The youth was completely moulded by the traditional heritage … but it no longer wanted to be subjected to its law, and did not accept its restrictions. Therefore, the youth violently rejected this heritage and built its own culture against it: it was its inner enemy.33
This was the context in which a virulent ‘anti-clericalism’ developed among progressive Jewish intellectuals, leaving countless evidence in the shape of polemical articles, autobiographical works and imaginative literature.
Directly confronted with the most conservative and authoritarian traditionalism, the young Jewish rebel from Russia (or Poland) could not ‘romanticize’ it in the way his German or Austrian counterpart could. There was not the distance that favours what Benjamin called an auratic perception of religion.
Isaac Deutscher was educated in a heder (religious school for children) in the Polish Shtetl Kranow. But although his family intended him to become a rabbi in the Hasidic sect of the Zaddik of Gere, he broke with religion as a teenager and became a leader of Polish Communism (and later the biographer of Leon Trotsky). Contrasting his attitude to religion with that of the German Jews, he described it as follows:
We knew the Talmud, we had been steeped in Hasidism. All its idealizations were for us nothing but dust thrown into our eyes. We had grown up in that Jewish past. We had the eleventh, and thirteenth and sixteenth centuries of Jewish history living next door to us and under our very roof; and we wanted to escape it to live in the twentieth century. Through all the thick gilt and varnish of romanticists like Martin Buber, we could see, and smell, the obscurantism of our archaic religion and a way of life unchanged since the middle ages. To someone of my background the fashionable longing of the Western Jew for a return to the sixteenth century, a return which is supposed to help him in recovering, or re-discovering, his Jewish cultural identity, seems unreal and Kafkaesque.34
This striking passage reveals in the clearest and most concise way what motivated the Eastern European revolutionary intelligentsia; it shows why a spiritualist movement, like the one spreading throughout Mitteleuropa, could not emerge from within its ranks.
It is a striking fact that the only Jewish socialist intellectual within the Russian Empire who was attracted by the powerful movement of religious/revolutionary rebirth that developed in Petrograd at the turn of the century around D. S. Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius, Nikolai Berdyaev and S. N. Bulgakov (not to mention the ‘God-builders’ within the Bolshevik Party, Bogdanov and Lunacharsky) was someone who converted to orthodox Christianity: Nikolai Maksimovich Minsky (N.M. Vilenkin). A member of the Philosophical-Religious Association of Petrograd and of Gorky’s socialist journal Novaya Zhizn [New Life], Minsky was inspired by Russian-Orthodox spirituality and seemed not to have any ties to Judaism.35
Were there no revolutionary Jews in Eastern Europe who were an exception to the rule – such as Bernard Lazare in Western Europe? Probably yes, but in all my research to date, I have yet to find one.36
Religious Jews Tending to Anarchism:Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig,Gershom Scholem, Leo Löwenthal
Within the turn-of-the-century generation of Jewish rebel romantics, the trend of religious semi-anarchism was one whose works were dominated by the Jewish dimension, both national-cultural and religious. This current had no common attitude to Zionism: Rosenzweig never accepted it, Löwenthal gave it up quite soon, and Buber and Scholem joined the movement but found themselves marginalized because of their hostility to the principle of the State. Their religious feeling ran deep and was charged with messianism, but it had little in common with orthodox ritual and traditional rules. Their aim of Jewish national revival did not lead them into political nationalism, and their conception of Judaism was still marked by German culture. In varying degrees, they all supported libertarian socialism as their utopian goal – a goal close to anarchism which they linked (directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly) with their messianic religious faith. With the exception of Leo Löwenthal, they criticized Marxism as being too centralist or too closely identified with industrial civilization. They were sympathetic to the revolutionary movements that shook Europe between 1917 and 1923, but they did not take an active part in them. Their primary centre of cultural influence was the magazine Der Jude, which Martin Buber edited between 1916 and 1924.
In addition to these four authors, many other intellectuals can be considered as belonging to this current: Hans Kohn, Rudolf Kayser, Erich Unger, to name but a few. The young Erich Fromm of the years 1921–26 could also be added, but his published work after 1927 falls into the opposite pole of religious atheism and libertarian Marxism. This example demonstrates that within the messianic/revolutionary domain it was quite possible to move from one category to another: there were frontiers, but they were far from being hermetically sealed.
Martin Buber was probably the most important and representative author of religious socialism within German-Jewish culture. His rediscovery of the Hasidic legends (1906–8), and his famous lectures on Judaism at the Bar-Kochba Club of Prague (1909–11), brought about a profound renewal of modern Jewish spirituality. His political and religious ideas left their mark on an entire generation of Jewish intellectuals, from Prague to Vienna and from Budapest to Berlin. Buber’s image of Judaism was as different from assimilationist liberalism (and the Wissenschaft des Judentums) as it was from rabbinical orthodoxy: his was a romantic and mystical religiosity, permeated with social critique and a longing for community. Buber was a close friend of both Franz Rosenzweig (with whom he collaborated on a German translation of the Bible) and of the libertarian philosopher Gustav Landauer (who made him the executor of his will); Buber also played a role in the spiritual development of Gershom Scholem and of many other young Zionists associated with the Hapoel Hatzair movement. Few indeed were the German-speaking Jewish thinkers of that era who were not touched, at some point in their life, by Buber’s writings.
Raised by a grandfather who spoke Hebrew and was a follower of the Haskala, Buber moved away from the Jewish religion in his youth. As a student in Vienna, Leipzig and Berlin (where he studied under Simmel and Dilthey), he was attracted by neo-romantic movements and by the rebirth of religious spirituality. His first works were not on Jewish themes; they focused instead on Viennese writers (Peter Altenberg, Hugo von Hoffmanstahl); on Jakob Böhme (Wiener Rundschau, vol. v, no. 12, 1901); on ‘Kultur und Zivilisation’ (Kunstwart, vol. XIV, 1901). Buber soon became involved in the Zionist movement, but his ideas rapidly came into conflict with Theodor Herzl’s State-centred diplomacy and, around 1902, he withdrew from political activity and devoted himself to the study of religion. Typically for this entire generation, Buber was at first interested in Christian mysticism: his doctoral thesis, which he presented in 1904, was written on ‘The History of the Problem of Individuation: Nicholas of Cusa and Jakob Böhme’. It was not until later that Buber took an interest in Jewish mysticism: he wrote his first book on Hasidism (Die Geschichte des Rabbi Nachmann) in 1906.
Buber’s writings (until 1920 in particular) were permeated with references to German Romantic thought (Görres, Novalis, Hölderlin, Franz von Baader, among others). But he established particularly close ties to neo-romantic philosophy (Nietzsche) and sociology; not only because in his Die Gesellschaft collection he published the writings of Tönnies, Simmel and Sombart (from 1906 to 1912), but also because Buber’s concept of the interhuman (Zwischenmenschliche) was directly influenced by their concerns, most notably by their longing for a Gemeinschaft.
In 1900, Martin Buber joined Die neue Gemeinschaft [The New Community], a neo-romantic circle in Berlin where he met Gustav Landauer. He gave a lecture before the circle entitled ‘Alte und neue Gemeinschaft’ [The New and the Old Community], which, though
