The Ordeal of Civility

Secular Jewish Intellectuals as a Modernizing Elite: Jewish Emancipation and the New Nations Compared

If the morally ambiguous stance of the intellectual in the new “under-developed” nations is analogous to that of the new ethnic intellectual in the old “developed” nations, this is a result of an analogy of situation. The Jewish intellectual who today theorizes about the modernizing new na-tions is frequently someone whose family and ethnic situation, not more than a generation or so ago, bore striking resemblances to that of the new nations. Thus these theorists of modernization recall their situation among the goyim of Galveston, Texas, as Marion Levy, Jr. does.¹ Or, remember-ing the demoralization and vulgarity that frequently accompanied mod-ernization, they write, as Daniel Lerner does, a dedication

For My Mother
Louetta Lerner
Who Passed from Traditional Ways
To a Modern Style
With Grace and Dignity. ^{2 3}

Or, the empathy of their situation takes them on a “passage to India” where, like Edward Shils, they write brilliantly of The Intellectual Be-tween Tradition and Modernity: The Indian Situation (1961). Or, as with Irving Louis Horowitz, years of modernization analysis funds itself into an exploration of the situation of Israel and the Diaspora in Israeli Ecstasies/Jewish Agonies (1974).

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It behooves us, then, to spell out in more detail the “modernization” parallels between shtetl and ghetto Jewry, from the time of emancipation until the present, and the situation of other peoples and nations.

Most obviously, the Jews were something like a colony. They were self-governing—with kehillot and super-kehillot—only up to a point. They were segregated, and self-segregated. The nineteenth century was “the century of emancipation,” as it is called: Jews in Europe, Catholics in England, blacks in America, muzhiks in Russia—all were formally “emancipated.” Jews were decolonized, entitled,⁴ granted civil rights.

Another parallel: they were, on the whole, a “backward” and “bar-barous” people, in the unembarrassed language of the early nineteenth century. We are talking here largely of the phenomenon of Eastern Euro-pean Jewry, the proverbial Ostjude. He has always been premodern, “underdeveloped,” precivil. In France, as in Germany, the fundamental factual assumption of the Emancipation debate—the underdeveloped state of the Jewish communities—was never itself in question. “But while the friends of the Jews argued,” writes Miriam Vardeni, “that the Jews’ nega-tive characteristics were a result of persecution, their enemies argued that these characteristics were innate.”⁵ Moses Mendelssohn became Exhibit A in this nurture/nature argument that framed the Jewish Emancipa-tion Proclamation of Napoleon. Lessing told the Germans that, in effect, one of his best friends was a Jew. Mirabeau considered Mendelssohn his most persuasive argument on behalf of Jewish Emancipation. “May it not be said that his example,” he asked the French, “especially the outcome of his exertions for the elevation of his brethren, silences those who, with ignoble bitterness, insist that the Jews are so contemptible that they can-not be transformed into a respectable people?”⁶ The need for Jews to be “advanced” was openly admitted on all sides of the debate. No one de-murred when, iater in Saint Petersburg, a group of Western-educated Jews formed the Society for the Advancement of Culture Among Jews.

I call all this to mind to point up what may be a profound analogy between the Jewish community in the nineteenth century emerging into autonomy in the European system and the Third World nations de-colonized into the international system of today: the earliest ideology, the proto-ideology of Diaspora Jewry, was the “lachrymose” story of their own history. An intellectual or priestly class, we learn from history, emerges with the differentiation of the culture system and its beliefs and values from the social system. Their job is to legitimate the social facts by means of the cultural myths and values. If there is a gap, they bridge it. The “lachrymose” ideology of Jewish history was created by Jewish intellectuals and their Gentile allies to justify the civic emancipation of Jews to the

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Gentile community. Only a Middle Ages rife with persecution could legiti-mate the gap between the Jewish cultural-religious self-conception of superiority, with its customary dose of ethnic narcissism, and the SOITy socioeconomic “look” of the actual Jewish communities. Before Emancipa-tion, Diaspora Jewry explained its Exile—i.e., the discrepancy between its essential chosenness and its “degraded” condition—as a punishment from God for its sins. After Emancipation, this theodicy, now turned outward to a new, Gentile status-audience, becomes an ideology, emphasizing Gen-tile persecution as the root cause of Jewish “degradation.” This ideology was so pervasive that it was shared, in one form or another, by all the ideologists of nineteenth-century Jewry: Reform Jews and Zionists, assimilationists and socialists, Bundists and Communists—all became virtuosos of ethnic suffering. In the ideologies of Marx and Freud, the blame is “impersonalized” and directed toward the “system.”

