History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Holdheim’s version of reform was not the only alternative to Geiger’s. In Frankfurt, an anti-circumcision group appeared. In London a Reform movement accepted the Bible, as God’s work, and rejected the Talmud, as man’s. As Reform spread abroad, it appeared in more and more guises. Some groups retained links with Orthodox Jews. Others broke off completely. Rabbinical conferences were held, to no great purpose. New prayer-books were issued, and provoked fresh controversies. In one version or another Reform Judaism clearly provided a satisfactory expression of the religious spirit for many thousands of educated Jews. In England, for instance, both a rather traditional-minded Reform Judaism, and eventually a more radical sub-group, Liberal Judaism, became firmly established. In America, as we shall see, the Reform, in both its conservative and liberal versions, became an important element in what was to become the third leg of the Jewish world tripod.

  But what Reform did not do, any more than the ‘Science of Judaism’, was to solve the Jewish problem. It did not normalize the Jews because it never spoke for more than a minority. It was, in essence, an alternative to baptism and complete assimilation, among Jews whose faith, or at any rate whose piety, was strong enough to keep them attached to their religion in some form, but not strong enough to defy the world. By the end of the 1840s, it was obvious that it was not going to take over Judaism, even in enlightened Germany. By the end of the century, it had acquired enough institutional supports to keep going, at any rate in some countries, but its creative force was spent. The traditionalist writer John Lehmann noted in 1905: ‘Today, when complete apathy has overtaken the neologue circles, it is hardly possible to imagine that there were once people who regarded it as their life’s task, and who were determined with their whole heart and their whole soul to reform Judaism, and who each considered himself as a miniature Luther, Zwingli or Calvin.’58

  One reason why Jews who wished to participate fully in the modern world without losing their Judaism failed to achieve a workable formula was that they could not agree on a language in which to express it. There were, at this stage, three possible alternatives. One was the ancient hieratic language of Judaism, Hebrew. A second was the language of their own country, whatever it might be. The third was the demotic language which most Jews actually spoke, Yiddish. Or possibly there might be a combination of all three. The men of the Jewish enlightenment wanted to resurrect Hebrew. Indeed, the very word Haskalah, with which they chose to identify themselves, was the Hebrew word for understanding or reason: they used it to signify their commitment to reason, as opposed to revelation, as the source of truth. They produced educational works in Hebrew. They ran a Hebrew publication. But there were a number of reasons why their project lacked dynamism. Few of them wrote much Hebrew themselves—Mendelssohn, their leader, very little. They chose Hebrew not because they wanted to express themselves in it: for that, they much preferred German. Nor did they venerate it for religious reasons. They saw it, rather, as being intellectually respectable, the Jewish equivalent of the Latin and Greek which was the ancient cultural heritage of Christian Europe. The age saw the dawn of modern philological studies. Everywhere in Europe, experts were compiling grammars, putting local tongues into written form and endowing them with rules and syntax—Finnish, Hungarian, Rumanian, Irish, Basque, Catalan were being promoted from local patois to the status of a ‘modern language’. The maskils wanted to subject Hebrew to this process. Logically, of course, they should have picked Yiddish, a tongue which Jews actually spoke. But the maskils regarded it with abhorrence. They dismissed it as nothing more than a corrupt form of German. It stood for everything they most deplored about the ghetto and unregenerated Judaism: poverty, ignorance, superstition, vice. The only people who studied Yiddish scientifically, they argued, were the police, who needed to know thieves’ slang.

  So the maskils revived Hebrew. But they did not know what to write in it. Their biggest project was a hybrid presentation of the Bible, using German words in Hebrew characters. This was quite a success. Many thousands of Jews, particularly of the older generation, who had had no access to secular schools, used it to acquire literary German. But this led to less Hebrew, not more. Once Jews read German, and acquired secular culture, their interest in Hebrew declined, or vanished; many even lost their Judaism. Even those who retained their faith found less use for Hebrew as services and prayer-books began to use the vernacular.

