18012543-GERSHOM-SCHOLEM-JEWS-AND-GERMANS-

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JEWS AND GERMANSGERSHOM SCHOLEM

O SPEAK OF Jews and Germans andT their relations during the last twocenturies is, in the year 1966, a melancholy enter-prise. So great, even now, is the burden of emo-tions, that a dispassionate consideration or analysisof the matter seems almost impossible; we have allbeen molded too strongly by the experience ofour generation to permit any such expectations ofdetachment. Today there are many Jews who re-gard the German people as a "hopeless case," orat best as a people with whom, after what hashappened, they want nothing to do, for good orfor ill. I do not count myself among them, for Ido not believe that there ought to be such a thingas a permanent state of war among peoples. I alsodeem it right-what is more, I deem it important-that Jews, precisely as Jews, speak to Germans infull consciousness of what has happened and ofwhat separates them. Upon many of us the Ger-man language, our mother-tongue, has bestowedthe gift of unforgettable experiences; it definedand gave expression to the landscape of our youth.Now there is a kind of appeal from the Germanside-both from the reaches of history and from ayounger generation that is coming to the fore-and precisely because this appeal is so uncertainand irresolute, indeed embarrassed, something in-heres in it which many of us do not wish to shun.To be sure, the difficulties of generalizing, aswhen we say "the Germans" and "the Jews," in-timidate the observer. In times of conflict, how-ever, such all-embracing terms prove easy to ma-nipulate; and the fact that these general categoriesare vulnerable to questioning has never prevent-ed people from using them vociferously. Never-theless, many distinctions should be made here.For not all "Germans" are Germans and not all"Jews" are Jews-with, of course, one appallingexception: when power was in the hands of thoseGermans who really meant all Jews when they re-ferred to the Jews, they used that power to thebest of their ability to murder all Jews. Sincethen, those who survived this murder, or were notexposed to it because of the accidents of history,find it somewhat difficult themselves to make theproper distinctions. The dangerous pitfalls thataccompany any generalization are well-known:GERSHOM SCHOLEM, who is generally considered to be theforemost Jewish scholar living today, is the author, amongother works, of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and Onthe Kabbalah and its Symbolism. Mr. Scholem, a frequentcontributor, is professor of Jewish Mysticism at the HebrewUniversity. The present essay, translated from the Germanby Werner J. Dannhauser, wa s adapted from an addressbefore the plenary session of the World Jewish Congress,held in Brussels this past summer.

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arbitrariness, self-contradiction, and incoherence.The relationships I am discussing are too variousand unique to be covered by any blanket assertionthat could not be countered by a different and al-most equally defensible one. And yet, fully awareas I am of these difficulties, I wish to make clearwhat it is that moves me about this theme-cer-tainly one of the themes which have most agitatedthe Jewish world in the past hundred-and-fiftyyears.In 1948, Alfred Doeblin, a Jewish writer whohad converted to Catholicism in his old age, wroteto another Jew that he should take care, when ad-dressing a German audience, to avoid using theword "Jew," for in Germany it was still a term ofabuse; only anti-Semites would be pleased by itsuse. According to Doeblin, anti-Semitism wa sdeep-seated among the Germans and more mali-cious-in the year 19481-than prior to 1933. In-deed, I myself can testify that in 1966 many Ger-mans who would like to dissociate themselvesfrom the Nazis (occasionally rather as an after-thought), to a certain extent still confirm thevalidity of Doeblin's remarks by their evidentaversion to calling any Jew a Jew unless he abso-lutely insists upon it. After having been murderedas Jews, the Jews have no w been nominated to thestatus of Germans, in a kind of posthumous tri-umph; to emphasize their Jewishness would there-fore be a concession to anti-Semitism. To such aperverse point has the effort to avoid facing therealities of the Jewish-German relationship come-and all in the name of progress. But it is pre-cisely the facing of those realities which I considerto be the task of both Germans and Jews, whichmeans that when we speak of the fate of Jewsamong Germans, we cannot speak emphaticallyenough of Jews qua Jews. The atmosphere be-tween Jews and Germans can be cleansed only ifwe seek to get to the bottom of their relationship,and only if we employ the unrestrained criticismthat the case demands. And that is hard: for theGermans, because the mass murder of the Jewshas become the greatest nightmare of their moralexistence as a people; for the Jews, because suchclarification demands a critical distance fromcrucial phenomena of their own history. Love, in-sofar as it once existed, has been drowned inblood; its place must now be taken by historicalknowledge and conceptual clarity-the precondi-tions for a discussion which might perhaps bearfruit in the future. If it is to be serious and un-demagogic, such a discussion must be approachedon a level beyond that of the political and eco-nomic factors and interests that have been, or are,under negotiation between the State of Israel and


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32 COMMENTARY/NOVEMBER 1966the German Federal Republic. I am lacking inany competence in this area and at no time will Irefer to it. I am not even certain that it can helpus at all in posing the right questions or in at-tempting to answer them.

