The Ordeal of Civility

Marx and the Euphemists

The whole of the nineteenth century can be viewed as a search for the proper set of euphemisms with which to talk about the “Jewish question.” The stage was set in 1781 with the publication of Christian Wilhelm von Dohm’s pamphlet Uber die biirgerliche Verbesserung der Juden: On the Civic Betterment of the Jews. But what did this well-intentioned Gentile Dohm—“the outstanding advocate of Jewish emanci-pation in eighteenth century Prussia,” according to Hannah Arendt¹ —mean by his phrase “civic betterment”? Logically, Jacob Katz points out, the “subject of the implied verb verbesseren is society, the Jews themselves, or probably both.”² And this, indeed, was Dohm’s proposal: for civic improvement to occur, both society and Jewry would have to mend their ways. Dohm “accepted the prevailing evaluation of the Jews,” Katz writes, “as a politically incapacitated and morally degenerate group.” He had not written, Dohm replied to his critics, an apologia for the Jews as they are but—vide the title—as they will be.³⁴ Thus, the idea of self-improvement as a precondition for civil rights—a debate that was revived in the form of “functional prerequisites for a stable democracy” only at thé end of World War II with reference to decolonization (and after 1950 with reference to civil rights for American blacks )—was being publicly debated at the end of the eighteenth century in reference to Jews.

Thus, Jews and non-Jews alike who in the decades following Dohm’s work fought for the betterment of Jews’ civic and social situation did so, Katz notes, “under the assumption that at the same time a civic and moral self-improvement on the part of the Jews was necessary.” Thus the “objective” appraisal that the access of Jews to Western bourgeois civil society would require a goodly amount of “adjustment and self-adaptation,” to use “value-free” terminology, was actually “couched in terms of moral judgment, stating that the Jews must become not only different but better.” Not a little of this transposition of the “Jewish question” into the key of morals is due to Dohm’s “Verbesserung,” a term remaining in use for almost half a century.⁵

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But not everyone was equally pleased at that way of talking about the “Jewish question.” There is the pathos of Jews like Moses Mendels-sohn who welcomed Dohm’s initiative in behalf of Jews yet found his estimate of the current “cultural depravity” of the Jew difficult to swal-low. In hailing Dohm’s book, Mendelssohn “characteristically dropped the term biirgerliche Verbesserung, substituting in its stead biirgerliche Auf-nahme: that is, civil acceptance. Inadvertently, perhaps,” Katz adds, “he interpreted Dohm’s term as referring to the state, which had to improve the Jews’ status.”⁶ Here we see, not some inadvertence, as Katz suggests, but an early form of a structural element in the “Jewish Emancipation problematic” that recurs throughout its history.

The discoveries in science of Copernicus, Darwin, and himself, Freud wrote in 1917, by toppling man from his privileged position at the center of things (things cosmological, biological, and psychological, respectively), wounded “the general narcissim of man.”⁷ If the self-love of Gentile humanity was, these three times, severely wounded by discoveries in science, the ethnic narcissism of the Jew suffered all at once a grievous trauma by its discovery of nineteenth-century European civilization. In the pre-Emancipation era, Jewry could maintain the illusion of its privi-leged position by maintaining the plausibility of its expectation of the long-deferred messianic reversal. A credible theodicy was always ready to hand to explain “the problem of evil”’—-namely, the present (and hence apparent) inferiority of the Jewish people vis-a-vis the present (and hence apparent) superiority of the surrounding goyim. Solomon Maimon, for example, recalls an incident from his Polish boyhood (he was later to visit, and embarrass by his behavior, Mendelssohn and his circle in Berlin). One day, Prince Radzivil, a great lover of the chase, came with his daughter Princess Radzivil and his whole court to hunt in Maimon’s neighborhood. The young princess, needing rest, came with the ladies and servants of her court “to the very room,” Maimon writes in his celebrated Autobiography,

where as a boy I was sitting behind the stove. I was struck with astonishment at the magnificence and splendor of the court…. I could not satisfy my eyes with the sight. My father came in just as I was beside myself with joy, and had broken into the words, “Oh, how beautiful!” In order to calm me, and at the same time to confirm me in the principles of our faith, he whispered into my ear, “Little fool, in the other world the duksel will kindle the pezsure for us,” which means, In the future life the princess will kindle the stove for us.⁸

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“No one can conceive the sort of feeling this statement produced in me,” recalls Maimon, supplying precious testimony on the waning of the Jew-ish “middle ages”:

On the one hand, I believed my father, and was very glad about this future happiness in store for us…. On the other hand, I could not get it into my head that this beautiful rich princess in this splendid dress could ever make a fire for a poor Jew. I was thrown into the greatest perplexity on the subject.⁹

