History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  The truth is that, despite Germany’s long tradition of vicious anti-Jewish feeling-despite, as it were, the Judensau—Jews felt at home in Germany. It was a society which honoured and revered its professoriat, and in some respects its values were those of the Jewish cathedocracy. A Jew could slip naturally from a yeshivah into one of Germany’s universities, now in their golden period of effort and achievement. He relished the opportunities which slowly opened to him in a country where intellectual achievement was justly measured and treated with awesome respect. German Jews worked fanatically hard. They soon began to carry off the new Nobel prizes: two in physiology and medicine, four in chemistry, two in physics, all for work done before the First World War.193 Ferdinand Julius Cohn founded bacteriology. Paul Ehrlich produced the first practical form of chemotherapy. Franz Boas founded the science of cultural anthropology. German Jews were workaholics, hurrying men. Eduard Devrient wrote of his friend Felix Mendelssohn: ‘The habit of constant occupation, instilled by his mother, made rest intolerable to him’; he kept looking at his watch.194 Gustav Mahler used to run from his apartment to his office at the Opera House in Vienna; on his return, to save time, he would announce his arrival by whistling the opening bars of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, as a signal for lunch to be served.

  But it was not merely intellectual habits Jews shared with the Germans: there was intellectual substance too. Many German Jews felt at one with the politician Gabriel Riesser (1806-63) when he insisted, ‘If we are not Germans then we have no homeland.’ Jews entering public life, whether socialists like Lassalle or Liberal leaders like Eduard Lasker (1829-84) and Ludwig Bamberger (1823-99), felt there was a strong link between the Jewish rationalizing spirit and the liberalizing aims of modern Germany, attempting patiently to devise and apply rational solutions to all social problems. There were few able German Jews who did not draw nourishment and delight from kant and Hegel.

  This applied, not least, to Jewish religious thinkers. Wilhelmine Germany was on the eve of a great revival in Christian theology, and Jewish writers were affected by the same deep impulses. Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), Professor of Philosophy at Marburg, who might be termed the last follower of Maimonides, argued forcefully that Judaism was the first religion in which the essential insights of what he called ‘the religion of reason’ were discovered, but that it had no monopoly of the formula. Once a nation reached a certain level of intellectual development, it was ready to receive ‘the religion of reason’. Of all the modern nations, he argued, Germany was the one where reason and religious feeling were easiest to reconcile, precisely because Germany, with its philosophical idealism, its reverence for pure religion and its ethical humanism, had been, as it were, anticipated by Jewish history. He rejected the supposed conflict between German culture and Jewish cosmopolitanism as ignorant nonsense. He refuted Professor Treitschke’s arguments contrasting Jew and German point by point, and dismissed his notorious catchphrase, ‘The Jews are our misfortune’, as the reverse of the truth. In fact the German spirit was infused with Jewish ideals. They were behind the victory of the Protestant Reformation. The new type of modern religious man, whether Christian Protestant or liberal Jew, ultimately sprang from the religious ideals and energy of the Jewish Bible. Hence, contrary to the views of the anti-clerical rationalists—the detestable French spirit of the secular enlightenment—the German-Jewish ethical interpretation of the Bible made it an instrument of human improvement, not a barrier to it.195

  Cohen’s lectures, indeed, helped to rekindle the Judaism of Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who had earlier come close to conversion, and turn him into one of the greatest of modern Jewish theologians. Rosenzweig conducted a passionate literary debate on the question of conversion with a cousin and contemporary, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who did cross over into Protestantism. Their ‘Letters on Judaism and Christianity’, written in the years just before the First World War, indicated how closely one strain of Jewish and one strain of Protestant thought could be brought together, and how easily Jews could move within the assumptions of German philosophy.196 Even German-Jewish thinkers who attacked Christianity, and stressed its differences with Judaism, like Leo Baeck (1873-1956), did so within German terms of reference. In 1905 Baeck published a brilliant reply, The Essence of Judaism, to the Protestant theologian Adolf von Harnack’s The Essence of Christianity (1900), arguing that Judaism was the religion of reason, Christianity of romantic irrationalism. St Paul had been the original villain; but had not Luther, too, written: ‘In all who have faith in Christ, reason shall be killed; else faith does not govern them; for reason fights against faith’? Yet this critique of Christianity had distinguished roots and allies in German scepticism, and Nietzsche had already provided guidelines for the attack on St Paul (a favourite target, incidentally, for generations of German anti-Semites). The theological debate, indeed, illustrated how comfortably yet how freely Jews could range within the German mental world, and what a spacious theatre of mind they found it.