IINTIL THE latter half of the 18th cen-U tury, and to some extent even be-

yond that time, the Jews in Germany led essen-tially the same existence as did Jews everywhere.They were clearly recognizable as a nation; theypossessed an unmistakable identity, a sharply de -fined awareness of themselves, and a millennialhistory of their own. However they themselves orthe peoples around them may have assessed thathistory, the Jews participated in a religious orderthat forced its way with extreme intensity throughtheir very pores and into their life and culture.To the degree that the influence of the Germanenvironment-and such influence was never en-tirely absent-penetrated into the Judengasse, itdid so not because the Jews deliberately turned toit and embraced it, but in large part through abarely conscious process of osmosis. To be sure,German cultural values were frequently enoughtransformed into Jewish values (and, linguisti-cally, into Yiddish). Moreover, tw o groups at theextreme poles of Jewish society maintained con-tact (albeit a special and perilous one, at themercy of the slightest change in political or socialconditions) with the Germans: the economicallystrongest element-as it was represented in thephenomenon of the Hofjudentum-Jewish man-agement of court finances-and the group at thebottom of the social ladder which touched on theunderworld. Nevertheless, the conscious relationsbetween the tw o societies as a whole remained sodelicate during the two centuries preceding theperiod of emancipation that nothing would bemore foolish than to speak of an intimate attach-ment between German Jews and Germany in thatage. Not a single pre-condition existed for suchan attachment, either among the Jews, whose re-ligious culture wa s for the most part self-containedand alien to the German world, or among the Ger-mans. Both parties knew that the Jews were inexile, and whatever their respective views of themeaning of that exile, there wa s no doubt as to itsenduring significance for the social condition ofthe Jews.

On the other hand, while the overwhelmingmajority of Jews lived within the mold of tradi-tion, a mold cast by their material and spiritualhistory during the long ages of exile, there is nomistaking the fact that in the latter half of the18th century, a grave weakness at the core of theirJewishness became visible. It wa s as if they had ar-rived at the nadir of one phase of their historicalexistence and were no longer certain where theroad would lead. This weakness had already be-

come evident at the time Moses Mendelssohn setout upon his career as a kind of conservative re-former among German Jewry. With him, andabove all with the school which he inspired, therebegan among Jews a conscious process of turningtoward the Germans, a process subsequentlygraced and furthered by mighty historical forces.There began a propaganda campaign for theJews' resolute absorption by German culture, andshortly thereafter, for their absorption by theGerman people itself. There also began the strug-gle of the Jews for civil rights, a struggle whichextended over three or four generations, andwhich was finally won because-let us not deceiveourselves about it-it wa s conducted on their be-half by a decisive and victorious stratum amongthe non-Jews.This struggle for civil rights, which wa s fur-thered no less by the French Revolution than bythe German Enlightenment, initiated a momen-tous change in German Jewry. At first the changewas hesitant and uncertain, just as the Jewsundergoing it often displayed uncertainty and em-barrassment. They still had a strong sense of theirpeoplehood as Jews, though frequently not of themeaning of this peoplehood, which had been orwas in the process of becoming lost to them. But,to put the case explicitly, they also began castingthose infinitely yearning and furtive glances atthe realm of German history-as a possible re-placement for the Jewish realm-which became socharacteristic of them in their relation to theGermans for the next hundred years and more.Those elements of German Jewry which joined inthis process only with the greatest reservations-especially the once preponderant and still verystrong circles of the traditionally pious-weremarked off from their more enthusiastic fellowsby nothing more distinct than an oppressed si-lence, broken only rarely among them by directvoices of warning; it is as if they were recoilingfrom their own suffering. In any event, up toabout 1820, when the Jews of Germany are men-tioned, it is almost exclusively as the members ofthe Jewish nation in Germany. In the next twogenerations, however, linguistic usage alters com-pletely; terms such as "Mosaic persuasion," andsimilar phrases favored by Jews and Germansalike, now begin their career.The furtive glances cast by the Jews toward theGermans were from the very outset attended byconsiderable dislocations, which at a later stage ofthe process were to lead to bitter problems. As theprice of Jewish emancipation, the Germansdemanded a disavowal of Jewish nationality-aprice the leading writers and spokesmen of theJewish avant-garde were only too happy to pay.For what had begun as furtive glances soon turnedinto a passionate involvement with the realm ofGerman history; and the objects of enlightenedtoleration not infrequently became ardent proph-ets, prepared to speak in the name of the Germans