  There was, indeed, a living if tenuous Hebrew tradition in literature. But the maskils found that distasteful too, for ideological reasons. Great medieval scholars like Maimonides had written in Arabic. But the practice of writing in Hebrew also survived in Moslem Spain, and thence it re-emerged in Renaissance Italy. Some Italian Jews continued to write beautiful Hebrew throughout the seventeenth century. Then the tradition acquired a genius: Moses Hayyim Luzzatto (1707-46). This remarkable man came from one of the oldest and most distinguished families of Italian Jewry in Padua. He was a prodigy and had the best teachers, as well as access to the great university. He learned secular science, the classics, modern Italian, in addition to the entire range of Judaic studies. Luzzatto had the unusual capacity of being able to write abstruse material in high academic style, and also to propound complex matters in simple fashion to a popular audience. He could also express himself in various languages, ancient and modern. One of his works is in Aramaic, the language in which the Zohar was originally written. But his customary mode of address was Hebrew. He turned out a great deal of Hebrew poetry, some religious, which has not survived, some secular, in honour of his friends. He produced three Hebrew verse dramas. Above all, he wrote an ethical work, Mesillat Yesharim, or The Path of the Upright, which in the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century was the most influential of all Hebrew books, and the most widely read, in the Jewries of eastern Europe.59 Was not he the ideal progenitor of a Hebrew revival? Not for enlightened German Jews. On the contrary: he symbolized what they wished to repudiate and eliminate.

  For Luzzatto was a kabbalist and a mystic. Worse: he may well have been a secret Shabbatean, or something very like it. He had acquired, as he admitted himself, a taste for the fatally insinuating writings of Nathan of Gaza, with their ability to explain anything once you had made the first irrational leap. In Padua, he seems to have drawn around him a group of clever young men who dabbled in dangerous thoughts. The Venetian rabbis had his house searched and found evidence of magic. To escape controversy, he went to Amsterdam. There, too, he was forbidden to practise kabbalah. So he finally went to the Holy Land, where the plague got him in Acre.60 Being named Moses, married to a girl called Zipporah, he seems to have reached the conclusion that he was the reincarnation of Moses and his wife. Many Jews in the East agreed; or at least treated him as a saint. No enlightened German Jew could accept that sort of thing. And, even if his personal claims were brushed aside, the contents of his ethics were also unacceptable to maskils. In his Path of the Upright and a further work, Da’ath Tevunot or Discerning Knowledge, he produced a brilliant recapitulation of the history of God’s purpose in the world and the role of the Jews, the covenant and the diaspora. He showed exactly why the Jews were in the world today, and what they had to do to justify themselves. His summary of the purpose of life was uncompromising:

  The essence of the existence of a human being in this world is that he should fulfil commandments, perform worship and resist temptation. It is unfitting that worldly happiness should mean anything more to him than a mere aid or support in the sense that satisfaction and peace of mind allow him to devote his heart to this service that is incumbent upon him; and it is fitting that the whole of his attention should be devoted only to the Creator—blessed be He—and that he should have no other purpose in any of his actions, whether small or great, except to draw near to Him—blessed be He—and to break down all the partitions separating him from his Owner.61

  Here was a man, writing in Hebrew, propounding a coherent, if rigorous, philosophy which inspired millions of Jews and continues to
be a living tradition in Judaism even today. But it was anathema to the enlightened. Far from using Hebrew to beckon the ex-ghetto Jews into the modern world, and bid them take a decent and honourable place there, it did exactly the opposite. It told the Jew to about-face, and turn his gaze to God—as pious Jews had always done. So the living Hebrew tradition, such as it was, could not be fitted into the master-plan of the enlightenment. Their scheme to run Hebrew in tandem with German thus made no progress. Jews simply learned German, and assimilated themselves. The maskils were not to foresee that Hebrew would indeed make a formidable re-entry into Jewish life—but as the instrument of Zionism, a form of Judaism which was as abhorrent to them as mystic messianism.

