The Ordeal of Civility

The Ancient Judenfrage

Freud came out of the Jewish Middle Ages only to enter the Jewish middle classes. Entering a highly developed and developing Europe, coming from behind, like Marx—and all the other intellectuals of the nineteenth-century Diaspora—he developed a modernization “complex.” The very “backwardness” of shtetl Yiddishkeit gave its sons a kind of perspective from behind, à rebours, on the civilization of Europe. If you will, a “lead of the retarded” took the form of the “punitive objectivity” of the nonmember. To accept the achievement of Western modernization at its own self-estimation would have been to downgrade themselves. And who enjoys doing that? Shtetl ascriptivities, as they prolonged themselves into the Europe of Jewish Emancipation, revealed surprising and embarrassing staying power. What was normal in the shtetl Gemeinschaft looked bad in the West. Jewry, in general, was making a “scene” in Gesellschaft, and everybody knew it, though few would admit it: the Jews were too ashamed, the liberal Gentiles too “nice.” Marx had declared it openly from the start, using it as the fulcrum of his “Marxism.” (He was rewarded by being called a “self-hater,” a Jewish anti-Semite.)

The problem renews itself again and again, as “Jewish Emancipation” occurs again and again. Freud’s critique of the developmental vicissitudes of the sexual instinct in the European modernization process was structurally equivalent to Marx’s critique of the proud boast of European “civil society” (as Hegel had rendered it) to have overcome the egoism of bourgeois economic self-interest after its emancipation from feudal controls. Marx unmasked this false universalization, claiming that the state had not “assimilated” these egoistic interests—had not “refined them behind their back,” so to speak—into identification with the Common Good of the political community, but that, on the contrary, these individual- and group-particularistic interests were using the “universal” state as a means to their end. The tail was wagging the dog. For Marx, Jewish “pariah capitalism” was “exhibit A” in the failure of the state to “assimilate” bourgeois society, and for him it revealed, in coarse an unmistakable form—more “honestly,” so to speak—the very greed that the more “spiritual” Christian businessmen concealed beneath the proprieties and civilities of their economic and social exchanges.

Freud faced in Western Europe, analogously, what Weber calls the “erotic sublimation of sexuality.” Instead of seeing in it what Durkheim in Paris and Simmel in Berlin were to see—a social-institutional “transsubstantiation” of the psychological—Freud saw only sentimentality and moral hypocrisy, Western-Christian efforts to refine the irredeemably coarse, a tender-minded “looking the other way.” Freud’s critique of the claims for the development of the sexual instinct becomes a metaphor for his critique of Western development generally. “The coprophilic elements in the [sexual] instinct have proved incompatible with our aesthetic ideas…. A considerable proportion of the sadistic elements belonging to the erotic instinct has to be abandoned,” he concedes, but, lest we mistake his thrust, he adds:

All such developmental processes, however, relate only to the upper layers of the complicated structure. The fundamental processes which promote erotic excitation [for Marx read: economic exploitation] remain always the same. Excremental things are all too intimately and inseparably bound up with sexual things; the position of the genital organs—inter urinas et faeces—remains the decisive and unchangeable factor…. The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty; they have retained their animal cast.¹

“And so,” Freud concludes, “even today love, too, is, in essence as animal as it ever was”² (my emphasis). Freud, looking at sexual activity in the West (as Marx had looked at economic activity) finds all its social institutionalization to be so much sublimation, so much “superstructural” disguise of coarse “nature” underneath. He asks of his followers that they not be “taken in by” this superstructure, that they not be suckered by appearances. “The basis of all this,” Max Weber notes, “is to be found in the naturalism of the Jewish ethical treatment of sexuality.”³ To the economic naturalism of Marx, emergent Western capitalism was mere greed all dressed up in Sunday clothes; to the sexual naturalism of Freud, “love in the Western world” (de Rougemont) is “id” tricked out as “Eros,” is like a “Yid” trying to “pass” as a goy. This is the fundamental metaphor. Freud finds the sexual instinct in the West “essentially” untransformed, unassimilated. It is stuck between pariah and parvenu much as the Jew, socially, is between pariah and parvenu. Freud is, so to speak, ego—between id on one side and superego (Gentile sociocultural demands) on the other. He warns against assimilation, against “conversion.” The id-“Yid” is essentially untransformable (in Jew as in Gentile). One cannot—one must not—replace the id by the superego (the Jew by the Gentile); one can—one should—replace the id by the ego: “Where Id was, there shall Ego be.” Freud sets himself a twofold task: to mediate “his own” people from the “darkness” of Yiddishkeit to the “enlightenment” of science (ego)—that is, to modernize them—but warning them against going all the way over to the superego (against becoming Gentiles)—that is, to prevent their becoming “civilized” in the Western sense. His other task is to unmask the gentility of the Gentile. Freud, as a transitional figure, a kind of New Moses, will “take apart” the package of the modernization process offered to “his people” by the new Egyptians among whom they sojourn, and separate the modernization process from the (Western-Christian-sublimational) civilizational process. He will use the naturalism of his own subculture as a knife to cut this Western package in two.