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themselves. The attentive reader of German reac-tions to this process and its acrobatics soon per-ceives a recurrent note of astonishment, and anirony that is partly amiable, partly malicious.With the renunciation of a crucial part of Jewishexistence in Germany, the ground wa s preparedfor what appears to many of us to have been acompletely false start in the history of modern re-lations between Jews and Germans-even though,given the conditions of 1800, it possessed a certainimmanent logic of its own.'WHEN THE Western nations emancipated the

people of Israel, they did not, to quoteMartin Buber, "accept it as Israel, but rather as amultitude of individuals." Among non-Jews, themost stalwart fighters for the cause of the Jewswere precisely those who most consciously and ar-ticulately counted on the disappearance of theJews qua Jews-who, indeed, like Wilhelm vonHumboldt, considered the disappearance of theJews as an ethnic group a condition for taking uptheir cause. The liberals hoped for a decisivelyprogressive Jewish self-dissolution. The conserva-tives, however, with their greater sense of history,had reservations about this new phenomenon.They began to chalk up against the Jews an all-too-great facility for renouncing their ethnic con-sciousness.- Thus a sinister and dangerous dialecticarose. The self-surrender of the Jews, althoughwelcomed and indeed demanded, was also oftenseen as evidence of their lack of moral substanceand thereby contributed to the disdain in whichthey were held by so many Germans. For whatcould a heritage be worth if the elite of its chosenheirs were in such a rush to disavow it?As for the socialists, Karl Marx's grotesque anddisgusting invective in On the Jewish Questionmay be taken as a sign of their frivolity and igno-rance; they were completely at a loss before theissues involved in this new turn of events, andcould do no more than press for the dissolutionof the Jewish people and its historical conscious-ness, a dissolution to be completed by the adventand victory of the Revolution. They could see nosense whatsoever in considering the Jews an activeparticipant in any meaningful encounter.Such, then, wa s the dangerous dialectic of thewhole process. The Jews struggled for emancipa-tion-and this is the tragedy that moves us somuch today-not for the sake of their rights as apeople, but for the sake of assimilating themselvesto the peoples among whom they lived. By theirreadiness to give up their peoplehood, by their actof disavowal, they did not put an end to theirmisery; they merely opened up a new source ofagony. Assimilation did not dispose of the Jewishquestion in Germany; rather it shifted the locus ofthe question and rendered it all the more acute,for as the area of contact between the tw o groupswidened, the possibilities of friction widened aswell. The "adventure" of assimilation, into which

the Jews threw themselves so passionately (it iseasy to see why) necessarily increased the dangerswhich grew out of heightened tension. Added tothis was the fact that there wa s something "dis-ordered"-and in a double sense-about the Jewswho were exposed to this new encounter with theGermans: they were "disordered" by the personaland social consequences of the undignified condi-tions under which they were forced to live; andthey were "disordered" by the deep insecurity thatbegan to hound them the moment they left theghetto in order, as the formula had it, "to becomeGermans." This double disorder of the GermanJews was one of the factors which retarded, dis-turbed, and eventually brought to a gruesome endthe process-or trial-that now began in such ear-nest. The refusal of so many German Jews to rec-ognize the operation of such factors and the dia-lectic to which they bear witness, is among thesaddest discoveries made by today's reader of thediscussions of those times. The emotional confu-sion of the German Jews between 1820 and 1920is of considerable importance if one wishes tounderstand them as a group, a group character-ized by that "German-Jewishness" (Deutschju-dentum) many of us encountered in our ownyouth and which stimulated us to resistance.

At the same time, however, and in the verymidst of this insecurity, something else unexpect-edly happened: the long-buried creativity of theJews was liberated. It is true that by entering soeagerly into a new world, the Jews relinquishedthe security their ancient tradition had once be-stowed upon them, and would frequently contin-ue to bestow in a frequently impressive way uponthose who held fast to it. But a loss of securitycan result in an outburst of productive energies.And so it was with many Jews who threw them-selves into the exciting "adventure" of assimila-tion: they found that it awakened qualities inthem that under the old order had long been dor-mant or forgotten. Here we have the positive as-pects of the process we have been examining-theaspects that were to become so meaningful to theJews, even those living far beyond the borders ofGermany; it is fitting that we examine and clarifythem at this point.THE Jewish passion for things German is connect-ed with the specific historical hour in which it wasborn. At the moment in time when Jews turnedfrom their medieval state toward the new era ofenlightenment and revolution, the overwhelmingmajority of them-80 per cent-lived in Germany,Austria-Hungary, and Eastern Europe. Due toprevailing geographic, political, and linguisticconditions, therefore, it wa s German culture thatmost Jews first encountered on their road to theWest. Moreover-and this is decisive-the encount-er occurred precisely at the moment when thatculture had reached one of its most fruitful turn-ing-points. It was the zenith of Germany's bour-