Of course, there had been massacres and pogroms and Christian anti-Semitism. The point is that these Diaspora groups were uninterested in actual history; they were apologists, ideologists, prefabricating a past in order to answer embarrassing questions, to outfit a new identity, and to ground a claim to equal treatment in the modern world. The result was a predictable division of labor: the story of Christian Jew-hatred was writ-ten by anti-Christian Jews, while the story of Jewish goy-hatred was turned over to Christian anti-Semites. You can be sure that neither worked the other’s territory. A kind of “gentleman’s agreement” pre-vailed. “It was Jewish historiography,” Hannah Arendt writes,

with its strong polemical and apologetical bias, that undertook to trace the record of Jew-hatred in Christian history, while it was left to the anti-semites to trace an intellectually not too dissimilar record from ancient Jewish authorities. When this Jewish tradition of an often violent antagonism to Christians and Gentiles came to light, “the general Jewish public was not only outraged but genuinely astonished,” so well had its spokesmen succeeded in convincing themselves and everybody else of the non-fact that Jewish separate-ness was due exclusively to Gentile hostility and lack of enlighten-ment, Judaism, it was now maintained chiefly by Jewish historians, had always been superior to other religions in that it believed in human equality and tolerance. That this self-deceiving theory, accompanied by the belief that the Jewish people had always been the passive, suffering object of Christian persecutions, actually amounted to a prolongation and modernization of the old myth of chosenness … is perhaps one of those ironies which seem to be in store for those who, for whatever reasons, try to embellish and manipulate political facts and historical records.⁷

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The point of the parallel here is that with many new nations the charge of “imperialism” as an explanation-legitimation of their present “degraded condition” is often a functional equivalent of the Jewish com-munity’s charge of “anti-Semitism.” The statement is frequently doing many jobs of work other than the ostensible one of stating facts. Needless to say, colonialism, like anti-Semitism, has worked its ugly will on de-fenseless peoples. Just as the problems of the modernization of late-comers indigenous (like the Jews) to the West have almost uniformly been discussed in contexts such as anti-Semitism, so now the moderniza-tion problems of latecoming new nations have almost uniformly been discussed in the context of imperialism. “Like most people today,” Marion Levy writes, “I happen to detest imperialism as it has existed and have no desire to deny its evils. I do wish, however, to point out that the morals of imperialists are essentially irrelevant to the problems faced by mem-bers of relatively nonmodernized societies in contact with moderniza-tion.”⁸ The effects of contact and collision between premodern and modern societies and premodern and modern consciousness have been obscured, Levy maintains, by the fact that this contact took the political form of imperialism. It is understandable, therefore, “that it is exceed-ingly difficult to get discussions of the phenomena apart from resentments about, guilt feelings about, or defensive attempts to reinterpret the myriad situations associated with the term ‘imperialism’ throughout the world.”⁹ Again, the paradigm here has been the difficulty of disentangling the phenomena of Jewish premodernity’s contact with Western-Gentile mod-ernization apart from resentments about, guilt feelings about, or defen-sive attempts to reinterpret the myriad situations associated with the term “anti-Semitism” in the West. If, even with the revolution of our choice, the problems of the collision of premodern with modern are still with us, so, even with the ecumenism of our choice, the problems of Jewish-Gentile collision would still be with us, in part because they are a special case of—and prefigure—the modernization collision.

