The words, "I am proud that I am German," or "I am proud that I am a Jew,"
sound as ridiculous to me as if someone were to say, "I am proud that I   
have brown eyes." Should I succumb to the folly of the persecutor and  
accept the Jewish conceit instead of the German one? Pride and love are   
not the same. If someone asked me where I belong, I would answer: a Jewish
mother gave birth to me, Germany nourished me, Europe formed me, my home
is the earth, the world is my fatherland.

Ernst Toller, Eine Jugend in Deutschland

The Jewish Ethic &

S O C I A L I S M

(The following are excerpts from Chapter 2)

Socialism And The Jews
Of Wilhelmine Germany

By Adam M. Weisberger

...In 1919 the Jewish socialists Rosa Luxemburg, Kurt Eisner and Gustav Landauer paid heavily in blood for their radical idealism. Within months of each other they were assassinated by right-wing extremists...

Lassalle, Moses Hess, and Marx

...Of course the first Jews involved in German socialism were among the most important: Lassalle, Moses Hess, and Marx.

While their contributions to building the German socialist movement cannot be overstated, it should be remembered that Hess and Marx spent the bulk of these years in exile in Paris and London, respectively. Lassalle died as he lived--dramatically, felled in a duel in 1869. Lassalle may well have eventually accomodated himself and the workers movement to a "triumphant Bismarck," with whom Lassalle had met secretly on a number of occasions, presumably to discuss making common cause against the upstart middle classes. No Jews were included among those in the succeeding generation primarily responsible for unifying the Lassallean and Marxist wings of the socialist movement at Gotha in 1875 (Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer)....

Jews, disproportionate to other members of their economic class, voted socialist and committed themselves to the advancement of the socialist movement. A remarkably high percentage of Jewish politicians of the Second Reich were social democratic--by Toury's estimate almost 40% on the eve of the First World War. In the first decades of the century between 8 and 14% of SPD Reichstag officials were Jewish, a larger percentage than in any other party. In 1903, the Zionist journal "Jdische Rundschau" wrote of the recent Reichstag elections, "Until now the anti-Semites have stirred up hatred against the Jews for being the leadership of the SPD, now also for being the whole team."

...The movement of many Jews into socialism corresponded to the rightward drift of the liberal parties. When mainstream liberalism succumbed to conservative Prussian nationalism, it in effect also capitulated to the forces propagating anti-Semitism...

...Diffuse anti-Semitic sentiments congealed into an organized political force following the Depression of 1873, for which "unproductive Jewish capital" was widely perceived responsible. The formation of mass political parties and pressure groups, which was linked to the 1871 establishment of the Reich, served to restructure anti-Semitism as a party-political phenomenon and worldview.

The ideology of the anti-Semitic movements was quite differentiated, ranging from the more traditional Christian authoritarian anti-Semitism of Stoecker, to the new racial ideology decked out with the trappings of a spurious scientific Darwinism. The former socialist Eugen Dhring was among the first to give a systematic ideological basis to the idea of racial struggle underpinning the anti-Semitic vlkisch movements which cropped up in Germany and central Europe in the 1880s and 1890s. The novelty of Dhring's anti-Semitism lay in its racial character, its reformulation of anti-Jewish sentiment in supposedly anthropological and biological terms, which raised the Aryan peoples to the apex of evolutionary development and demoted Jews to a lower level.

What roused the socialist movement to a spirited attack upon the anti-Semitic parties was not an altruistic interest in the well-being of the Jews; rather, the socialists wished to beat back attempts of the antiSemitic parties to win over the proletariat to their paternalistic policies. Socialism sought to immunize the workers against the anti-Semitic contagion, diagnosing it as the false consciousness of expiring classes and a diversion from the class struggle. This is not to say there were never anti-Semitic sentiments expressed by socialist leadership (some of the followers of Lassalle are a case in point) and rank and file, or even an anti-Semitic undercurrent within its discourse, but by and large the socialists were successful in rejecting anti-Semitism in both theory and practice. Along with the Progressives, the SPD was the only party which consistently refused to discriminate against Jews in its nominations to the Reichstag. Between 1881 and 1914, 43 out of 417 socialist Reichstag deputies were Jewish, ten times their representation in the population. Eventually almost half of all Jewish politicians in Germany were social democratic.