Jewish Emancipation in the next century consists in a humiliating series of such encounters of the theodicy of Jewish Exile with the West. On every such contact, the plausibility of the explanation of why the people of the Covenant need “betterment,” and why the surrounding goyim are riding so high, comes under considerable strain. “Little Jewish boys,” Margaret Mead writes, “read the stories of Polish heroes, with admiration as well as with the required disapproval, covert admiration” coexisting uneasily with overt disapproval of the lure of the “world more attractive” existing beyond the pale of the Eastern European shtetl.¹⁰ “The core concept that embodies and integrates the whole Jewish experience in the Diaspora,” writes Ben Halpern, “is the idea of Exile,… a ban of penance, … living in expiatory subjection to the Gentiles.”¹¹ Emancipation puts this core concept under increasingly more strain. Traditional ethnic self-esteem eases this tension and maintains Jewry’s morale by the stance it takes up toward the past, the present, and the future. (The matter might be put as follows: Jewish secularization takes place in three tenses.) As far as the condition of the Jews goes, at any given time the need for “betterment” due to “degradation,” “inferiority,” (call it what you will) can be either affirmed or denied. If it is affirmed, then it will be ex-plained by the past. The traditional, observant Jew will explain it as part of sacred salvation history—that is, it is a punishment for Israel’s sins. The secularizing, intellectual Jew will turn this theodicy inside out, forg-ing it into an instrument with which to blame the Gentile. The older, intrapunitive theodicy becomes an exteropunitive sociodicy: “You made us what we are today,” the secularist intelligentsia of the Diaspora will insist, indicting the Gentile West, creating what Salo Baron calls the “lachrymose” historiography of the Jews.¹² The culture of the West being what it is—Christian—the victim-status carries considerable prestige. This victim-status, derived from the Christ-figure,* becomes for Jews almost irresistible when to its pathos is added the attraction of the fact that it is liberal Gentiles of impeccable status like Dohm who themselves offer past anti-Semitism as the overall explanation for the present Jewish “condition.” Historically, Katz writes, Christian Dohm "lays the blame for the civic and moral deterioration of Jewry on Christian society, which debarred Jews from using their abilities and exercising their innate moral qualities. But his diagnosis of the fact of deterioration, or perhaps even

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degradation, was accepted with little hesitancy.“¹³ Dohm’s description of the present degradation of the Jews was”accepted with little hesi-tancy" precisely because—and this is another recurring feature of the problematic of Jewish Emancipation—it was coupled with the anti-Semitism explanation of the origin of this degradation. It was coating on a bitter pill. This “package”—coriceding Jewry’s ignominy, pledging better-ment, explaining it by Jew-hate—is the formula for both the classical liberal Jewish adjustment to the Diaspora and its counterpart among the goyim, liberal Gentile philo-Semitism. This Diaspora liberalism divides once more into. two varieties: the militant activist liberalism whose prov-enance is among Eastern European Jewry and which, throwing over the passivity of the rabbinical halakah, organized for autoemancipation; and the more assimilated liberalism of Western Jewry, which threw off the traditional legal system only to replace it with the restraints of the Gentile halakah of civility. (To this day, the thrust of the former type of liberalism is reflected in the American Jewish Congress, as the latter is in the Amer-ican Jewish Committee.¹⁴)

The liberal Jewish adjustment for living-the-Diaspora, then, was to concede present Jewish shortcomings contingent upon Gentile admis-sion of Christian shortcomings both past and present. In the Diaspora ideology of liberalism, in other words, anti-Semitism was not a phenom-enon of interaction, a “tragic but inevitable’ outcome of”Jews in a Gentile world," but was almost entirely an input from the Gentile side of the line, gratuitous, willful, unnecessary. The Diaspora ideologies of Zionism and radical Marxism directly challenged Diaspora liberalism’s diagnosis of the past and the present and its hopes for the future. Zion-ists, for their part, “held to a sociological doctrine that Jew-hatred was necessarily caused by Jewish homelessness and would disappear when the national home was built and the exiled Jewish masses were gath-ered in.” The symmetrical] ideology of universalistic Marxism was identi-cal in this respect to Zionism: “Jewish radicals analyzed anti-Semitism as incidental to the class struggle and expected it to disappear in the ruins of the capitalist system. Those who made a direct attack on anti-Semitism,” Halpern concludes, “were Jewish liberals”¹⁵ (my emphasis). In this way, the disesteem and “self-hate” structural to the experience of dispersion into the West could be muted. Zionists planned to heal at one stroke the wound to national self-esteem by leaving Europe—and by leaving behind the invidious comparisons fatal to remaining there. Marxists planned to kill the “Jewish question” by revolution, not emigra-

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tion: at one stroke, all would be changed, changed utterly, as a species-humane community is born. The ideology of Diaspora liberalism was es-’sentially a decision and a utopian dream: it was the decision to remain in the West (neither emigrating nor revolting); it was the dream that, by dint of nudzhing and kvetching, litigation and voting, education and modernization, a neutral society might awake from the nightmare of history, offering neutral spaces and public places where Jew and Gentile might mingle civilly and socially, a social system in which differences in culture made no difference in society.