  Ironically enough, the Jewish language which made most, and entirely spontaneous, progress in the nineteenth century was Yiddish. It is a pity that the maskils, whose ability to speak and write German was the certificate of their enlightened status, knew so little about it. It was not just a criminal argot. It was much more than a corrupt form of German. To pious Jews it was a ‘temporary’ language in that it was non-divine, non-historical (in Jewish terms). Once history got going again, as the Messianic Age approached, Jews would presumably revert to Hebrew, the language of the Torah, in which in any case important matters such as ritual, scholarship and often communal administration were conducted. But for a temporary language, Yiddish was old, almost as old as some European tongues. Jews first began to develop it from the German dialects spoken in the cities when they pushed up from France and Italy into German-speaking Lotharingia. Old Yiddish (1250-1500) marked the first contact of German-speaking Jews with Slavic Jews speaking a dialect called Knaanic. During the 200 years 1500-1700, Middle Yiddish emerged, becoming progressively more Slavic and dialectic. Finally, modern Yiddish developed during the eighteenth century. Its literary form was completely transformed in the half-century 1810-60, in the cities of the east European diaspora, as Yiddish newspapers and magazines proliferated, and a secular Yiddish book-trade flourished. Philologists and grammarians tidied it up. By 1908 it was sophisticated enough for its proponents to hold a world Yiddish conference in Czernowitz. As the Jewish population of eastern Europe grew, more people spoke, read and wrote it. By the end of the 1930s it was the primary tongue of about eleven million people.

  Yiddish was a rich, living language, the chattering tongue of an urban tribe. It had the limitations of its origins. There were very few Yiddish words for animals or birds. It had virtually no military vocabulary. Such defects were made up from German, Polish, Russian. Yiddish was particularly good at borrowing: from Arabic, from Hebrew-Aramaic, from anything which came its way. On the other hand it contributed: to Hebrew, to English-American. Its chief virtue, however, lay in its internal subtlety, particularly in its characterization of human types and emotions.62 It was the language of street wisdom, of the clever underdog; of pathos, resignation, suffering, which it palliated by humour, intense irony and superstition. Isaac Bashevis Singer, its greatest practitioner, pointed out that it is the only language never spoken by men in power.

  Yiddish was the natural tongue for a revived Jewish nation because it was widely spoken and living; and in the second half of the nineteenth century it began, quite rapidly, to produce a major literature of stories, poems, plays and novels. But there were many reasons why it could not fulfil its appointed destiny. Its role was riddled with paradoxes. Many rabbis saw it as the language of women, who were not clever or educated enough to study in Hebrew. The German maskils, on the other hand, linked it with Orthodoxy, because its use encouraged backwardness, superstition and irrationality. Among the large Jewish community of Hungary, for instance, the local language was used for everyday life, and Yiddish was the language of religious instruction, into which Jewish boys had to render the Hebrew and Aramaic texts—so it was associated with the uncorrupted Orthodox. In the Russian Pale, however, and Austrian Galicia, it was often the language of secularization. In the second half of the nineteenth century, almost every sizeable Jewish community in eastern Europe had a circle of atheists and radicals, whose language of dissent was Yiddish and who read Yiddish books and periodicals which catered to their views. Yet even in the East, where Yiddish was the majority Jewish tongue, it had no monopoly of worldliness. For the political radicals increasingly turned to German, then to Russian. The non-political secularizers usually, in true maskil fashion, accorded a superior status to Hebrew. The point was made by Nahum Slouschz, who translated Zola, Flaubert and de Maupassant into Hebrew:

  While the emancipated Jew of the Occident replaced Hebrew by the vernacular of his adopted country; while the rabbis were distrustful of whatever was not religion; and rich patrons refused to support a literature which had not the entrée to good society—while these held aloof, the maskil, the ‘intellectual’, of the small provincial town, the Polish mehabber [author], despised and unknown, often a martyr to his convictions, who devoted himself heart, soul and might to maintaining honourably the literary traditions of Hebrew—he alone remained faithful to what had been the true mission of the Bible language since its beginnings.63

  That was doubtless true. But there were many Yiddish writers who could make an equally heroic-pathetic case for themselves, with at least as strong a claim to be upholding the Jewish spirit.

