A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  Freud indicted the dominant form of Christianity only en passant, as Josephus’s history did the ruthlessness of the presiding emperors. In a modification of Spinozan loftiness, Freudian science dispelled faith without risking specific polemic. The universalization of Charcot’s la chose génitale dissolved the distinction between Jew and Gentile: all human beings were subject to, if not victims of, a common, undiscriminating nature. As Rudyard Kipling put it, and the psychoanalyst’s couch confirmed, the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady were sisters under the skin, and the skirt. Yet the trick could not quite be won: similarity is also a form of difference. Freud’s entourage was too obviously composed of Jews. However scientific its jargon, psychoanalytic practice had a Jewish accent.l Its theory also manifested involuntary mimesis: the postulate that the human psyche had a tripartite nature became an article of faith that sported a correspondence with the Christian Trinity as well as with Plato.

  Without any scheme for historical or economic progress, Freud wanted “science” to be the new, transcendental master of the world. His elevation of science modernized the Josephan translatio imperii. This time, the supreme and unifying power would be impersonal. Truth would be determined by dispassionate observers, whose speculations would depend only on scientifically attested evidence. The emergence of the ego from the guilt-making paternal shadow generalizes for all humanity the particular condition of the modern Jew as he seeks to shake free of his specific history. It is only right to say that Freud wished and believed that his truth, that of psychoanalysis, would indeed set men free. In practice, however, he imposed his own orthodoxy by the force of a genius that was, in its way, as authoritarian as that of any other prophet.

  The allegedly irretrievable otherness of Jews was central to the philosophy of another precocious fin de siècle Viennese Jew. In Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), Otto Weininger (1880–1903) attributed virility only to Aryans. He located Jews in an effeminate annex. Weininger’s distinctions, like Freud’s, were an amalgam of literary insights and metaphysical “science.” Without denying his Jewish nature, Weininger crossed the line, if only with one foot. His suicide, soon after he had published his solitary masterpiece, enhanced his Tiresian reputation. Graced with the aura of a last testament, his text had great appeal for anti-Semites, especially since it came, on a Nazi reading, as a confession from the other side. Like Josephus, Weininger has been read as giving comfort to the enemy.m

  In philosophy, the famous Vienna Circle of the 1920s and 1930s also had a Josephan aspect: it too attacked the dominant religion by indirection. Its overt animus was against “metaphysics,” the system-building “revelations” of other philosophers. Logic, not rhetoric, articulated the syntax of logical positivism; its aggressive neutrality sharpened the guillotine that was meant to sever metaphysicians from respectable academic company. Its English apostle, the precocious A. J. Ayer, denied that the logical positivists had ever been motivated by a desire to assimilate to a universal “religion” of science or for its company to dress itself in the uniformity of men who, with no distinction between Jew and Gentile, worked in the world’s supreme laboratory. All the same, the Vienna Circle’s cult of science, like Freud’s, can be read, from outside, as another attempted great escape from specificity into a godless monotheism to which Yahweh, like the Savior, was irrelevant. Whatever Ayer considered his motives to be,n his attitude resembles Wittgenstein’s ambivalent allegiance to the Vienna Circle, which he attended and then repudiated.

  In 1936, as the Nazi threat grew heavier, Wittgenstein wrote to Ludwig Hansel, “I lied to you and several others back then during the Italian internment [at the end of the Great War] when I said that I was descended one-quarter from Jews and three-quarters from Aryans, even though it is just the other way round. This cowardly lie has burdened me for a long time.”5 The confession becomes more touching in the light of the deliberate bravery which Wittgenstein displayed as an artillery observer, in the Austrian army, when under fire during heavy fighting on the Italian front. The element of recycling and reform—inevitable when outsiders become fluent in an adopted tongue—may do something to explain what Wittgenstein acknowledged when he said that Jews were never more than talented. It is witless not to read his remark as containing a tincture of irony, not to say false modesty.

