– that is to say, upon national, social or cultural references from which he, as a Jew, was completely excluded. True, some Jewish thinkers (especially in the Stefan George Circle) were able to make the leap and to be transformed into German nationalists (Rudolf Borchardt), conservative German scholars (Friedrich Gundolf, Karl Wolfskehl) or Protestant theologians (Hans Ehrenberg). But these were fairly rare cases which involved a total and rather artificial negation of Jewish identity – the supreme example being the works of the Jewish anti-Semites (Otto Weininger, Theodor Lessing). As for the others, the majority of Jewish intellectuals of German cultural background, only two solutions were possible within the framework of neo-romanticism: either a return to their own historical roots, to their own culture, nationality or ancestral religion; or adherence to a universal romantic-revolutionary utopia. Not surprisingly, given the structural homology between these two paths, a number of Jewish thinkers close to anti-capitalist romanticism chose both simultaneously: on the one hand, a (re-)discovery of the Jewish religion – most notably, the restorative/utopian dimension of messianism; on the other hand, sympathy for, or identification with, revolutionary (especially libertarian) utopias loaded with nostalgia for the past.
Let us examine these two paths more closely. In the atmosphere permeated with neo-romantic religiosity, many Jewish intellectuals revolted against their parents’ assimilation and sought to save the Jewish religious culture of the past from oblivion. As a result, there was a process of de-secularization, partial dis-assimilation, cultural and religious anamnesis, and ‘reculturalization’,18 which certain circles or literary groups actively promoted: the Bar-Kochba Club in Prague (Hugo Bergmann, Hans Kohn, Max Brod); the circle around Rabbi Nobel in Frankfurt (Siegfried Krakauer, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, Ernst Simon); the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Nahum Glatzer, Margarete Süssmann); Martin Buber’s magazine, Der Jude, among other examples. But ‘re-culturalization’ spread even further to embrace, in varying degrees, a large number of Jewish intellectuals influenced by neo-romanticism. It sometimes took on a national character (especially through Zionism), but the religious aspect predominated. Assimilation ran so deep in Mitteleuropa that it was extremely difficult to break with the German national-cultural identity. As religion was the sole legitimate specific for ‘German citizens of Israelite denomination’, it understandably became the primary means of expression for the movement of cultural anamnesis.
This was, however, a new type of religiosity, charged with German romantic spirituality, which was very different from the traditionalism ritualistically preserved within certain non-assimilated orthodox Jewish milieux. The paradox was that, through German neo-romanticism, these young Jewish intellectuals rediscovered their own religion: their path to the prophet Isaiah went by way of Novalis, Hölderlin or Schelling. In other words, assimilation and cultural integration were the preconditions and the points of departure for their dis-assimilation and re-culturalization. It was not by chance that Buber wrote on Jakob Böhme before he wrote his works on Hasidism;19 that Franz Rosenzweig almost converted to Protestantism before becoming the reformer of Jewish theology; that Gustav Landauer translated the mystical writings of Meister Eckhart before turning towards the Jewish tradition; and that Gershom Scholem rediscovered the cabbala through the writings of the German Romantic Franz Joseph Molitor. Consequently, the Jewish religious heritage was seen through a grid of romantic interpretation which favoured its non-rational and non-institutional dimension, its mystical, explosive, apocalyptic, ‘anti-bourgeois’ aspects (to use Scholem’s phrase from the first article he wrote on the cabbala in 1919). Messianism is the theme which, as in a pool of radiant light, concentrates all of the Sturm und Drang aspects of the Jewish religion – provided, of course, that it is stripped of the liberal, neo-Kantian and Aufklärer interpretation (in which messianism equals the gradual perfection of mankind) and that the original tradition is re-established in all its eschatological force, from the prophets to the cabbala, from the Bible to Sabbatai Sevi. It is therefore not surprising that the messianic reference, in its double restorative and utopian meaning, became the Shibboleth of the religious anamnesis of the Jewish-romantic generation of the 1880s. On the other hand, it goes without saying that this sort of Jewish messianism, charged with romantic explosiveness, was far more susceptible to political activation than the rabbinical (quietist or abstentionist) messianism of the orthodox milieux.
How did this activation work? Or rather, how can we explain that a large fringe of this generation adhered to the path of revolutionary utopias?
This question must be placed in a broader context: that of the attraction of Jewish intellectuals in general to left-wing movements and socialist ideas. For, as historians have noted, the majority of left-wing Jews in Central Europe (the situation was different in Eastern Europe, with its Jewish proletariat) were intellectuals.20
Anti-Semites had their own ‘explanation’: the stateless and cosmopolitan Jews tended instinctively towards red internationalism. This platitude is obviously false – the majority of Jews were good-and-proper German or Austrian patriots – but probably the situation of national assimilation/rejection/marginalization of the Jewish intellectuals made them potentially more sensitive than their non-Jewish counterparts to the internationalist themes of socialism. The intelligentsia felt more directly than did the bourgeoisie and the business class the pariah condition of the Jew in Central Europe, the pervading anti-Semitism, the professional and social discrimination. As Hannah Arendt wrote, this new stratum of intellectuals, which had to find both their daily bread and their self-respect outside of Jewish society, was particularly exposed (‘without shelter and defence’) to the new wave of Jew-hatred at the turn of the century, and it was within the intelligentsia that a rebel ‘pariah consciousness’ developed in opposition to the conformist posture of the parvenu.21 There were only two possibilities for the pariah: either radical self-negation (Otto Weininger!) or radical questioning of the societal values that devalued his otherness. The pariah consciousness, by definition marginal or outside, tended to be critical and could become, in the words of Elisabeth Lenk, ‘the quintessential mirror of society’.22
The ‘negative privileges’ (to use Max Weber’s phrase) of Jewish pariah intellectuals in Central European societies took various forms. At the socio-professional level, civil-service and (to a large extent) academic positions were closed to Jews – a situation which condemned them to marginal intellectual occupations such as ‘freelance’ journalist or writer, independent artist or researcher, ‘private’ educator, and so on. According to the German sociologist Robert Michels, it was this discrimination and marginalization which explained ‘the Jews’ predisposition to joining revolutionary parties’.23 Analysing this same phenomenon in Hungary, Karady and Kameny underscored that
the formation of a hard revolutionary core within the liberal intelligentsia seemed directly indebted to the rigidities within the marketplace of intellectual occupations, in which institutionalized anti-Semitism within certain professional bodies (such as higher education) was but one aspect … that could only reinforce the conviction held by the excluded that ‘normal’ integration into the intellectual marketplace required subversion of its ground-rules.24
Now, the importance of this point should not be underestimated. But it seems to me that the revolutionary radicalization of a large number of Jewish intellectuals – be it in Hungary or Germany – cannot not be reduced to a problem of the job market or career opportunities. Other factors must be taken into consideration in order to explain why the son of a Jewish banker (Georg Lukács) became a People’s Commissar in the Budapest Commune, or why the son of a rich Jewish merchant (Eugen Leviné) led the Bavarian Soviet Republic.
In an attempt to understand why Jews turned to Socialism, Walter Laqueur wrote, in his book on the Weimar Republic:
They gravitated towards the left because it was the party of reason, progress and freedom which had helped them to attain equal rights. The right on the other hand, was to varying degrees anti-semitic because it regarded the Jew as an alien element in the body politic. This attitude had been a basic fact of political life throughout the nineteenth