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34 COMMENTARY /NOVEMBER 1966

geois era, an era which produced an image ofthings German that, up to 1940, and among verybroad classes of people, was to remain unshaken,even by many most bitter experiences. Thus anewly-awakened Jewish creativity, which was toassume such impressive forms after 1780, im-pinged upon a great period of German creativity.One can say that it was a happy hour, and indeed,it has no parallel in the history of Jewish encoun-ters with other European peoples. The net resultwas the high luster that fell on all things German.Even today, after so much blood and so manytears, we cannot say that it was only a deceptiveluster. It was also more, both in fact and inpotentia.To the Jews, Germany was defined and symbol-ized by the names of Lessing and Schiller-espe-cially Schiller, whose significance for the formingof Jewish attitudes toward Germany was almostincalculable, and seldom appreciated by the Ger-mans themselves. For to generations of Jews with-in Germany, and almost to a greater extent toJews outside Germany, Schiller, spokesman forpure humanity, lofty poet of the highest ideals ofmankind, represented everything they thought of,or wished to think of, as being German-evenwhen, in the Germany of the last third of the 19thcentury, his language had already begun to soundhollow. To Schiller, who never addressed them di-rectly, the Jews did indeed respond, and for manyJews, their encounter with him was more realthan their encounter with actual Germans. Ger-man romanticism meant something to many Jews,but Schiller meant something to all of them. Hewas a factor in the Jewish belief in mankind. Heprovided the most visible, most impressive, andmost resounding occasion for the idealistic self-deception engendered by the relations of theJews to the Germans. For the new Jew who hadlost his self-confidence, Schiller's program seemedto promise everything he so fervently sought; theJew heard no false tones in it, fo r this was musicwhich spoke to his depths. The collapse of thisdialogue perhaps contains one of the secrets ofthe general collapse of relations between Jews andGermans. After all, Schiller, to whom their loveclung o passionately, was not just anybody; hewas the national poet of Germany, regarded assuch by the Germans themselves from 1800 to1900.

In this case, then, the Jews did not, as has hap-pened often enough, "have the wrong address." Inthis case a bridge had really been built betweenthem and the Germans, built out of the sameboundless passion that induced a number of Rus-sian Jews, who were, by contrast, seeking the roadto humanity among the Jewish people itself, lit-erally to adopt the name of Schiller as their own;one of the noblest figures of the Zionist movement,Salomo Schiller, is a notable example of this prac-tice. Unfortunately, however, the task of buildingbridges wa s pursued by the Jews alone. To Ger-

mans of a later day, Jewish enthusiasm for Schillerseemed merely comic or touching. Only rarelywa s there a German who was stirred by the ideathat here, for once, there could have been muchcommon ground.

III

THE FIRST HALF of the 19th century wasa period in which Jews and Germansdrew remarkably close. During this time an ex-traordinary amount of help came from the Ger-man side, with many individual Jews receivingcooperation in their stormy struggle for culture.There was centainly no lack of good-will then;reading the biographies of the Jewish elite of theperiod, one again and again finds evidence of theunderstanding they encountered, even in decided-ly Christian circles like the Moravians. But inkeeping with the inner dynamics of the process wehave been examining, things did not remain at thelevel of a mere struggle for culture. The Jewswere at a point of radical transition from the tra-ditional wa y of life, which still held sway among amajority of them, to Germanism. In the effectingof this transition, according to one contemporarysource, "the German national education of theJews and their participation in the general inter-ests of human beings and citizens appears as themost essential task, to which everyone who ex-pects anything of himself must be dedicated."The formulation is by Moritz Lazarus, a most pris-tine representative of the very tendency he advo-cated, who himself completed the transition frompure talmudic Judaism to the new German-Jewishwa y of life in a mere five yearsl The unendingJewish demand for a home wa s soon transformedinto the ecstatic illusion of being at home. It iswell-known, and easy to understand, that thespeed of this transformation, which even todayamazes the observer, the haste of this breakup ofthe Jews, wa s not paralleled by an equally quickreciprocal reaction on the part of the Germans.For the Germans had not known they were deal-ing with such deep processes of decay in the Jew-ish tradition and in Jewish self-consciousness, andthey recoiled from the whole procedure. Whilethey would have approved of the eventual resultof the process-which accorded at least with theprevailing liberal ideology and to a considerableextent with the prevailing conservative one-theywere altogether unprepared for this tempo, whichstruck them as overheated and whose aggressive-ness set them on the defensive. Sooner or later thisdefensiveness was to combine with those currentsof opinion which from the very beginning had re -acted to the whole process with antipathy andwhich, since the post-Mendelssohn generation,had never lacked for eloquent spokesmen.It made good sense to speak of a "host people,"whose guests the Jews were. Even in the best ofcircumstances, it wa s a matter of a guest being ac-


