilation. To investigate this phenomenon, which among other things found expression in a literally astonishing wealth of talent and of scientific and intellectual productivity, constitutes a historical task of the first rank, and one which, of course, can be attacked only now, after the history of the German Jews has come to an end.”1 Arendt energetically answered her own call and on occasion quite brilliantly addressed herself to the task.2 Her conviction concerning German Jewry’s unique intellectual productivity, its remarkable cultural achievements, was no idiosyncratic quirk. For over a half-century now, fascinated scholars have been chronicling, mapping, and variously explaining these accomplishments, often in a highly sophisticated manner.
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Notes
See the (1956) preface to Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, ed. Liliane Weissberg, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 82.
For a very fine example that documents and seeks to explain “the startling productivity of the German-Jewish symbiosis,” see David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1740–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), especially the conclusion.
See George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington and Cincinnati: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. ix. In his autobiography, Confronting History: A Memoir (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), Mosse writes about German Jews Beyond Judaism, that it “is certainly my most personal book, almost a confession of faith” (p. 184).
James Joll, Intellectuals in Politics: Three Biographical Essays (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960), pp. xii–xiii. In overall terms this portrait is accurate, yet it somewhat downplays the anti-Semitic attacks that Blum had to endure.
Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749–1824 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967).
See the superb work by Jay Berkowitz, The Shaping ofJewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), pp. 142–144. He argues that, unlike in Germany, where there was a concentration upon rabbinic literature and a disinclination towards Biblical criticism, prompted by the anti-Jewish bias of this Protestant-dominated field with which German Jewish scholars did not want to be associated, in France Jews were vocal in Biblical and philosophical studies. Thus the by-now Frankified Munk dispassionately treated issues pertaining to the documentary hypothesis, disputing most of its claims, but accepting in principle the idea of human authorship of the Pentateuch. Unlike German-Jewish scholars and in the spirit of the Durkheimians, he adopted a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. French scholars, Berkowitz notes, hardly touched rabbinic literature. Because reformers and rabbis could work together in France, no massive assaults on the Talmud were necessary, as they were for their counterparts in Germany. Munk, it should be noted, also translated Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed into French. Of course, French-Jewish scholars were clear on the fact that they modeled their translation work on the Mendelssohn Biur. See also Frances Malino, “Jewish Enlightenment in Berlin and Paris,” in Brenner, Caron, and Kaufmann, Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered.
Of relevance too is Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), especially p. 95.
See the difficult but insightful preface to Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1965).
Berkowitz comments that among these intellectuals there “appears to have been greater affinity and loyalty to the basic ideals of Mendelssohn and Wessely in France than among the reformers in Germany.” In Jay Berkowitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity, note 11, p. 270. See too the comparisons with regard to French-Jewish and German-Jewish education in Chapter 8, “The Ideology of Educational Reform.” It should also be noted that there were other (perhaps a little more minor) intellectuals who in the Third Republic sought to redefine Jewish identity and to “re-embody” it—people like Hyppolite Prague, the editor of the Archives Israelites, or the Jewish theologian Maurice Liber of the Societe des Etudes Juives; James Darmsteter; Israel Levi; and so on. See Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 38.
Berkowitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity, pp. 209–210. The same author (note 18, p. 283) does however remind us that Michael Meyer in his German Political Pressure and Jewish Religious Response in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981), pp. 11–14, has challenged the notion that religious reform was a strategy designed to strengthen the case for emancipation.
Most centrally see Pierre Birnbaum’s The Jews of the Republic: A Political History of State Jews in France from Gambetta to Vichy, translated by Jane Marie Todd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996)
and his superb essay on the French model in his and Ira Katznelson, Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States and Citizenship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
The phenomenon of right-wing and conservative Jews is well known in the German case. In France too, while Republican liberalism was the dominant strain among late nineteenth-century Jewry, there were those who were influenced by Barrés (paradoxically to return to their Jewish roots) and the Action Francaise appealed, for instance, to people such as Daniel Halévy. See note 4 in Venita Datta, Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 251.
On this and the problematic of defining the “Jewishness” of such activities, see Ezra Mendelsohn, “Should we take Notice of Berthe Weill? Reflections on the Domain of Jewish History,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 1 (no. 1, Fall 1994), pp. 22–39.
On the nature of these anti-Semitic representations, see the articles by Sander Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Modern Jewess,” and by Carol Ockman, “When Is a Jewish Star just a Star? Interpreting Images of Sarah Bernhardt” in Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (eds.), The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995). I thank Richard I. Cohen for this reference.
On this see Elizabeth Frenzel, Judengestalten auf der deutschen Bühne: Ein notwendiger Querschnitt durch 700 Jahre Rollengeschichte (Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag, 1940).
Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto (New York, 1978) also touches on this. See especially p. 86.
For the following remarks I have relied upon the excellent work by Rachel M. Brownstein, Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie-Francaise (New York: Knopf, 1993). I thank Zvi Jagendorf for suggesting both this topic and book to me. Brownstein informs us that the name “Felix,” the Latin for “happy,” was a fairly common name among Jews and constituted a translation of the Hebrew “Baruch” (“blessed”), p. 50.
I have relied fully on the interesting article by Janis Bergman-Carton, “Negotiating the Categories: Sarah Bernhardt and the Possibilities of Jewishness,” Art Journal, vol. 55, No. 2 (Summer 1996), pp. 55–64.