  Wittgenstein somewhat contradicted himself by proclaiming Otto Weininger to have been a genius, a designation that, in Wittgenstein’s own reckoning, exempted him from Jewishness. In his scrupulous biography, Ray Monk takes this opinion to endorse the image of Wittgenstein as a “self-hating” quasi-Nazi who had, as if by psychic osmosis, internalized the Wagnerian notion of the essentially uncreative and parasitic Jew.6 Béla Szabados’s counteroffensive insists that Wittgenstein’s attitude was colored by circumstances.7 The nasty, but more or less bloodless, anti-Semitism of imperial Vienna (typified by its populist mayor Karl Lueger’s frivolous claim that it was up to him to define who was a Jew) became lethal only in the policies and practices of Hitler and his followers.o Freud could imagine that his books might one day be burned; he regarded it as an inconceivable anachronism that, in our time, an author might be. He died, on September 23, 1939, only just before he could be disillusioned.

  Although baptized a Catholic, like the rest of his very rich and ennobled family, Wittgenstein was willing, by 1931, to “confess” that he regarded himself as a “Jewish thinker.” In 1949, Szabados points out, he “described his.… thoughts as ‘100% Hebraic.’ ”p What was typically “Hebrew” about Wittgenstein’s later philosophy was in line with the Pharisaic tradition: he glossed and commented on issues raised in philosophical discourse but he no more affected to add to the substance of the matter than any Jewish scholiast, however ingenious his reading, would ever claim to have added something substantial to the Torah.q Wittgenstein was never more “Hebraic” than when he said that the problem in philosophy was to “say the new thing in the old language.” A Talmudist was, by definition, never original; even the subtlest reading requires a basic text.

  Gershom Scholem, who emigrated from Germany to Palestine before the Nazis came to power, claimed that journalistic writing signaled the decline of modern Jewish culture and yet, in an exquisite form, could be a kind of redemption. Even while enthusing about the “messianic” Jewishness of Karl Kraus’s style, Scholem contended that Kraus “never had an original thought in his life.”r He added that his observation “is meant here infinitely more as a compliment than as a criticism”: it promised that Kraus, like Wittgenstein, was “a hundred percent Hebraic.” Wittgenstein said on several occasions that “if we confuse prototype and object [individual case], we find ourselves dogmatically conferring on the objective properties which only the prototype possesses.”s He reacted with fury when his friend and pupil Norman Malcolm attributed “national characteristics” (fair play being the one at issue) to the British, for whom, he said, it was an impossibility that they should plan to assassinate even a man such as Hitler.

  Already translated to a Cambridge professorship, Wittgenstein went in 1938 to Switzerland, soon after the Anschluss, which forcibly united Austria with Hitler’s Reich, in order to negotiate with Nazi officials over the fate of his two sisters who were still living in Vienna. He succeeded in buying their immunity, doubtless at a very high price. As a result, they survived while others perished. No transcript exists of the conversation, but it is tempting to speculate in what terms, and in what tone and—to use theatrical terms—in what character, Wittgenstein chose to address the well-dressed, civilian plenipotentiaries of Hitler’s regime. Whatever his thoughts, his words—like those of Josephus when in the company of the Flavians, pater et filius—can hardly have been 100 percent Hebraic. Nor, probably, was his person. Nazi thugs were often in the habit of forcing down the trousers of men they suspected of being Jews who were failing to wear the yellow star. Born a putative Christian, Wittgenstein was most likely uncircumcised.

  Karl Popper, a Viennese exile, was a similar case
. His father, like Isaac D’Israeli, had a large and cosmopolitan library, in which the young Popper, like any precocious Jew, began the earnest education that took him away from Judaism. By the end of his university studies, Popper had dispensed with religious belief, though not yet with the impatient self-assertion that his enemies associated with his Semitic origins. In wartime New Zealand, Popper elaborated his 1936 essay “The Poverty of Historicism” into a voluminous indictment of the totalitarian tendency in Western philosophy. Published in 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies was an Austrian exile’s response—as passionate as it affected to be impersonal—to what Raul Hilberg would call, in his 1961 masterpiece, The Destruction of the European Jews. Beginning with Plato and threading through Hegel and Marx, Popper lit a fuse that exploded under the factitious certainties of the closed societies, Nazi and Communist. Both took their warrant from Plato’s high-minded false logic. His “guardians,” whatever philosophical distinction they affected, were indicted as betrayers of liberty.