The theoretical position of the movement was based on the Marxist analyses of Bernstein, Engels, Kautsky and Bebel, though only Bernstein and Kautsky maintained a constant interest in the "Jewish question." In general, in their analyses it sufficed to demonstrate the social function of anti-Semitism in the class struggle: anti-Semitism served as an instrument to stabilize the current authority structure. In 1890 Engels wrote the first systematic Marxist interpretation of the Jewish question in reaction to the dangers antiSemitism posed to the labor movement. Engels' letter in the WienerArbeiterzeitung

Arbeiterzeitung first classified anti-Semitism as one of the diseases plaguing expiring social classes. Engels appears to have recognized the debt which the socialist movement owed to Jewish intellectuals. He noted with admiration the dedication of German Jewish socialists and the fervor of the Jewish labor movement of Eastern Europe, which had in the meantime arisen. Engels' analysis of anti-Semitism accorded with the current Marxist transition to a Darwinian evolutionary perspective, which contrasted with the idealist dialectics in which Marx had wrestled with the Jewish question almost 50 years earlier....

.... The socialist analysis of anti-Semitism stood neither hostilely nor favorably disposed to Jews themselves. Jews could not continue to exist, nor could Christians, for that matter, because socialism would abolish the social conditions which allowed Christians and Jews to continue to exist and to lock themselves in combat. Socialism diagnosed anti-Semitism as one of the illnesses of a diseased social order. It had no interest in the struggle against anti-Semitism as such, because embedded in its critical analysis of capitalism was the assumption that anti-Semitism would disappear when capitalism did. It would follow as a logical consequence; the struggle against capitalism, therefore, sufficed to address the Jewish question.

The socialist position on anti-Semitism possessed obvious similarities with the earlier one of liberalism. Both saw anti-Semitism as the product of social conditions they proposed to change. AntiSemitism was not "really" anti-Semitism; it was a symptom of something else. Both positions were implicitly reductionist, which allowed them not to recognize Jewishness as a living, different totality, much less commit their energies on behalf of Jews, simply because they were Jews. Jewish interests were subordinated to general interests. It was not as if Jews as a mass offered resistance to this kind of analysis; on the contrary, in their desire to be integrated they were eager to confirm it, if not produce it themselves. Liberalism had attacked anti-Semitism as a means of repressing the citizen; socialism branded it the death rattle of dying classes.

In broader terms, the socialists naively affirmed the liberal Enlightenment conception of the solution to the "Jewish question," i.e., the unproblematic and full integration of the Jews predicated upon their complete assimilation into German society. Kautsky, for example, wrote, "Jews became an eminently revolutionary factor, but Judaism a reactionary one. We are not out of the Middle Ages as long as Judaism exists among us. The sooner it disappears, the better for society and Jews themselves." Apparently Kautsky"s views on the "Jewish question" were considered authoritative within the SPD: "Most German socialists agreed with the anti-Zionist and proassimilationist perspective on the Jewish question propounded by Karl Kautsky in his work Rasse und Judentum..."

....If Judaism were a simple reflex of an economic category, there was no pretext for socialism to take up the defense of the particular interests of the Jews as a religious or ethnic group. August Bebel 1893 book bore the title Sozialdemokratie und Antisemitismus, not Judentum und Sozialdemokratie. In fact it was the anti-Semites who stressed non-material, spiritual factors in history. They postulated an inherent connection between Jews and socialism, regardless of how they evaluated the connection. Materialist analysis was designed to refute what was regarded an inherently reactionary frame of reference. To acknowledge Judaism as an independent Geist would have entailed a violation of theoretical principles and an intellectual capitulation to the enemy.

The conceptual inadequacy of the image of anti-Semitism as political strategy, tool of the bosses, or means of manipulation is that it fails to identify the causes of why one group as opposed to another is chosen as the target of aggression. Anti-Semitism must have already been present if it could be manipulated. But why Jews as opposed to some other social group? I think it is necessary to recognize the independence of the cultural level to understand anti-Semitism, because it is rooted there, in deeply held assumptions of the religious and secular Christian West. But Marxism has been plagued by a reductionist tendency regarding culture and a false universalism which effaces Jewish differences. Socialists were generally not concerned to appreciate the uniqueness of Jews or to enrich themselves with it.

Like the rationalism of the liberal Enlightenment, socialism altogether misconstrued the integrating power of religious symbolism. Socialism's exclusive reliance on socioeconomic categories of analysis prevented it from estimating correctly the emotional and irrational appeal of anti-Semitism.