There is an embarrassment of parallels. In the nineteenth century, with the dispersed new Jewish nation struggling to be born—as later with the ingathered Israel—there were many Gentiles in the West who “lent a hand,” as today underdeveloped nations have many ardent spon-sors in the developed countries. What were Gentile Zionists and philo-Semites but an early form of “foreign aid.”¹⁰

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Before the present century was born, communities of post-Emancipa-tion Jewry were exemplifying Boeck’s “lead of the retarded,” with their ethnic-ascriptive solidarities crisscrossing the lonely differentiations of the urban nonkinship Gesellschaften (analogous in this way to class solidari-ties). Talcott Parsons tends to underobserve the staying power of ascrip-tive nexuses in the modern world. (Because ascription and achievement are analytically distinct and polar variables in a long-term evolutionary sense, he fails to see the functions of residual ascription as it prolongs itself into modern, differentiated societies.)

Modernization occurred indigenously and over a long period of time in the West—and, it appears, indigenously only in the West. Western Jewry exhibits many of the advantages and disadvantages of latecomers to that process, for whom modernization was an import or, in the case of the Jews, what the late J. P. Nettl called “an inheritance situation.” In Modernization and the Structure of Societies (1966), Levy lists five ad-vantages and three disadvantages. The principal advantage of latecomers is that the process of modernization is “no longer the sort of terra incognita it was for the indigenous developers” and that they thus have some sense of the transition problems involved. Secondly, there always exists for the latecomer the possibility of borrowing (expertise in plan-ning, capital accumulation, machines, and skills). The problem here, of course, is exactly what do you borrow when you borrow? A tractor, or a form of consciousness? A way of dressing, or a cast of mind? The problematics of the package problem always went, for Jews, under the heading “assimilation.” The latecomer’s third advantage is that of being able “to skip some of the early stages associated with the process of modernization as developed indigenously and gradually.” By taking over the latest inventions, accumulated capital formation is acquired at one stroke (with initial obsolescences avoided). Borrowers are possibly ad-vantaged over developers in taking over social inventions, too (for exam-ple, teaching methods). Post-Emancipation Jewry early exhibited the ad-vantages of a telescoped modernization. The intellectuals among them especially—think of Solomon Maimon—came out of the ghetto at a dead run¹¹ and hurtled themselves proleptically into, if not modernity, then Certain of its aspects. (As with Prussia and Japan, there were drawbacks to being in such a hurry.) A fourth advantage of the latecomer is knowl-edge—sketchy as it may be—of where the modernization scenario may lead. He can point to certain possible fruits, outcomes, results. The mediating intellectual can activate his people—in the case at hand the Jewish masses, the Ostjuden—with the charm of prospects and possibil-ity. Levy’s last advantage is simply the advantage of the modernized society to latecomers: they are able to help.¹²

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Among the disadvantages for the latecomers to the modernization process is the problem of scale. Levy is thinking here of the generally high levels of literacy, for example, necessary in large proportions of the population if the modernizing facilities (schools, communications, govern-ment) are to be effectively staffed. This disadvantage—or dilemma— may be transposed into the dilemma faced by the socially mobile nineteenth-century Jewish intellectual: “Should I assimilate as an”excep-tion Jew, " he asked himself, “improving myself, wending my private way in bourgeois society, making my ‘separate peace’? Or will I never be really ‘emancipated’ and modernized unless I enlarge the public scale of my latecoming modernization so as to include my fellow Ostjuden, sunk in the traditionary, Orthodox past?” Gradual, indigenous development usually mitigates this painful choice between self-enhancement and group enhancement, egoism and altruism, liberty and equality.¹³

A second special disadvantage and frustration for latecomers is the scandal of the continuing gap between what indigenous members of highly modernized societies have achieved and what even the successful latecomers are able to attain. Even if closed in relative terms, this gap may continue to grow rather than lessen in absolute terms with the pas-sage of time. Thus we have here a form of relative deprivation on an international scale. Nations today are internationally stratified on a modernization scale the same way individuals within a modern nation—as — well as the groups to which these individuals belong—are ranked by domestic stratification systems. Lateral entry into this stratification sys-tem generates painful self-disesteem.