But the question that remained for Diaspora liberalism was how best to talk about those differences between Jew and Gentile that per-sisted. The search for the proper set of euphemisms with which to talk about the “Jewish question” continued unabated. Mendelssohn, as we have seen, dropped (not so inadvertently) Dohm’s term “civic betterment” (biirgerliche Verbesserung ) for “civil acceptance” (biirgerliche Aufnahme). Mirabeau journeys from Paris to Berlin. He had read and was duly im-pressed by Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, arriving in Berlin just after the death of its real-life hero, Mendelssohn. He attends the salon of Henriette Herz, intervenes with Frederick II in favor of her people, and reads Dohm’s Civic Betterment. Emulating Dohm and C. F. Nicolai, the comte de Mirabeau soon publishes his own apologia for the Jews, Moses Mendelssohn et la reforme politique des Juifs.¹⁶ “Civic betterment” has taken on a French accent and been politicized into “political:reform.” But in Germany the idea of the self-improvement of the Jews as a pre-condition for full civil rights gains more and more currency after the Congress of Vienna in 1815; Dohm’s very term is used in its documents.¹⁷ Finally, by way of the public discussion of Catholic Emancipation in England, the term “emancipation’—not used prior to 1828 in Germany —begins to take hold as a way of talking about the”Jewish question" and, in the end, expropriates all others. “Emancipation” as a euphemism for talking about the “Jewish question” defeats all its rivals because it gets rid of any notion of self-improvement as a precondition for civil

rights on the part of Jews, and, by being a political term purely and simply, it rids the “problem” of any lingering suggestion that there might be nonpolitical qualifications—bourgeois qualifications—for political citi-zenship. It cuts off in advance any idea that there might be a possible connection between the rudimentary political rights of civil society and the bourgeois social rites of polite society. “Emancipation” has the’ addi-tional advantage, from the side of Diaspora liberalism, of implying that the pre-Emancipation status of Jews in the Gentile world—accounting for all their subsequent disabilities—was one of slavery. Sir Isaiah Berlin merely draws out the implications of the term itself when he writes, in 1961, his Jewish Slavery and Emancipation.¹⁸ European Jewry, then, in its non-Zionist, non-Marxist mainstream, becomes—in both its own and

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in liberal Gentile eyes—the earliest of those “belligerent communities of pathos” of which Renate Mayntz speaks.¹⁹ With the emergence of this pathos of the victim a mystique is born; henceforth, Gentile liberalism will be inseparable from bourgeois-Christian philo-Semitism.²⁰

It is a revealing cultural circumstance that so many of the Diaspora ideologies begin their “revolutions” in revolt against euphemism. Freud’s psychoanalysis deeuphemizes sex, the id, which represents, as we have seen, the pre-Emancipated Jew. The “civilized” sexual morality of West-ern civil society, Freud argues, inclines us “to concealment of the truth, to euphemism, to self-deception, and the deception of others.”²¹ Theo-dore Herzl’s Zionism really began on January 5, 1895, when, as corres-pondent for the Vienna Neue Freie Presse covering the public degrada-tion in Paris of Captain Dreyfus, he heard the mob scream “Death to Jews!” (“A mort! A mort les juifs!”) The liberal Jewish editors of the Neue Freie Presse altered the text of Herzl’s dispatch in their Sunday edition, universalizing, that is, euphemizing it to read: “Death to the traitor!” “Even if we grant, on insufficient grounds,” Herzl’s biographer, Alex Bein writes,

that it was really a traitor who was being condemned and degraded, the attitude of the crowd was—according to the report—a strange one. We read, in the Neue Freie Presse, that the crowd shouted: “Death to the traitor!” This is quite comprehensible—but there is something incomplete about it. We cannot avoid the impression that Herzl’s telegrams were edited before they were printed, and it was fear that motivated the excisions. It is unlikely that Herzl … had himself colored the report. Four years afterwards there still rang in his ears the shouts of the crowd, which left him shattered: “A mort! A mort les juifs!”²²

Politeness, perhaps even more than fear, motivated the excision and the resulting euphemism (the substitution for “Jews” of the more abstract “traitors”). There was a contradiction between the coarse bluntness of Herzl’s dispatch and what Hannah Arendt calls in another context “the hypocritical politeness which surrounded the Jewish question in all re-spectable quarters.”²³ This politeness and euphemism existed in Marx’s time, in all respectable quarters. In fact, such politeness and euphemism defined respectability. It is this cultural situation that will make it all but inevitable that the anti—philo-Semitism of Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question” will be misread, when it appears in 1844, as unadulterated anti-Semitism.