  In the last generation or two before the First World War—that universal catastrophe of body and spirit which made all human problems more difficult and dangerous—able Jews were emerging into competitive general life in astonishing numbers. Nowhere was their contribution more varied and impressive than in the German-speaking areas. Examining their achievements, one is tempted to conclude that many of these brilliant Jews felt, in their hearts, that Germany was the ideal location for Jewish talents. Was not Germany now aspiring, and on solid grounds, for cultural world leadership? And could not the Jews play a notable, perhaps even a paramount, role in helping the Germans to make good this challenge to all-comers? Was not this the true, modern and secular meaning of the ancient injunction to the Jews to be ‘a light to the gentiles’?

  There seemed to be all kinds of ways in which the Jews could assist the Germans to world leadership. Germany was now a great industrial as well as the leading intellectual power in the world. Who better to marry these two attributes, in the cause of German-inspired progress, than the Jews, strong in both, always conscious, through their long and painful history, of how economic strength could be created and guided by mental subtlety? One man who was aware of these opportunities was Walther Rathenau (1867-1922), who succeeded his father as head of the great AEG electrical combine, and later was briefly and tragically German Foreign Minister. He was not merely Germany’s leading industrialist but one of her most discussed writers on state, society and economics—his essays fill five volumes—and in his own way a visionary. He suffered as much from German anti-Semitism as anyone: ‘In the youth of every German Jew’, he wrote, ‘there comes the painful moment which he will remember for the rest of his life, when for the first time he becomes fully conscious that he has come into the world as a second-class citizen, and that no ability and accomplishment can liberate him from this condition.’197 Yet Rathenau did not despair. He believed passionately in assimilation. He thought that German anti-Semitism was fundamentally an aristocratic creation, and that it would disappear with the end of aristocratic leadership, bound to be eclipsed by the new industrial ruling class.198 Complete and final assimilation would then follow quickly. This in turn would make it possible for the Jewish element in finance and industry to make a decisive contribution to a new, affluent society, on American lines or better, in which the proletariat disappeared and liberal tolerance reigned.

  To men like Rathenau, then, both baptism and Zionism were nonsolutions, cowardly escapes from the real task. The Jew should assert his Germanism as well as his humanity, should do the German thing in all spheres. Was physical courage not a Jewish trait? Then let it become one! Jewish students made themselves more hot-tempered duellists than the Junker gentiles. They became feared to the point that gentile clubs had to invent ideological-racial reasons for declining their challenges. They trained. They competed. In the first two decades of the revived Olympics, German Jews won thirteen golds and three silvers in foil and sabre. The German women’s fencing champion, Hele
ne Mayer, holder of two golds, was known as die blonde He. Jews might, in effect, be banned from the officer corps, but they did their best. Men whose grandfathers had spoken Yiddish, which had no words for war, went on in 1914-18 to amass over 31,500 Iron Crosses.199

  Yet this Jewish identification with the German was taking place against the background, in the last generation before Armageddon, of a cultural and scientific revolution which was hurtling in quite a different direction, and in which Jews were seen to be at the controls. The military and naval arms race which increasingly divided and electrified Europe was paralleled by an intellectual arms race, which divided society as a whole. The modern movement, affecting every department of artistic and intellectual life, was gathering power and momentum. It was becoming an irresistible force. Tradition and conservatism, though by no means forming an immovable object, offered strong resistance, which became progressively more angry and violent as the full demands of modernism were displayed in the last decade before 1914. The Jews, like everyone else, were on both sides of the battle. Pious Jews, whether Orthodox or hasidic, formed perhaps the most conservative, indeed reactionary, element in Europe, in deploring artistic and scientific change. But in the gentile world nobody took the slightest notice of them, or even knew they existed, except perhaps as a piece of traditional human furniture. They saw the Jews, and Jewishness, as everywhere and always identified with modernism in its most extreme form.