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cepted into the family, but subject to dismissal ifhe did not live up to the requirements. This be-came especially clear where the liberals were con-cerned. The talk one occasionally hears today ofa fusion which would have made excellent prog-ress had not the advent of Nazism come betweenthe great majority of Jews and the "citizens of adifferent faith" (the phrase was used in print bya Jew in the Germany of 19651)-such talk is noth-ing but retroactive wish-fulfillment. Withoutdoubt, the complete submission to the Germanpeople of so many individuals who in their auto-biographies (which are available in abundance)characterized themselves as being "of Jewish de-scent"-because they no longer had any otherinner ties to the Jewish tradition, let alone to theJewish people-constitutes one of the most shock-ing phenomena of this whole process of alienation.Infinitely long is the list of Jewish losses to theGermans, a list of great and frequently astonish-ing Jewish talents and accomplishments that wereoffered up to the Germans. Who can read withoutemotion the history of those who to the point ofsuicide maintained the claim that they were bet-ter Germans than those who were driving them totheir deaths? Today, when it is all over, it is nowonder that there are many who wish to recog-nize this claim as just. These people made theirchoice and we should not contest the Germans'right to them. And yet it makes us uneasy, foreven in their complete alienation from everything"Jewish," something is evident in many of them,from Karl Marx and Lasalle to Karl Kraus, GustavMahler, and Georg Simmel, that was felt to besubstantially Jewish by Jews as well as by Ger-mans-by everyone, indeed, except themselves.No one has more profoundly characterized thisbreaking away of the Jews from themselves thanCharles Peguy, who had an insight into the Jewishcondition rarely attained, let alone surpassed,by non-Jews. To him we ow e the sentence: "Etreailleurs, le grand vice de cette race, la grandevertue secrete, la grande vocation de ce peuple."*This "being elsewhere" combined with the des-perate wish to "be at home" in a manner at onceintense, fruitful, and destructive. It is the clue tothe relationship of the Jews to the Germans. It iswhat makes their symbolic position so alluringand so gripping to today's observer, and it is alsowhat at the time caused them to appear disgust-ing, to be working under false pretenses, and tobe deliberately provocative of opposition. Nobenefit redounded to the Jews of Germany fromwhat today, under very different circumstances,invests them with positive significance for an im-portant part of the world and brings them specialconsideration: I am thinking of the widespreadcurrent appreciation of Jews as classic representa-tives of the phenomenon of man's alienation fromsociety. The German Jew was held to blame fo r

"Being elsewhere, the great vice of this race, the greatsecret virtue, the great vocation of this people"-ED.

his ow n alienation from the Jewish ground thathad nourished him, from his own history and tra-dition, and wa s blamed even more for his aliena-tion from the bourgeois society which was then inthe process of consolidating itself. The fact thathe wa s not really at home, however much and em -phatically he might proclaim himself to be-the"homelessness" which today is sometimes account-ed to his glory, in that it is taken as an image ofthe condition humaine-constituted, at a timewhen alienation was still a term of abuse, a power-ful accusation. And it is in keeping with so distort-ed a state of affairs that the great majority of Jews,and especially those who had the highest degreeof awareness, concurred in this judgment of theirsituation; this is why, in the very teeth of theskepticism which wa s a part of their German en-vironment, they aspired to or claimed a deep at-tachment to things German, and a sense of beingat home.

HE JEw's ENTRY into German society, how-T ever, was a many-sided process. It is, for in-stance, an important fact that during the genera-tions of entry, the Jews to a great extent lost theirown elite through baptism and mixed marriages.Yet this fact also points to marked variations inthe process, because not all Jews were by anymeans prepared to go so far. It is true that verybroad segments of German Jewry were ready toliquidate their peoplehood, but they also wished-in differing degrees, to be sure-to preserve theirJewishness as a kind of heritage, as a creed, as anelement unknowable and indefinable, yet clearlypresent in their consciousness. Although this isnow often forgotten, they were not ready for thattotal assimilation which the majority of their elitewas seeking. Their feelings may have been un-certain and confused, but the flight of their ownavant-garde wa s more than they were willing toaccept.These continuous bloodlettings, through whichthe Jews lost their most advanced elements to theGermans, constitute a crucial-and, from a Jewishperspective, most melancholy-aspect of the so-called German-Jewish symbiosis, which is nowbeing discussed with such pleasure and profusecarelessness. It wa s the petite bourgeoisie, themost ordinary citizens, who made up the mainbody of the German-Jewish community during the19th century and from whom a wholly new classof leaders had to be brought forth in every gener-ation. Rarely does one find any descendantsamong 20th-century Jews of those families which,after 1800, led the "breakup" in favor of thingsGerman. On the other hand, the lower classeswere almost entirely retained within the bounda-ries of Judaism, albeit a Judaism now watered-down-or rather dried-up and emptied: a Judaismcomposed of a curious admixture of the "religion

of reason" with strong, frequently disavowed,strains of feeling. The attitude of these Jews to-


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36 COMMENTARY /NOVEMBER 1966

ward the deserters fluctuated greatly, as is indi-cated by their response to the singular phenome-non of Heinrich Heine: it rariged from sensitiverejection to almost equable indifference. Heine, tobe sure, was a borderline case. He could say ofhimself that he had never returned to Judaism be-cause he had never left it.