"Even the socialists failed to see that the process of over-zealous assimilation, far from disposing of the Jewish question in Germany, was in fact aggravating it and multiplying the possibilities of tension and friction," writes Wistrich. Socialists were not in a position to appraise the danger of the prejudice against Jews unleashed by Rassentheorie (racial theory), urban Mittelstand resentment or the Bauernbewegung (peasants' movement) fomented by conservative and clerical groups.

[...]

One under-investigated topic in the literature on German Jews and socialism is an inter-generational conflict within the Jewish community which did not fully crystallize until the 1890s, when a cohort of Jewish university students found their ambitions frustrated by a discriminatory political system. In the 1890s Jews made up 8% of German university students, an astonishing 8 times their presence in the population. The progression of assimilation paradoxically had resulted in a generational conflict within the Jewish community, as the liberal center buckled under the pressure of integration. Both Toury and Hannah Arendt, in her introduction to Walter Benjamin work Illuminations, refer to a conflict between generations which estranged the sons and daughters from the world of their parents and drew them closer to the polar extremes of Zionism and socialism in the later Wilhelmine period. "Older German Jews who voted for the SPD tended to do so because they saw it as the lesser of evils rather than because of a genuine agreement with SPD policies. A large number of young German Jews, however, became genuinely committed to the SPD during the Weimar years," writes Jacobs, who notes this trend had begun earlier, in the latter part of the Wilhelmine era.

In some instances Jews who joined the SPD were or had been subjected to exclusion from an academic career as result of both religious and political affiliations. As a Jew and social democrat, Heinrich Braun, for instance, could not get an academic post despite the strong positive recommendations of prestigious university professors. Leo Arons, a physicist related by marriage to Bismarck's ultra-nationalist financial adviser and confidante Gerson Bleichrder, was driven out of his university position on account of both his Jewishness and SPD affiliation. Arons provided indispensable financial backing to Bloch revisionist journal, Sozialistische Monatshefte.

The deepening assimilation brought on by a secular education occasioned a rebellion against what the intellectual progeny of the Jewish bourgeoisie perceived as the philistinism of their parents, including a hypocritical, mechanical observance of an empty Reform Judaism. They took flight into German culture and politics, where they were rebuffed. It is important to understand that many Jews of this generation were marginal in a double sense: they were alienated not only from German society, which closed its doors to them, but also from the Jewish community, whose houses they had left. It was many of these doubly marginal Jews who were receptive to the message of socialist universalism. Socialism became an emotional outlet for both a generational rebellion and an attempt at a universalistic solution to their predicament. Marx himself may be seen to have prefigured this constellation: his uncle a rabbi, his father a good German Brger. Neither Judaism nor liberal assimilation seemed satisfactory to Marx. Alienation and its transcendence are taken up by Marx as major themes of his early works.

Socialism attracted its Jewish followers mainly from this stratum of alienated, assimilated middle-class intellectuals. What was a trickle in the 1870s became a stream in the 1890s. In the Wilhelminian era the Jewish socialists, who practically all belonged to intellectual professions, sought their cure in politics itself. The majority of socialist Jews were in fact "non-Jewish Jews" who evinced indifference, even hostility toward Judaism. Mannheim's term "free-floating intellectuals" may well have been meant for this sector of the Jewish population. They were not integrated into the cultural institutions of the Reich. They were therefore more receptive to alternative normative orientations. Their educational background positioned them to assume leading roles as intellectuals and theoreticians of socialism. It is also important that they were not implicated in the primary economic institutions of the nation: they stood at a distance, the sacrifice was lighter. Economically Jewish professionals were hardly more distant from the proletariat than from the industrial capitalists.

The Role of Jews In the Socialist Movement

The skills of educated middle-class Jews were much in demand in the party of the proletariat. The cultural capital and educational training of Jews in a party whose membership was recruited primarily from the industrial proletariat enhanced their relative importance....

[...]

While the presence of Jewish intellectuals (especially left radicals such as Rosa Luxemburg) may have stirred resentment in the rank and file as well as some segments of the party hierarchy, there is much evidence that their contributions were highly valued. Engels once commented that the altruism of Jewish socialists distinguished them from the rest of the bourgeoisie. Jewish socialists, after all, shared the common fate of other members of the movement, including exile and imprisonment.

|