  What could not be denied was that the emancipation of the European Jews and their emergence from the ghetto into the intellectual and artistic mainstream greatly accelerated changes which were coming anyway. The Jews were natural iconoclasts. Like the prophets, they set about smiting and overturning all the idols of the conventional modes with skill and ferocious glee. They invaded spheres traditionally alien or banned to Jews and quickly became the chief foci of dynamism.

  The Jewish musical tradition, for instance, was far older than anyone else’s in Europe. Music remained an element in Jewish services, and the cantor was almost as pivotal a figure in local Jewish society as the rabbi. But Jewish musicians, except as converts, had played no part in European musical development. Hence the entry, in considerable numbers, of Jewish composers and performers on the musical scene in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was a phenomenon, and a closely observed one. Judaism was not the issue. Some, like Mendelssohn, were converts. Others, like Jacques Offenbach (1819-80), were assimilated and indifferent. A few of them, like Jacques Halévy (1799-1862) and Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864), were faithful or observant.* But the musical world was aware of their Jewishness and the influence they wielded, not just as composers but as directors of orchestras, academies, opera houses, musical theratres. Moreover, there was a general belief that many more famous musicians were of Jewish origin. Rossini, present at the famous Rothschile Frankfurt wedding in 1839, was widely believed to be a Jew. Johann Strauss, founder of the famous Viennese musical family, was certainly the son of a baptized Jewish innkeeper in Budapest. Even Wagner had fears he might be Jewish (they were unfounded). There was also a suspicion that radical innovation in music was primarily a Jewish responsibility.

  Between 1860 and 1914, public resistance to innovation grew, particularly in centres like Vienna, where they took music very seriously indeed. As one musical historian has put it, the quickening rate of stylistic change and the growth of the musical public combined to make ‘the normally difficult relation between artist and public a pathological one’.200 The musicians became deliberately provocative; the public sometimes responded with force. The iconoclastic Jewish element made both provocation and response more extreme. There was fury in Vienna when Mahler was made head of the court opera in 1897, probably the most important post in German music. He got it on merit: he was one of the leading conductors in Germany and the appointment was abundantly justified by the variety and splendour of the productions which marked his ten-year tenure. But to make himself eligible he had to convert to Catholicism. This, in the eyes of those who hated his innovations, far from removing his Jewish stigma, drew attention to it. ‘He was not a man who ever deceived himself,’ wrote his wife, ‘and he knew that people would not forget he was a Jew…. Nor did he wish it forgotten…. He never denied his Jewish origin. Rather he emphasized it.’201

  Mahler’s reign in Vienna was stormy, and hostile intrigues eventually drove him to New York. All this took place without even the provocation of his symphonies, which were rarely or never performed in his lifetime. It was a different matter with Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951), who was born a Jew in Vienna but brought up a Catholic. He caused a scandal at the age of eighteen by converting to Protestantism (he returned to Judaism in 1933). In 1909 his Opus 11, No. 1 for piano dispensed with traditional tonality completely. Two years later, largely on Mahler’s recommendation, he was given a minor post in the Viennese Royal Academy of Music, and this produced a stormy protest in the Austrian parliament. Here, it was argued, was Vienna, capital of European music, custodian of one of the crown jewels of world culture—was it to be put into the hands of this Jew, or ex-Jew, or ex-Catholic, or whatever he was, who held it in obvious contempt? The feeling of cultural outrage was much more important than anti-Semitism as such; or rather, it turned into anti-Semites, at any rate for the moment, people who normally never expressed such feelings. It was the Jew-as-Iconoclast which aroused the really deep rage. When Schönberg’s enormous traditional cantata Gurrelieder was presented in Vienna in February 1913, it was given a fifteen-minute ovation. Next month, in the same city, his Chamber Symphony No. 1 (Opus 9), followed by the Altenberglieder of his gentile pupil Alban Berg, generated a vicious riot and police intervention. Mahler had begun it; Schönberg carried it on; both were Jews, and they corrupted young Aryan composers like Berg—so the argument went.