  Popper, who learned Greek in order to berate Plato with well-read accuracy, seemed to be fueled by a rage with no specific motive. Yet his passion has something of the zeal of the Essenes, who held that the Sanhedrin and the High Priests had defiled the purity of Judaism. He justified his furious devotion to reason by advocating the priority of scientific method. Having shucked Judaism, with an implicit contempt that his husky disciple Bryan Magee has declared overtly, Popper scarcely mentioned religion in his writings. He assumed that postwar society would dispense with unscientific superstitions. In the same tradition, Hannah Arendt never reckoned with the abiding irrationality of dogmatic faith. Her panacea, “universal pluralism,” is the complacent prescription of the New York school’s haughty principal. The craving for universal “solutions” is, if not malign, more sentimental moralizing than practical politics.

  Unlike Leo Strauss, Popper assumed that revealed religion would have no important place in the civilized world after a war that had, in effect, been won by Anglo-American technology (one of the reasons why Martin Heidegger deplored it). Popper assumed that in the future, an Open Society would be secular, democratic and without discrimination. In a spirit germane to the positivists, Freud had wanted nothing so much as to be accepted as a scientist. Wittgenstein insisted that Freud was, on the contrary, in the highest sense, a speculator (D. H. Lawrence remarked on the Jewish genius for “disinterested speculation”).

  According to Jacques Bouveresse,8 “For Wittgenstein, a person who thinks that there must be one correct explanation and one correct reason for the sort of phenomena treated by psychoanalysis is not.… adopting the dominant scientific attitude but.… is already on the road to producing a mythology.” In this light, the notion that Josephus was always “pro-Roman” and was essentially a traitor can be seen as an attempt to make him an anti-icon in the demonology of the Jews. The mutable opportunist resembles Homer’s Odysseus, who, when Polyphemus demanded to know his name, replied that he was “outis”: no one. The wounded Cyclops then cried out, to the fellow Cyclopes who had come to his aid, “No One has wounded me”; whereupon they went away.

  In Vienna, the Jew as a nobody (like Josephus in imperial Rome) was transformed—especially when Jews became psychoanalysts and philosophers, even if they devised their own specialities in order to do so—into the Jew as an Odyssean No One, the intellectual without a specific personality who carried out an autopsy on what was left of human illusions. The Vienna Circle’s rejection of metaphysics can be seen as an undeclared war on religion. Logical positivism disqualified theology from serious consideration on the formal grounds that its propositions were unscientific. Personal opinions or beliefs did not impinge on philosophy. Objections that began with “I believe” or “I sincerely think” were greeted with “But this is mere autobiography!” The disappearance of the ego was, in theory, a condition of admission to the scientific fraternity.t

  Freud’s dispassionate pathology had offered a way for Jews to consider their own lives, and to investigate other people’s, without sentimentality. After the discovery of what had happened to Europe’s Jews under the Nazis, Raul Hilberg composed his account of their mechanized murder by discounting the anguish of the victims. He adopted an unblinking, positivistic method hardly within the scope of an eyewitness such as Joseph ben Mattathias had been of the Roman butchery in Jerusalem. Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) resembled The Jewish War in that it mounted no explicit polemic. Without the direct menace of a conqueror’s commission, Hilberg chose to work as if he were under an embargo imposed by Gentiles. The result was an indictment veiled in alienated and statistical accountancy. More coroner than judge, Hilberg eschewed fine writing; he acknowledged no affinity with the victims whom he enumerated and classified (as Serge and Beate Klarsfeld would in the case of French deportees). With similarly “positivistic” self-effacement, Primo Levi wrote about his experiences as an inmate of Auschwitz in the style of a “factory report.” He refrained from overstatement to moderate his anguish, not to ignore it. Affecting to make no moral judgments, both Levi and Hilberg, like Josephus, put on impassive masks for the best expression of their findings.u In his later years, Levi regularly attended his synagogue in Turin, but as a form of remembrance, not because he had come to believe in revealed religion.