Most famously, Benda’s 1928 La Trahison des Clercs, translated by Richard Aldington as The Treason of the Intellectuals (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1959)
and Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, translated by Terence Kilmartin (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1957). The work originally appeared in 1955. By placing these two together l do not mean to imply that there were not significant differences between them. See Aron’s critical comments on the lofty but rather abstract, removed moralism of Benda, pp. 301ff: “It is seldom possible to choose between parties, regimes or nations on the basis of values defined in abstract terms.... The intellectual who sets some store by the just and reasonable organisation of society will not be content to stand on the side-lines, to put his signature at the bottom of every manifesto against every injustice.”
For a nuanced view proclaiming, in the last analysis, the relevance of this factor in terms of the Jewish situation of cognitive belongingness and social outsiderness, see Paul Mendes-Flohr’s suggestive “The Study of the Jewish Intellectual: A Methodological Prologemenon” in his Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991).
John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1974). Cuddihy’s work contains many interesting insights. Yet some of the dangers of such undertakings also become apparent in this work, as its ultimate impulse seems to veer close indeed to older stereotypical conceptions of Jewish subversiveness and unruliness.
See the superb review by Robert Alter, “Manners and the Jewish Intellectual,” Commentary 60 (no. 2, August 1975), pp. 58–64. Alter concludes (pp. 63–64): “In dropping so many Jewish names, Cuddihy seems to have forgotten about Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Mann, Lawrence ... Cuddihy’s sleight-of-hand trick is to focus on a few seminal thinkers of Jewish origins within this much larger movement and so to give the impression that the subversiveness of modernism was foisted on intellectuals everywhere by the Jews, who repeatedly argued out of the resentment of their own special social predicament as though they were describing man in general. I do not presume to know Cuddihy’s motives, which may well be associated with a kind of uneasy admiration of Jewish intellectuality. But whatever his conscious intentions, the clear tendency of his historical exposition is to represent Jewish social thought as inherently meretricious, disruptive, vindictive, twisting, and breaking the civil body of Christian society on the Procrustean bed of Jewish social distress.”
See Venita Datta, Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France (Albany: State University of New York, 1999), p. 107.
See Waldemar George, “The School of Paris,” in Cecil Roth, Jewish Art: An Illustrated History, revised edition, Bezalel Narkiss (Jerusalem: Massada Press, 1971), pp. 229–260. This aspect of the school is now becoming increasingly recognized in the popular press. See for instance, Michael Gibson, “The Gifted Foreigners of the School of Paris,” International Herald Tribune (December 23–24, 2000), p. 7.
Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 1.
Gide’s Journal entry (175–176) is quoted in Elaine Marks, Marrano as Metaphor: The Jewish Presence in French Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 59–60.
Quoted Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France 2. See note 12, p. 162. Strenski notes in this connection (p. 18): The Jewish philosophers of Durkheim’s generation—those who opposed him in the name of the autonomy of reason, such as Léon Brunschvicg—seemed immune enough from some native Jewish tendency toward the social.” But beyond this, Maire misunderstood what Durkheim was doing for, like so many other bourgeois Bildung Jews, he never abandoned his deep embrace of individualist values; what he patriotically sought to do was reform individualist Cartesianism along societist lines, both within the domain of national morale and in the realm of science. This attempt to integrate individualism within nationalism, as distinct from integralist efforts to suppress such individualism under the weight of nationalism, as Strenski (p. 42) puts it, was just as characteristic of French Jews as it was of German Jews (if we are to make the claim that Jews tended to emphasize certain things and downplay others). Be that as it may, Maire’s essentialist, hostile reading is really not far from the sympathetic and suggestive but ultimately problematic approach of Louis Greenberg, who posits that Durkheim’s antiaesthetic sensibilities were derived from his rabbinical father Moise and his adherence to a strict Talmudic (Rashi) rationalism, whereas for Henri Bergson, his Polish Hasidic background may have pushed intuition to the center of his thought. See Louis Greenberg, “Bergson and Durkheim as Sons and Assimilators: The Early Years,” French Historical Studies 9: 4, (1976), pp. 619–634. The difficulty here is that Durkheim’s positivistic hostility to poetry, arts, and mysticism and Bergson’s irrationalism are far more easily and persuasively accounted for in terms of the wider prevalent intellectual currents of their times.
Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison de Clercs), translated by Richard Aldington (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1959), pp. 61–62. Benda earlier referred to the new Jewish propensity of “laboring to assert this peculiarity, to define its characteristics....I am not trying to discover whether the impulse of these Jews is or is not nobler than the efforts of so many others to have their origin pardoned in them; I am simply pointing out to those interested in the progress of peace in the world that our age has added one more arrogance to those which set men against each other, at least to the extent that it is conscious and proud of itself” (pp. 11–12). In a note (1, p. 12) Benda added that he was “speaking of Western Jews of the bourgeois class. The Jewish proletariat did not await our time to plunge into the feeling of its racial peculiarity. However, it does so without giving provocation.”
See the exchange of letters between George Lichtheim and Gershom Scholem, letters 108a (28 November 1966) and 108 (4.12.66), respectively in Gershom Scholem, Briefe II, 1948–1970, ed., Thomas Sparr (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), pp. 159 and 162, where Scholem very briefly concedes this.
Ernst Bloch, “Die sogennante Judenfrage” (1963) in Bloch’s Literarische Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main, 1965), p. 553.
Quoted in Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Jews Within German Culture” in German-Jewish History, edited by Michael A. Meyer (Michael Brenner, Assistant Editor), Volume 4, Renewal and Destruction 1918–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 192. Note 13 (p. 411).
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© 2012 Steven E. Aschheim
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Aschheim, S.E. (2012). Toward a Phenomenology of the Jewish Intellectual: The German and French Cases Compared. In: At the Edges of Liberalism. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137002297_13
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