  It received a further twist when innovation was accompanied by eroticism. This was precisely the ingredient Leon Bakst (1866-1924) injected into the Ballets Russes, which was primarily a Jewish creation. He was the son of a pedlar who walked all the way from Grodno to St Petersburg with his belongings on his back and then prospered as a Crimean War military tailor. Bakst was red-haired; passionately Jewish in his own way, he believed that most famous artists—Rembrandt and Ruisdael for instance—had Jewish origins and had the Star of David on his monogrammed stationery. He got himself expelled from the Academy of Art in St Petersburg by painting the prize subject, ‘The Madonna Weeping over Christ’, with a crowd of Lithuanian ghetto Jews to emphasize the Jewishness of Christ and His mother: the outraged judges simply scrawled across his canvas two furious strokes of red crayon.202

  It was Bakst, the designer of costumes for Pavlova and Nijinsky, who first introduced the latter to Diaghilev. When the company was formed, a Jew, Gabriel Astruc, provided the money, followed in due course by Baron Gunzberg, the Tsarist court Jew. Bakst created the ballets themselves as well as the sets and costumes. He brought to the venture his overwhelming heterosexual eroticism, made more powerful by his skill in covering or constraining, his use of veils. For his ballet Cléopâtre, opening the historic programme at the Châtelet Theatre in Paris on 19 May 1909, he announced: ‘A huge temple on the banks of the Nile. Columns. A sultry day. The scent of the East and a great many lovely women with beautiful bodies.’ He found Ida Rubinstein, a typical Jewish beauty, to play the role, and it was the spectacular appearance of Rubinstein, unveiled on stage, in Bakst’s constumes and settings, which launched the movement. As Serge Lifar put it, ‘It was painting which first attracted Paris to the Ballets Russes.’203 Rubinstein, with her long legs, Semitic profile and oriental image was, as Arnold Haskell put it, ‘the living picture of Bakst’.204 The following year he created Schéhérazade, the greatest of all the Ballets Russes successes, with a harem of beauties indulging in an orgy of sex with muscular negroes, ending in a bloodbath of vengeance. This was the biggest culture-shock of the entire period.

  If Bakst’s voluptuousness was Jewish, so was his sense of colour and still more
his moral theory of colour, which, as he said, used religious qualities in certain colours (‘There is a blue the colour of a Magdalen and the blue of a Messalina’) to draw from the spectators the exact emotions he required.205 He passed this one, in the school he ran for a time in St Petersburg, to his favourite pupil Marc Chagall (1887-1985), the grandson of a Jewish ritual butcher. Again, the arrival of the Jewish artist was a strange phenomenon. It is true that, over the centuries, there had been many animals (though few humans) in Jewish art: lions on Torah curtains, owls on Judaic coins, animals on the Capernaum capitals, birds on the rim of the fountain-basis in the fifth-century Naro synagogue in Tunis; there were carved animals, too, on timber synagogues in eastern Europe—indeed the Jewish wood-carver was the prototype of the modern Jewish plastic artist. A book of Yiddish folk-ornament, printed at Vitebsk in 1920, was similar to Chagall’s own bestiary. But the resistance of pious Jews to portraying the living image was still strong at the beginning of the twentieth century. When the young Chaim Soutine (1893-1943), the son of a poor hasidic tailor, painted a portrait from memory of the Smilovichi rabbi, his father flogged him. Chagall’s father, who hauled herring-barrels for a living, did not go so far when his son began to study with the portraitist Yehuda Pen, but he flung the five-rouble fee violently on the ground as a gesture of disapproval.206 So the urge to get away from the religious background was strong. So too was the need to leave Russia. Chagall spent several weeks in gaol for trying to enter St Petersburg without a permit; Bakst was refused entrance (though his father was a ‘privileged Jew’) as late as 1912, when he was already world-famous.