  Although Arthur Schnitzler’s main claim to fame derives from plays such as The Ring Dance (La ronde), his 1908 novel The Road into the Open is one of the shrewdest depictions of the pains and pleasures, illusions and dilemmas of Diaspora Jews. In the early heat of his nostalgic enthusiasm, Theodor Herzl was keen to recruit Schnitzler to Zionism.v He asked his friend to imagine the thrill of writing and having his plays put on in Jerusalem. The reply of the most applauded playwright in Vienna was simply “In what language?” As a medical man, Schnitzler regarded the incurable contradictions of the Jewish condition with unblinking resignation and a certain amusement.w

  In a personal letter, Freud wrote that Schnitzler had, by the lightning exercise of his imagination, arrived at conclusions that had taken the inventor of psychoanalysis years of clinical study to reach. One of them, in Presentiments and Queries, might have afforded Josephus some comfort when he thought back on that blood-filled pothole in Jotapata: “Martyrdom was only ever a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness, of a belief.” Another might not have: “The snob is a person who aspires to apparent self-advancement by means of actual self-abasement. He is the masochist of the social order.” His target here may well have been Karl Kraus, whom Schnitzler openly scorns elsewhere:x he described Kraus’s pandering to anti-Semitic fashion as “the most repulsive thing I have ever seen.” As they did in the Second Temple precinct, attacks of Jews on Jews can still have an unguarded trenchancy.y

  Principalities and powers with summary authority over Jews have rarely paid close attention to what Jews choose to say or do to each other. Within the ghetto or the academy, a Jew could make his case against another Jew without the inhibitions that might constrain him in Gentile courts. The venom with which, in the early 1950s, Edward Teller pursued J. R. Oppenheimer over the latter’s reluctance to develop the hydrogen bomb is a merciless instance of an intra-Jewish vendetta.z

  In the confines of a semiprivate language, Jews have been able to rail at Jews as they could wish to do at their common enemies. Yiddish bristles with scornful and obscene expressions, from schnorrer to schlemiel by way of schmuck, schvitz and schtup. Jewish “self-hatred” is as likely to signal introverted anger against the injustice of the outside world as any apprehension of innate inadequacy. Persecution generates compensatory vanities. In the Lodz ghetto during the Shoah, Chaim Rumkowski, whom Hannah Arendt describes as “Eldest of the Jews,” nominated himself Chaim the First and issued currency notes bearing his signature and postage stamps engraved with his image. He also rode around his walled fiefdom in a “broken-down horse-drawn carriage.” Moshe Merin, in East Upper Silesia, was scarcely less dictatorial. Arendt’s own tone, in Eichman
n in Jerusalem, is more regularly scornful of Jews than of anyone else. “We know the physiognomies of the Jewish leaders during the Nazi period very well” she says and then shows those Jews small mercy. Her use of the word “physiognomies” proclaims the celebrity intellectual’s divorce from ghetto-born vulgarity; a fancy term for “faces,” “physiognomies” parades the Hellenized makeup she learned from Martin Heidegger (and which would have infuriated the Zealots).

  The only European Jewish “leaders” of whom Arendt appears to approve are “a few who committed suicide—like Adam Czerniakow, chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council, who was not a rabbi but an unbeliever.… who must still have remembered the rabbinical saying ‘Let them kill you, but don’t cross the line.’ ” A stern moralist when it came to other people’s conduct, Arendt might well have sided with the Zionists, at least in condemning Joseph ben Mattathias for preferring dishonor to death. Never does she suggest that an ordinary German, deputed to murder, should have had recourse to suicide before turning butcher.aa

  Jews who hope to escape from the ethnico-ethical bunker can be more outspoken in criticizing the habits or morals of Jews than when confronting their Gentile enemies. This posture seems to emancipate the speaker from his or her unwanted origins.bb If, in the novels she wrote in the entre-deux-guerres, Irène Némirovsky criticized Jews with a relish that is close to inquisitorial, it is, at least in part, because a clever girl could,cc with impunity (and commercial advantage), pillory the Jewish bourgeoisie the better to appeal to the French. In due time, when the Vichy authorities began the deportations of “stateless Jews,” as a result of which Irène herself and her husband were eventually transported to their deaths, the faults of the Jews (especially those of her parents, whom she had satirized remorselessly) were seen by Némirovsky to be venial compared with the self-serving callousness of their supposed betters and onetime colleagues and friends.