In the West, the ascetic ethic of Protestantism was in the process of penetrating, mastering, and transforming both the public world of economic and social intercourse (where one “performed contracts” and “exchanged civilities”) and the private world of sexual intercourse. Innerworldly restraint was to be the great instrument of this transformation. Coarse greed and lust were being “gentled.” “Love taught him shame, and shame, with love at strife, / Soon taught the sweet civilities,” wrote England’s seventeenth-century poet laureate John Dryden in Cymon and Iphigenia (line 133). The fierce giants of Diaspora intellectual Jewry scorned all this emergent bourgeois-Christian “niceness” as so much hypocrisy, as a lure, ultimately, to conversion to that “pale Galilean” who had taught—so Matthew Arnold was saying—“sweetness and light.” The Western-Christian claim to have linked decisively the outer with the inner, to have integrated outer conduct—economic, social, and sexual—with the inwardness of feeling and conviction, was rejected by the descendants of Judaism in Galut. Diaspora in the West forced a bitter choice on the emancipated Jewish intelligentsia (ultimately, also, on the Jewish “masses”): either Yiddishkeit lacked something and the West had something to offer, or Yiddishkeit had something and the West had nothing (essentially) to offer. In the former case, assimilation or conversion was in order, to acquire that “something”; in the latter case, reduction rather than conversion was indicated—that is, an essentially reductive analysis that would strip the apparently “superior” culture of its apparent superiority (thus elevating the apparently “inferior” and marginal subculture). In part, such a “confrontation” of cultures is a special case of the general theme of “the spiritual antagonism,” Yvor Winters writes, “between the rising provincial civilization and the richer civilization,… an antagonism in which the provincial civilization [read: the subculture of the shtetl] met obviously superior cultivation … with a more or less typically provincial assertion of moral superiority.”⁴⁵

Max Weber, for his part, finds the differences in the Diaspora encounter to be ultimately structural and religious in origin:

Above all, what was lacking in Judaism was the decisive hall-mark of that inner-worldly type of asceticism whichy is directed toward the control of this world: an integrated relationship to the world from the point of view of the individual’s proof of salvation (certitudo salutis), which proof in conduct nurtures all else. Again in this important matter, what was ultimately decisive for Judaism was the pariah character of the religion and the promises of Yahweh. An ascetic management of this world … was the very last thing of which a. traditionally pious Jew would have thought. He could not think of methodically controlling the present world, which was so topsy-turvy because of Israel’s sins, and which could not be set right by any human action but only by some free miracle of God that could not be hastened … The Jew’s responsibility was to make peace with this recalcitrancy, while finding contentment if God sent him grace and success in his dealings with the enemies of his people, toward whom he must act soberly and legalistically, in fulfillment of the injunctions of the rabbis. This meant acting toward non-Jews in an objective or impersonal manner, without love and without hate, solely in accordance with what was permissible.⁶

Freud’s stance vis-a-vis “this recalcitrancy” of the id is not to recommend its transformation (assimilation) but precisely “to make peace with it.” This is Freud’s well-known “stoicism,” and here we find its non-Greek provenance. Freud the Jew rejected the claims of Protestant alchemy to have turned this base sexuality into the gold of love. Lust, no more than greed, could not be set right by any human action, “but only by some free miracle of God [in which Freud, of course, no longer literally believed] that could not be hastened.”⁷ The delayed Parousia had caused the Calvinists to retract from the “end of days” the magic of the messianic event—in a kind of reversal of prolepsis—back into the present where it became attenuated into the everyday magic of secular Protestant self-control. Freud was a principled disbeliever in the transformative claims of this Protestant magic; sexuality is better left with a professional marriage broker (Schadchen) than to the uplift of a Protestant minister. The Schadchen “quite explicitly rated, bargained for, and exchanged all human qualities as if they were commodities which could be given an exact price.”⁸ Sexual activity, for Freud, remained its old, coarse, recalcitrant self. In economic activity, for Marx (until the Revolution comes), selfish greed, despite its sublimated appearance, remains selfish greed. Max Weber’s Quakers and Baptists, who believed that “by such practices as their fixed prices and their absolutely reliable business relationships with everyone, unconditionally legal and devoid of cupidity,”⁹ they had become “spiritual,” who believed, in a: word, that by ridding themselves of “Jewish” haggling they had rid themselves of “Jewish” cupidity, were—to Marx—only kidding themselves. Their New Testamentary economic behavior spiritualiter barely concealed beneath its decorum the old carnaliter of the Old Testamentary double ethic. The cupidity remained essentially the same, despite the “universalism,” the fastidiously fixed prices, the vaunted “reliability” (predictability). “I had to laugh at these goyim and their politeness, …” the character Harry Bogen remarks in I Can Get It For You Wholesale. “They act like gentlemen to each other. They’re polite all the time so they can be sure one won’t screw the other. Well, thank God I didn’t need any substitutes for smartness. I didn’t have to be polite, except for pleasure.”¹⁰ Dutiful politeness, universalistic, equable, reliable even-handedness, the belief of the Calvinist in the certifiably religious merit of such economic (as of such sexual) performances does not alter one jot or tittle the rank concupiscence and avarice they serve to conceal. Bourgeois-Protestant love may have eliminated haggling from courtship, as bourgeois-Protestant capitalism eliminates haggling from economic exchange, but sexuality and avarice endure unchanged.

From Solomon Maimon to Normon Podhoretz, from Rahel Varnhagen to Cynthia Ozick, from Marx and Lassalle to Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel, from Herzl and Freud to Harold Laski and Lionel Trilling, from Moses Mendelssohn to J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, and Reich I and II (Wilhelm and Charles), one dominating structure of an identical predicament and a shared fate imposes itself upon the consciousness and behavior of the Jewish intellectual in Galut: with the advent of Jewish Emancipation, when ghetto walls crumble and the shtetlach begin to dissolve, Jewry—like some wide-eyed anthropologist—enters upon a strange world, to explore a strange people observing a strange halakah (code). They examine this world in dismay, with wonder, anger, and punitive objectivity. This wonder, this anger, and the vindictive objectivity of the marginal nonmember are recidivist; they continue unabated into our own time because Jewish Emancipation continues into our own time.