  In short, during the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Jewish linguistic outlook and future was confused, for reasons which had their roots deep in history and faith. This linguistic confusion was merely one part of a much wider cultural confusion. And this cultural confusion sprang, in turn, from a growing religious confusion among Jews themselves, which can be summed up in one sentence: was Judaism a part of life, or the whole of it? If it was only a part, then a compromise with modernity was possible. But in that case the Jews might simply fade into the majority societies around them. If it was the whole, then they had merely replaced the ghetto of stone with the ghetto of intellect. So in that case, too, most Jews would choose to escape from the prison, and be lost to the Law for ever. All the compromises we have examined collapsed before the majestic logic of this stark choice.

  Hence the central fact of the Jewish predicament in the first half of the nineteenth century was the absence of an agreed programme or a united leadership. Where other oppressed and insurgent peoples could concentrate their energy on marching behind the banners of nationalism and independence, the Jews were rebels without a cause. Or rather, they knew what they were rebelling against—both the hostile society in which they were implanted, which gave them full citizenship grudgingly if at all, and the suffocating embrace of ghetto Judaism—but they did not know what they were rebelling for. None the less, though inchoate, the Jewish rebellion was real. And the individual rebels, though lacking a common objective, were formidable. Collectively, they constituted a huge force for good and evil. So far we have looked at only one side of the problem of emancipation: how could Jews liberated from the ghetto adjust to society? But the other side was equally important: how could society adjust to liberated Jews?

  The problem was gigantic because for 1,500 years Jewish society had been designed to produce intellectuals. It is true they were sacerdotal intellectuals, in the service of the god Torah. But they had all the characteristics of the intellectual: a tendency to pursue ideas at the expense of people; endlessly sharpened critical faculties; great destructive as well as creative power. Jewish society was geared to support them. The community rabbi was designated in his writ of appointment ‘Lord of the Place’. He received the chief honour, as the spiritual descendant of Moses himself. He was the local model of the ideal Jew. He was the charismatic sage. He spent his life absorbing abstruse material and then regurgitating it in accordance with his opinions. He expected to be, and was, supported by the wealth of the local oligarchs. The Jews subsidized their culture many hundreds of years before the practice became a function of the Western welfare state. Rich merchants married sages’ daughters; the brilliant yeshiva student was found a wealthy bride s
o he could study more. The system whereby sages and merchants ran the community in tandem thus redistributed rather than reinforced wealth. It also ensured the production of large numbers of highly intelligent people who were given every opportunity to pursue ideas. Quite suddenly, around the year 1800, this ancient and highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals began to shift its output. Instead of pouring all its products into the closed circuit of rabbinical studies, where they remained completely isolated from general society, it unleashed a significant and ever-growing proportion of them into secular life. This was an event of shattering importance in world history.

  Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was the archetype of the new phenomenon. He was born in Düsseldorf of a mercantile family. Fifty years before he would have become, without question, a rabbi and talmudic scholar, no doubt of distinction. Instead he was a product of the revolutionary whirlwind. By the age of sixteen, without leaving his place of birth, he had undergone six changes of nationality. His family was half-emancipated. His mother, Piera van Geldern, had secular ambitions for him. When Napoleon’s armies advanced, she saw her son as a courtier, a marshal, a politician or governor; when the French retreated, he was transformed into a millionaire businessman.64 She saw that he got very little Jewish education, sending him to the Roman Catholic lycée. Heine lacked personal, religious, racial and national identity. His Jewish name was Hayyim. As a boy he was called Harry. Later he called himself Heinrich, but he signed his work H. Heine and hated the ‘H’ to be spelled out.65 As a boy he had lived under the Napoleonic creation, the Grand Duchy of Berg, so he claimed his spirit was French. But the most important book of his childhood was the great Lutheran Bible, than which there is nothing more German. He moved to Paris in 1831 and did not return to Germany (except for two short visits). But he never applied for French citizenship, though eligible. He wrote all his works in German. He thought the Germans, though often evil, more profound; the French lived on the surface. Their poetry was ‘perfumed curds’.66