In all this, we must not fail to consider theinner tensions of Jewish society, which exercisedno little influence on the relationship of Jews tothe German environment. Germany, after all, wasthe scene of especially bitter arguments betweenthe pious of the old school-the Landjuden andtheir leaders-on the one hand, and the "neolo-gians" or Reformers on the other, with the latterquickly gaining preponderance, if not numerically,then socially and politically. The term "assimila-tion" was first used by its defenders in the positivesense of an ideal; later, when the Zionists threwthe word back at them in derision and as a formof abuse, they were doubly indignant at beingcalled "assimilationists." The tendency toward as-similation, which manifested itself in many forms,was certainly significant. Yet one cannot unequiv-ocally say just how far the advocates of assimila-tion were prepared to go at the time, and not allinstances of assimilation can be judged alike. Inany case, however, there existed on the Jewish sidea strongly critical stance toward Jews and tradi-tional Judaism, and it is well-known how often inindividual cases this stance was heightened tothose extreme forms we have come to recognize asJewish anti-Semitism. It is, after all, to a GermanJew who had left Judaism-though, as he said, he"of course knew that this was impossible"-that weow e what a critic once called "the most naked ex-posures" of the Berlin Jewish bourgeoisie whichexist anywhere and which will endure as a sinisterdocument of the German-Jewish reality; I am re-ferring to the monologues of Herr Wendriner,written by Kurt Tucholsky. The anti-Semites tookpains to make the Jews look as bad as possible,but their writings are curiously overstrained andhollow. The hatred is there, but there is noknowledge of the subject and no feeling for atmos-phere. Small wonder, then, that it remained forone of the most gifted, most convinced, and mostoffensive Jewish anti-Semites to accomplish on adefinitive level what the anti-Semites themselveswere unable to bring about.We often find representatives of extreme possi-bilities within the same family-for example, thebrothers Jacob and Michael Bernays (whose niecebecame the wife of Sigmund Freud). Jacob, aclassical philologist of the highest rank, remainedloyal to the strictest form of Jewish Orthodoxy,even to the point of neurosis; Michael left Juda-ism to venture on an even more illustrious careeras a scholar in the field of Germanic studies andas a foremost critical interpreter of Goethe. Aftertheir split, the tw o brothers never spoke to eachother again. A similar divergence occurred be-

tween tw o cousins of the Borchardt family. One ofthem, the writer Georg Hermann, depicted the19th-century Berlin Jewish bourgeoisie in a man-ner never surpassed-critically, ironically, but atthe same time lovingly. The other cousin, the ex-orbitantly gifted Rudolf Borchardt, convinced hehad annihilated everything Jewish within himself,became the most eloquent spokesman fo r a cultur-ally conservative German traditionalism. He him-self was the only person to read his work who wasnot alarmed by the paradox.

HE MAJORITY of German Jews, to repeat, wasnot prepared to "go all the way," but searchedfor a middle course. Only rarely, however, did theJews benefit from their gifted progeny. The ex-

ceptions include such significant yet problematicfigures as Leopold Zunz, the founder of "the sci-ence of Judaism" (Wissenschaft vom Judentum),Ludwig Steinheim and Hermann Cohen, the twomost distinguished German-Jewish religious think-ers, and Abraham Geiger and Samson RaphaelHirsch, the great polar opposites of the Germanrabbinate. Most of the ablest Jewish minds, how-ever, enhanced German society with an astonish-ingly profuse outpouring in the fields of econom-ics, science, literature, and art. In a famous essay,the great American sociologist, Thorstein Veblen,wrote of the intellectual "pre-eminence" of theJews; it wa s this pre-eminence that wa s to spelltheir doom in Germany. In their economic role,the Jews had served as a progressive force in thedevelopment of 19th-century Germany, but longafter there had ceased to be a need for that, theycontinued to exercise-especially in the 20th cen-tury-a cultural function which from the very be-ginning had awakened unrest and resistance, andwhich never did them any good. That the Ger-mans did in fact need the Jews in their spiritualworld is now, when they are no longer present,noticed by many, and there is mourning over theloss. But when the Jews were there, they were asource of irritation (whether they wanted to be ornot).By the middle of the 19th century, the great ma-jority of Germans had at last become reconciledto the political emancipation of the Jews, butthere wa s no corresponding readiness to acceptthe unrestrained movement of the Jews into theranks of the culturally active. The Jews, of course,with their long intellectual tradition, consideredthemselves made-to-order for such an activerole among the German elite. But this is preciselywhat stimulated a resistance that was to becomeincreasingly vigorous and virulent, and wa s finallyto prevent the process of their acceptance fromhaving any chance of fulfillment. By and large,then, the love affair of the Jews and the Germansremained one-sided and unreciprocated; at best itawakened something like compassion (as it didwith Theodore Fontane, to name only one fa-mous, but hardly unambiguous, example) or grat-