The final disadvantage singled out by Levy brings us to our deepest level of comparison between post-Emancipation Jewry and the decolo-nialized Third World and simultaneously brings us directly to what Peter Berger calls the bricolage—versus—the “seamless robe” scenarios of the modernization process.¹⁴ “The members of a relatively nonmodernized society,” Levy writes, and we must apply this to the Jews from the time of Emancipation until now, “see before them many and various results of the process in which they are, or are about to become, involved. These appeal to them in varying degrees, and almost inevitably the popular leaders, the influential persons, or the society’s members in general are obsessed with the belief that they can take what they please and leave the rest.”¹⁵ They know something about the results of modernization; they may have seen Leningrad or Indianapolis; they know what they don’t want; they believe themselves thus advantaged over the indig-enous developer. But they are thus likely to be quite sure that they think they know where they are going and not going. They assume willy-nilly the posture of the consumer of modernity. They imagine them-

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selves in a supermarket. They will pick and choose. “The result is likely to be an interplay among old and new factors of a particularly explosive character,” writes Levy. “The very discrepancy between their planning and their results constitutes a special disruption for them.”¹⁶

Levy, though not opting for the extreme version of the “seamless robe” theory, nevertheless finds the keynote of relatively modernized so-cieties in “the fact of general interdependence itself.” The core of interde-pendence, in turn, he finds in “the diminished levels of self-sufficiency” that go with the modern division of labor in specialized organizations and subsystems. With modernization, the older “relatively high levels of self-sufficiency of the various organizations is lowered” and “the mere fact that [the newcomer] is aware of more alternative organizations to his own family makes a difference.” The “density of avoidant¹⁷ relationships per person per day” radically increases.¹⁸

Levy vigorously attacks the bricolage theory as romantic: “The myth of easy independent selectivity from among the social structures of highly modernized societies,” he writes, “must be recognized for what it is and has always been—a hybrid of wishful thinking and sentimental piety.”¹⁹ Questions such as private and public ownership, concepts like capital-ism, communism, or socialism, get us nowhere, since these differences do not touch on the strategic factors differentiating the structures of modernized from relatively nonmodernized societies. The structures of modernization “can never simply be imported piecemeal. That is to say,” Levy explains, and this is what makes the hope of ethnic pluralism as utopian, ultimately, as the wish for total assimilation, “the members of relatively nonmodernized societies … can never simply take over what they want or what fits in well with the rest of their social structures and leave the rest. This is the fatally romantic element best propounded by F. S. C. Northrop. He holds that a good and proper state of mankind in-heres in a combination of what he seems to regard as a sort of combina-tion of the best of the East and the West.”²⁰ Modernity for Levy is “sub-versive” of traditional societies, disintegrating them. His preferred image of modernization is of a “solvent”‘—he refers, e.g., to a “peculiarly sol-vent effect” that “invades” and “erodes” with “explosive subversion” the Structures of relatively nonmodernized societies; “a sort of universal sol-vent”; and a sort of universal social solvent’ (my emphasis) that dissolves premodern social structures.²¹

Despite the appearances of a formidable functionalist scholasticism, Levy’s 855-page Modernization and The Structure of Societies is a very Personal testament and should be read as such.²² He tells us on page 79

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that “I grew up in Galveston, Texas, a member of a family long of that place,” and of the “dramatic” discrepancy between his particularist, pre-modern upbringing, with its fixed horizons and closed future, and the structures of modern American society. He experienced the crisis of modernity in his own person, as well as the havoc it wreaks on tradi-tionary, particularistic values. He came to see the need for socializing his own children into modernity, into an open future. “In this context,” he writes, “it is easy to understand the importance of a predominantly universalistic ethic.”²³ And it is in this context also that he dedicates his book to—among others—Talcott Parsons, “from whom,” he writes, “one could always learn without having to agree.”²⁴

Right or wrong, Levy’s thesis sums up some of the hard-earned experi-ence of post-Emancipation Jewry in its encounter with the structures of the modernizing West. The modernity of the West acted as a solvent upon the premodern structures of shtetl Jewry: it tended to dissolve their cul-ture system, their social system, their personality structures. Levy sums up all of this experience in two significant sentences: “The structures of relatively modernized societies can never be imported entirely piece-meal,” he writes. “Whether introduced by force or voluntary means, more is introduced than is bargained for or understood.”²⁵

You get more than you bargained for or understand. Here we have an echo of the “contract theory” of Jewish Emancipation: “We did not read the fine print,” the complaint runs; “we only wanted the right to vote and walk your streets as free men: ‘men in the street, Jews at home.’ Emancipation doesn’t mean having to marry you, or eat with you, or become like you. And now, look at our children and grandchildren: they’re all beginning to wear your seamless robes.”

