Such an analysis certainly helps to clarify why many Jewish intellectuals in Germany and especially in Austria joined social democracy. However, it does not explain the radicalization of the romantic Jewish generation of the 1880s, which was distrustful of rationalism, industrial progress and political liberalism – and none of whose members was attracted by social democracy.
What was the spiritual road that led a part of this current to socialist ideas – or, more precisely, to the revolutionary socialist version of anti-capitalism? Why was it, for example, that in one of the main discussion centres of the neo-romantic world-view, the Max Weber circle of Heidelberg, it was precisely the Jews (Lukács, Bloch, Toller) who opted for revolution?
As noted earlier, their social condition as pariahs, their marginalization and uprooting clearly made Jewish intellectuals receptive to ideologies that radically contested the established order. But other motivations entered into play, which were specific to the anti-capitalist romantic milieu. Jewish national/cultural romanticism (i.e. Zionism) did not gain the support of the majority. Assimilation was too deep for Jewish intellectuals to be able to identify with a rather abstract Jewish nation in Central Europe (unlike in Eastern Europe). It is, therefore, understandable that most of them refused all nationalism and opted instead for an internationalist, anti-capitalist romantic utopia, in which social and national inequalities would be completely abolished: in other words, anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, or a romantic and libertarian interpretation of Marxism. The attractive power of this ideal was so great that it even influenced Zionists such as Buber, Hans Kohn or Gershom Scholem.
There are various reasons why, above all before 1917, libertarian utopia held a particular attraction: first, as we have already seen, of all socialist doctrines, libertarian utopia was the one most charged with anti-capitalist romanticism – while orthodox Marxism, then identified with social democracy, appeared as a more left-wing version of liberal/rationalist philosophy and worship of industrial civilization (Gustav Landauer’s criticism of Marxism as the ‘son of the steam-engine’ typifies this attitude). On the other hand, the authoritarian and militarist character of the German imperial state also stimulated the libertarian anti-authoritarianism of the rebel intelligentsia, especially after 1914, when it appeared to the intelligentsia like a Moloch avid for human sacrifices. Finally, anarchism corresponded better to the intellectual’s posture of being ‘without social attachments’, uprooted and marginal, especially in Germany where (unlike in France, Italy or Spain) the libertarian current was not an organized mass social movement.
It was the combination of all these economic, social, political and cultural conditions which made it possible – at a specific moment in history, and within a specific generation of Central European Jewish intellectuals – for the correspondence between Jewish messianism and libertarian utopia to become dynamic and to turn into a relationship of elective affinity. It is hard to know which of the two was the primordial or determining element: what is important is that they sustained, reinforced and stimulated each other. This was the context, then, in which a complex network of links took shape, between anti-capitalist romanticism, Jewish religious rebirth, messianism, anti-bourgeois and anti-statist cultural revolt, revolutionary utopia, anarchism and Socialism. To this socio-historical process, which began to unfold in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, must now be added the concrete political conjuncture of a revolutionary upsurge without precedent in modern European history, stretching from the Russian Revolution in 1905 to the final defeat of the German Revolution in 1923. It was not by chance that the main works displaying the Wahlverwandtschaft between messianism and utopia were written in this period, from Landauer’s ‘Die Revolution’ (1907) to Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness and the second edition of Bloch’s Geist der Utopia [Spirit of Utopia], both published in 1923. It was not by chance, either, that the writings in which this affinity was the most intense and profound, and in which both messianism and libertarian utopia were expressed most completely and explosively, dated from the crest of the revolutionary wave: 1917–21. These were the years that saw the publication of: Buber’s ‘Der heilige Weg’ (‘The Holy Way’), the Preface to the re-issue of Landauer’s Aufruf zum Sozialismus [Summons to Socialism], Benjamin’s ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ (‘Critique of Violence’), Bloch’s Geist der Utopie [Spirit of Utopia, first edition 1918], Lukács’ ‘Bolshevism as a Moral Problem’, and Toller’s two great plays, Die Wandlung [The Transfiguration] and Masse Mensch (Man and the Masses). This does not mean, of course, that the problematic did not survive after 1923, although it changed in form, character and intensity. It reappeared most notably during certain periods of catastrophe – for example, between 1940 and 1945, when Walter Benjamin wrote the Theses on the Philosophy of History, Martin Buber his Pfade in Utopia (Paths in Utopia), and Ernst Bloch the main portion of Das Prinzip Hoffnung [The Principle of Hope].
What remains to be explained is why this phenomenon – the emergence of a ‘metaphysical-anarchist’ or revolutionary-messianic movement inspired by romanticism – should have been confined almost exclusively to Central Europe.
The figure of the Jewish revolutionary had been virtually non-existent in the political and cultural arena of Western Europe. In England and the United States towards the end of the nineteenth century, Jews originating from Eastern Europe came to form a super-exploited proletariat, a breeding ground for anarchist and socialist militants. But Jews with their origins in the West were completely assimilated, both nationally and culturally, and quite conformist in social and political terms. Intellectuals stemming from this milieu identified in their whole being with the prevailing bourgeois liberalism. The roots of this were to be found in the bourgeois revolutions of sixteenth-century Holland, seventeenth-century England and post-1789 France, which had emancipated the Jews and made possible their economic, social and political integration into capitalist society. If the revolutionary Jew appeared in Central and Eastern Europe, this was principally due to the delay or failure of bourgeois revolutions – and the lagging development of capitalism – in that part of the continent, which restricted the emancipation/assimilation of Jews and maintained their pariah condition.
Romantic/revolutionary messianism never attracted the West European and American Jewish intelligentsia: on the contrary, the most important liberal rationalist polemics against utopias of religious inspiration were written by Jewish intellectuals of Anglo-Saxon cultural origins – for example, the well-known book by Norman Cohn (born in London in 1915), The Pursuit of the Millennium. Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1957); or that of Jacob Talmon (former Foreign Office official), Political Messianism. The Romantic Phase (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960).
The Dreyfus Affair was (prior to the Second World War) the only rift in the Western system of assimilation/integration, but even this traumatic event could not shake the patriotic, bourgeois-republican faith of French Jews. However, it did make possible the emergence of an exceptional messianic/libertarian revolutionary figure: Bernard Lazare. He may be the only Western Jewish thinker who can be compared to Buber or Landauer. But he was doomed to remain isolated, rejected and misunderstood by the great majority of the French Jewish community.26
The situation was completely different in Eastern Europe, notably in the Russian Empire, which, prior to 1918, included Poland and the Baltic countries. Here the Jews’ participation in revolutionary movements was far greater than in Central Europe, and unlike in Germany, not limited to intellectuals: an entire Jewish proletariat organized itself within the Bund or joined the Bolshevik or Menshevik faction of the RSDLP (Russian Social/Democratic Labour Party). This can easily be explained by the qualitatively higher degree of oppression, the different social composition of the Jewish population (with its working-class and/or impoverished mass) and the strength and violence of anti-Semitism; in short, by the much more directly pariah condition of the Jews living in the tsarist Empire. As a result, a huge and varied mass of Jewish intellectuals was present in all East European revolutionary movements, be they socialist, Marxist or anarchist, including in leadership positions as organizers, ideologists and theoreticians. As Leopold