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itude. But if the Jews did on occasion meet withgratitude, they almost never found the love theywere seeking.There were misunderstood geniuses among theJews, prophets without honor, men of mind whostood up for justice, and who also stood up-to anastonishing degree-for the great spirits amongthe Germans themselves. (Thus, almost all themost important critical interpretations of Goethewere written by Jewsl) But among the Germans,there wa s never anyone who stood up for the mis-understood geniuses who were Jews. Nothing inGerman literature corresponds to those unforget-table pages in which Charles Pguy, the FrenchCatholic, portrayed Bernard Lazare as a trueprophet of Israel, and this at a time when theFrench Jews themselves-out of embarrassment ormalice, out of rancor or stupidity-knew no betterthan to treat one of their greatest men with dead-ly silence. Nothing corresponds to this in themuch-discussed German-Jewish dialogue-a dia-logue which in fact never took place. At a timewhen no one cared a whit about them, no Germanstood forth to recognize the genius of Kafka,Simmel, Freud, or Walter Benjamin-to say noth-ing of recognizing them as Jews. The present, be-lated concern with these great figures does noth-ing to change this fact.Only very few Germans-some of their noblestspirits, to be sure-possessed that openness of truehumanity which allowed them to see and acceptthe Jew as a Jew. One of them was Johann PeterHebel, who valued the Jew for what he had togive, rather than for what he had to give up. Butit wa s precisely among liberals that unmistakablereservations about Jews were frequently voiced.When Fritz Reuter, a typical member of the North-German liberal intelligentsia, made a speech in1870 to celebrate the unification of Germany, hecould think of nothing better than to levelcharges against those "miserable Jewish rascalslike Heinrich Heine" who were supposedly lack-ing in patriotism. The feeling was widespread thatthe emancipation of the Jews heralded the ap-pearance of radical and subversive tendencies.And indeed, during a century of prominence injournalism, the Jews did play a highly visible rolein the criticism of German public affairs-a roledeeply grounded in their history as well as in theirsocial position and function. In reaction to thisrole, the phenomenon of anti-Semitism-to whichthe Jews responded with peculiar blindness-began to send forth its malignant tendrils. Anti-Semitism was to assume a sterilizing and destruc-tive significance in the years 1880 to 1930, a timeof increasingly tense relations between the Jewsand the Germans. It is unnecessary to emphasizethe specific social and political conditions underwhich the most radical forms of anti-Semitismeventually came to rule over Germany. But noth-ing is less tenable than the opinion that NationalSocialism came, so to speak, from out of the blue,

or that it wa s exclusively a product of the after-math of World War I. Anti-Semitism could nothave become as virulent as it did, or have re-leased all its murderous consequences, without along pre-history. Not a few of the 19th-centurytracts against the Jews read today like wholly un-disguised documents of 20th-century Nazism, andperhaps none is more sinister than Bruno Bauer'sDas Judentum in der Fremde ["Judaism Abroad"]of 1869. Here one comes upon everything that waslater preached in the Thousand-Year Reich, andin formulations no less radical. And this docu-ment came from the pen of one of the leaders ofthe former Hegelian Left. There was, moreover,no lack of the more "sublime" varieties of anti-Semitism-the kind which, shortly after World WarI, found expression in works like Hans Bliiher'sSecessio Judaica. Such works, fluctuating betweenadmiration and hatred, and embodying a degen-erate metaphysics in the form of genteel anti-Semitism, provided a cue for the more murderousmetaphysics to come. Perhaps nothing depressesus more today than the uncertain wavering ofmany Germans, including some of their finestminds, in the face of this dark swell.C AX BROD has spoken of the ideal of "distantlM love" as that which should have governedrelations between Germans and Jews. The con-cept is a dialectical one: distance is meant to pre-vent an all-too-coarse intimacy, but at the sametime to create a desire to bridge the gap. Thiscould certainly have been a solution for the pe-riod under discussion, if only both parties wouldhave agreed to it. Yet Brod himself admits thatwhere there is love the feeling of distance disap-pears-this wa s true of the Jews-and where thereis distance no love can arise-this was true of themain body of Germans. We may grant that with"distant love" the two partners could have man-aged more kindness, open-mindedness, and mu-tual understanding. But historical subjunctivesare always illegitimate. If it is true, as we now per-ceive, that "distant love" was the right Zionistanswer to the mounting crisis in the relations be-tween Jews and Germans, it is also true that theZionist avant-garde hit upon it too late. Forduring the generations preceding the catastrophe,the German Jews-whose critical sense was as fa-mous among Germans as it was irritating to them-distinguished themselves by an astonishing lackof critical insight into their own situation. An"edifying" and apologetic attitude, a lack of criti-cal candor, taints almost everything they wroteabout the position of the Jews in the Germanworld of ideas, literature, politics, and economics.The readiness of many Jews to invent a theorywhich would justify the sacrifice of their Jewishexistence is a shocking phenomenon, and there arecountless variations on it. But nothing, it seemsto me, surpasses in sheer self-contradiction andcravenness the formulation produced as late as