This is “The Brutal Bargain,” as Norman Podhoretz entitles the first chapter of Making It. Looking back on the Gentile Mrs. K of his Browns-ville boyhood, who took him in hand as the psychopompess of his initia-tion into “high” Gentile taste, he writes: “What seemed most of all to puzzle Mrs. K., who saw no distinction between taste in poetry and taste in clothes, was that I could see no connection between the two…. How could she have explained to me … that a distaste for the surroundings in which I was bred, and ultimately (God forgive me) even for many of the people I loved, and so a new taste for other kinds of people—how could she have explained that all this was inexorably entailed in the logic of a taste for the poetry of Keats and the painting of Cézanne and the music of Mozart?”²⁶ In that oil company in Kuwait, in that steel mill set down in India, or in the more generalized forces of modernity, in the rationality immanent in technology, in the arbitrariness and functional specificity immanent in bureaucracy, in urbanization with its “world of strangers,” in social pluralization as such, in, finally, modernity’s very differentiatedness, is there not entailed a logic as inexorable as that entailed in Keats, Cézanne, and Mozart?²⁷

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From the earliest days of Emancipation, the Jewish intelligentsia in Diaspora used for its own purposes versions of the conservative distinc-tion between the “pays légale” and the “pays réel.” The advent of the French Revolution disembedded the legal system from its premodern matrices much as the Industrial Revolution disembedded—at least in theory—a purely market nexus from its feudal and mercantile capitalist matrices. To appeal from the actual culture, where it all hangs together —the pays réel—to the rights of the citizen—the pays légale—may be seen as an early form of the refusal of the total Western package. Was it a kind of practice session in bricolage-theory? (The ACLU carries on this tradition today, forcing logically legal test cases that take prayers out of public schools and Christmas créches off village greens, with the American Jewish Congress a frequent amicus curiae.) Is there a difference between trying to disassemble components of the modern West in the West and im-porting its already disassembled parts into a noncontiguous foreign country? That is, being already in the West, near the area of technological production, was it more difficult for the Jewish community to take the modernizing package apart than for a people farther away? Can one buy the industrial package without the Western European civilization package? Are hopes and dreams of such a differentiation utopian? Which elements are differentiable? Is industrialism a kind of importable Un-terbau, with social modernization a relinquishable superstructure?

In the meantime, though, post-Emancipation Jewry had to live with the whole package, they had to live the Diaspora. Ideologies were cognitive strategies for doing this. We have spoken of the “lachrymose” ideology of their own history. Nevertheless, the very presence of the modernizing West constituted what Matossian calls an “assault.” “Many of our ancestors,” writes Michael Polanyi, “recognizing themselves as disgracefully backward, were overwhelmed by the contact with a superior civilization.”²⁸ They had imported, in other words, the consciousness of underdevelopment, what Jules Isaac calls “the teaching of contempt.” Out of this, I believe, came early the ideology of Hebraism—namely, that whereas “you may be a superior civilization (whatever that is), we, in our political and economic impotence, are a superior moral heritage.” There is Hellenism, which is pagan, perhaps civilized, and with an eye to beauty, but greater ’still is Hebraism, with its concern for justice and its superior morality. From Luzzatto to Heine (from whom Arnold got it) and beyond to Hermann Cohen (1842-1914) and the Marburg neo-Kantians, this is a major theme of alienated Diaspora intellectual Jewry. It is the “moralistic style’ of the modern oppositional intelligentsia. If earlier intellectual strata emerged as a priestly caste to legitimate by fudging the embarrassing gaps between culture and society (between profession and practice), the later,”outsider" prophetic intellectuals emerged to widen these gaps, to expose them, to delegitimate the rela-tion of the culture’s values to its social system practice. Like Max Weber’s