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38 COMMENTARY /NO VEMBER 1966

1935 by Margarete Susman, in full awareness ofthe fact that the time had come of "the most fear-ful fate ever to strike the Jews." She wrote: "Thevocation of Israel as a people is not self-realiza-tion," as with al l other peoples, "but self-surrenderfor the sake of a higher, transhistorical goal." Inthis case, the delusion goes so far that we areasked to believe-in the name of the prophets,who indeed did not wish Israel to be a peoplelike al l other peoples-that "the original meaningof the Jewish idea is the absorption of this peopleby other peoples." What is so terrible aboutthis statement is not that it has been so dev-astatingly refuted by history, but that it never sig-nified anything except a perversion wherebyChristian ideas-rejected by Jews unto their dyingbreath-now presented themselves as the demand ofthe greatest Jewish minds. Such solutions havebeen offered to Jews again and again, and fromvarious sources. They bespeak a great inner de-moralization, an enthusiasm fo r self-sacrificewhich has necessarily remained wholly withoutmeaning for the Jewish community itself, andwhich no one ever took seriously except the anti-Semites, who indeed understood this desire on thepart of the Jews to be absorbed by the Germansas a destructive and singularly sinister maneuveraimed at undermining the German people. Toquote one of the many metaphysicians of anti-Semitism in the years between 1830 and 1930 wh onever tired of repeating this theme: "The Jewsare the dark power of negation which kills whatit touches. Whoever yields to it, falls into thehands of death."

This, in brief, is an analysis of what from thevery beginning was a "false start" in the relationsbetween Jews and Germans, one which broughtthe elements of crisis inherent in the process itselfto an ever riper development.

IVWERE DO WE stand now, after the un-speakable horror of those twelveyears from 1933 to 1945? Jews and Germans tookvery different roads after the war. The most vital

segment of the Jews attempted to build up its ownsociety in its own land. No one can say whetherthe attempt will succeed, but everyone knows thatthe cause of Israel is a matter of life and death tothe Jews. The dialectic of their undertaking isobvious. They live on a volcano. The great im-petus they received from the experience of theholocaust-their experience of the German murderof the Jews, and of the apathy and hard-hearted-ness of the world-has been followed by a pro-found exhaustion whose signs are unmistakable.And ye t the incentive generated by their originalinsight into their true situation is still operatingeffectively.

The Germans have paid for their catastrophewith the division of their country, but on the

other hand, they have experienced a material up-surge that has placed the past years in shadow.Between these two mountains, produced by a vol-canic eruption, can there no w be a bridge, how-ever shaky?The abyss which events have flung open be-tween us can be neither measured nor fathomed.Unlike many in Israel, I do not believe that theonly possible means of overcoming the distanceis to admit the abyss into our consciousness in allits dimensions and ramifications. There is littlecomfort in such a prognosis; it is mere rhetoric.For in truth there is no possibility of comprehend-ing what ha s happened-incomprehensibility is ofits essence; no possibility of understanding it per-fectly and thus of incorporating it into our con-sciousness. This demand by its very nature cannotbe fulfilled. Whether or not we can somehow meetin this abyss, I do not know. And whether theabyss, flung open by unspeakable, unthinkableevents, can ever be bridged-who would have thepresumption to say?Abysses are flung open by events, bridges arebuilt by good-will and conscious thought. If thebridges are to endure, they must be firmly an -chored on both sides. The people of Israel hassuffered fearfully at the hands of almost all thepeoples of Europe. The bridges on which we meetpeoples other than the Germans are shaky enough,even when they are not burdened with the mem-ory of Auschwitz. But-is this memory not an op-portunity? Is there not a light that burns in thisdarkness, the light of repentance? Fruitful rela-tions between Jews and Germans, relations inwhich a past that is both meaningful and at thesame time so horrible as to cripple communica-tion may be preserved and worked through-suchrelations must be prepared with great care. But itis only through an effort to bring them about thatwe can guarantee that official contacts betweenthe two peoples will not be poisoned by counter-feit formulas and demands. Already the worm ofhypocrisy is gnawing at the delicate roots. Wherelove is no longer possible, a new understandingrequires other ingredients; distance, respect, open-ness and openmindedness, and above all, good-will-on both sides.

A young German recently wrote to me express-ing the hope that Jews, when thinking of Ger-many, might keep in mind the words of Isaiah:"Remember ye not the former things, neither con-sider the things of old." I do not know whetherthe messianic age will bestow forgetfulness uponthe Jews. It is a delicate point of theology. Butfo r us, who must live without illusions in an agewithout a Messiah, such a hope entails the im-possible. However sublime it might be to forget,we cannot. Only by remembering a past that wewill never completely master can we generate newhope in the resumption of communication be-tween Germans and Jews, and in the reconcilia-tion of those who have been separated.

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