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double theodicies, Hebraism as ideology gave meaning to Jewish civiliza-tional inferiority and moral superiority at one stroke. In his great essay “Maule’s Well, or Henry James and the Relation of Morals to Manners,” the late critic Yvor Winters speaks of the spiritual antagonism between a rising provincial civilization—he is thinking of nineteenth-century America—and a more central, richer civilization—he is thinking of nineteenth-century Europe. In this contest, he writes, as we have noted previously, “the provincial civilization met the obviously superior culti-vation of the parent with a more or less typically provincial assertion of moral superiority.” This theme, he says, obsesses James, Cooper, and Mark Twain.²⁹

When Jewry was physically peripheral to Europe, locked into its shtetlach in the pale, this provincial assertion of moral superiority, of moral purism, was that of a spatial outsider, a geographical provincial. With Emancipation into Europe, the axis of this moralism shifted from a horizontal to a vertical plane, splitting into the toplofty “mission to the Gentiles” of Reform Judaism on the one hand and, on the other, into Marx’s underclass of society and Freud’s underside of personality. In each case, proletariat and id were invested with a subversively pure moral critique of the hypocritical, if superior, civilization of the West. (In passing, it may be said that the attempt of Jurgen Habermas to find in what he chooses to call “the Jewish sensibility in Marxism” a heritage of Jewish “cabbala and mysticism” is as misguided as David Bakan’s earlier attempt to tie Freud to the Jewish mystical tradition.³⁰ These mystical interpretations cry out for demystification.)

It is here, I think, that we have a far-reaching convergence of the role of the Jewish intelligentsia for 150 years within the European system and the modernizing elite of many of the new nations: the moral pas-sions become the’ruling passions, become special pleaders. Lionel Trilling once wrote, in a Burkean essay entitled “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” “that the moral passions are even more willful and imperious and im-patient than the self-seeking passions.”³¹ It is Susan Sontag, we recall, who notes that “the Jews pinned their hopes for integrating into modern society on promoting the moral sense.”³²

A final parallel between the modernizing elite of the new nations and the modernizing intelligentsia of Diaspora Jewry will close this explora-tion in comparative analysis: the members of each of these mediatorial elites were burdened with the necessity not only of taking moral stances but of choosing a language in which to express them. The immigrant in-tellectual issuing from the Yiddish-speaking world of Eastern Europe, like the black African today, faced the crisis of cultural loss involved in the loss of the home language, the mama-loshen. As John Updike writes,

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The black African moved to literary expression confronts choices a Westerner need not make. First, he must choose his language—the European language, with its alien tradition and colonial associations or the tribal language, with its oral tradition and minuscule reading audience. Unless his mother and father came from different tribes and used a European tongue as lingua franca in the home, his heart first learned to listen in the tribal language, which will forever then be more pungent and nuancée; but English and French command the far broader audience, across Africa and throughout the world. So he must choose his audience.³³

“For whom does one write?” is a question that forces itself with madden-ing insistence on the literary intellectual representatives of a modernizing “underdeveloped” people, trapped in the moral and cultural ambiguities of “delayed modernization.”

“We were in some ways,…” Leslie Fiedler writes of his Freshman Composition class at City College of New York in the late thirties, “like a class in an occupied country, a group of Alsatians or Czechs, say, under a German master.” “We were forbidden Yiddishisms as we were for-bidden slang; and though we had our censors outnumbered, our ignorance and shame kept us powerless.” Thus were urban Jews force-fed a language “whose shape was determined by antiquated rules of etiquette (usually called ‘grammar’),… a language capable of uttering only the most correctly tepid Protestant banalities no matter what stirred in our alien innards.” Fiedler enlisted in a kulturkampf against these WASP “standards of an established alien taste…. I would know,” he writes, “what I wrote against as well as for: against their taste as well as for our own.”³⁴

Not unconnected with this question about what sociologists call “the institution of language” is another, about social and cultural institutions: How does’ one behave? In life? In literature? “Can you explain,” novelist Philip Roth asks himself, “why you are trying to come on like a bad boy— although in the manner of a very good boy indeed? Why quarrel, in decorous tones no less, with decorum?”³⁵