The Ordeal of Civility

Introduction

Before becoming “privy to the true inwardness of Jewish modernity”¹ one must first break the stranglehold of paradigms—the pious paradigms that preempt the story of Jewish emancipation. The story of the exodus of Jews into Europe in the nineteenth century is a case study in culture shock. The hoped for “goodness of fit” between what Jews expected from emancipation and what Europe had promised its Jews became, instead, “the Jewish problem.” The Jewish “great expectations” were utopian; the Gentile promises carried a caveat. An ethnocentric and family-oriented people—“one of the most familistic societies known,” Eisenstadt tells us²—awoke “the morning after” emancipation to find itself in a world of strangers: the nonkinship, universalistic nation-societies of modern Europe. A slow disintoxication supervenes as Jewish emancipation fails to make good on its promises.

I give the problem of civility a thematic authority over this whole story because if, as Berger and Luckmann argue, “the most important experience of others takes place in the face-to-face situation, which is the prototypical case of social interaction,”³ this face-to-face encounter when it occurs between strangers in the West takes the form of a ritual exchange of gifts we call “civility.” The encounter of Jew with Gentile was never able to remain near enough to the surface to achieve a genuine ritual consummation. Thus, the ratification of Jewish emancipation in social emancipation, in face-to-face social contact with the Gentile, never occurred. The failure of Jewish emancipation was a failure of ritual competence and of social encounter: no “ritually ratified face-to-face contact”⁴ took place, no social rites of public behavior were reciprocally performed, nor were they performed for their own sakes. This failure of civility spread shock waves through nineteenth-century society. In arguing a larger alienation—since the norms of civility merely spell out and specify for face-to-face interaction the more general values of the culture—the failure of civility came to define “the Jewish problem” as this problem reconstituted itself in the era of social modernity. It is this ordeal, this problem of the ritually unconsummated social courtship of Gentile and Jew that is formative for the labors of the secular Jewish intelligentsia of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is their hidden theme. This problem stems, ultimately, as we shall see, from a disabling inability of Judaism to legitimate culturally the differentiation of culture and society, or from what Philip Rieff calls “the disastrous Jewish attempt to maintain an identity of culture and society.”⁵

Max Weber wrote about the Protestant Ethic. This book is about the Protestant Esthetic and the Protestant Etiquette, those expressive and situational norms ubiquitously if informally institutionalized in the social interaction ritual of our modern Western societies. More particularly, it is about the Protestant Etiquette (“etiquette” understood in the nontrivializing sense of public behavior and civility) and the spirit of Judaism, as Judaism took the form of Yiddishkeit when Jews, from the late eighteenth century up into our own time, entered the West from the ghettos and shtetlach of Central and Eastern Europe. The cultural collision, the Kulturkampf, between Yiddishkeit and the behavioral and expressive norms we call the Protestant Esthetic and Etiquette came to constitute the modern form of the ancient Judenfrage: the “Jewish question.”

Thus, Jewish emancipation, assimilation, and modernization constitute a single, total phenomenon. The secularizing Jewish intellectual, as the avant-garde of his decolonized people, suffered in his own person the trauma of this culture shock. Unable to turn back, unable completely to acculturate, caught between “his own” whom he had left behind and the Gentile “host culture” where he felt ill at ease and alienated, intellectual Jews and Jewish intellectuals experienced cultural shame and awkwardness, guilt and the “guilt of shame.”⁶ The focus of his concern, often unacknowledged, was the public behavior of his fellow Jews, the Ostjuden.

The ideologies of the post-Emancipation era—Marxism, Freudianism, Haskalah, Reform Judaism—have a double audience: on the one hand, they have “designs” on their Jewish audience, which they wish to change, enlighten, or reform; but, on the other hand, they constitute an elaborate effort at apologetics, addressed to the “Gentile of good will” and designed to reinterpret, excuse, or explain to him the otherwise questionable public “look” of emancipating Jewry: secular Jewish intellectual ideologies are exercises in antidefamation, addresses in defense of, Jewry to the cultured among its despisers.

In Marxism and Freudianism, the ideology is both a hermeneutic, a reinterpretation, and a praxis, an instrument of change. Beginning, in each case, with the public delict of Jewish behavior—the “scene” it was making in the public places of the Diaspora—it urges change (wholesale revolutionary change in the case of Marx, retail individual change in the case of Freud).

Let us take the case of socialism. Universalist in its rhetoric and appeal, the socialist ideology that comes out of German Jewry, from Marx to the young Walter Lippmann, is rooted in the “Jewish question” which, for German Jewry generally, has always turned on the matter of the public misbehavior of the Jews of Eastern Europe (the proverbial “Ostjuden”). Marx in his 1843 essay “On the Jewish Question” views the problem—as we shall see—as one of eliminating “the crudeness of practical need” so conspicuously visible in Jewish economic behavior. (He equally indicts the refinement of Gentile economic behavior in which the civil nexus—civility—serves only as a hypocritical figleaf concealing the reality of the cash nexus.)

German-Jewish socialism, in other words, in its deep-lying motivation nexus is a sumptuary socialism. It is tailor-made for a recently decolonized “new nation” indigenous to the West whose now-dispersed “nationals” have had neither time nor opportunity to internalize that system of informal restraints we are calling the Protestant Etiquette. Protestant interiority and internalization—in the triple form of an ethic, an esthetic, and an etiquette—was the functional modernizing equivalent of what, for Catholics and Jews in the Middle Ages, had been a formally institutionalized set of legal restrictions on conspicuous consumption and behavior. (Jewry was in the nineteenth century exiting from its Middle Ages.) Feudal sumptuary laws—external constraints—took the modernizing form of internal restraints of moderation on consumption, trade, and commercial practices.

As we shall see, the ideology of the Jewish intellectual is frequently a projection onto the general, Gentile culture of a forbidden ethnic self-criticism. Shame for “one’s own kind” is universalized into anger at the ancestral enemy. The intrapunitive theodicy of the shtetl—“We are in Galut as a punishment for our sins”—is secularized, after Emancipation, into either exteropunitive sociodicies—“You made us what we are today”—or into the great impunitive, ideological, “value-free” edifices of Freud and Marx—“Neither Jew nor Gentile is to be blamed for the tsuris of the Diaspora: it is but a symptom of capitalist-exploitation [Marx] or a medical symptom of anxiety [Freud].”⁷ The relation of the secular Jewish ideologists to the “Jewish problem” is frequently forgotten or obscured. The late George Lichtheim’s essay “Socialism and the Jews,” for example, obnubilates the “Jewish problem” matrix of Marxian as of other socialisms. Of this whole problem-complex, for example, he writes that, by a “stroke of bad luck, the problem has somehow become entangled with the issue of Jewish emancipation”⁸ (my emphasis). Lichtheim exhibits a curious disinclination to explore this “somehow” entanglement. “Bad luck” rushes in where historians fear to tread.

Emancipating Jewry was thus making a “scene” in the Diaspora. Even if ordinary, prost, grass-roots Jewry did not realize this, the Jewish intelligentsia did. They knew how Jews “looked” to goyim. The Jewish intellectual placed himself between his people, “backward” and pre-modern, and their modern, Gentile status-audience. If Jews offended the goyim, the Jewish intellectual would perform the “remedial work” best suited to place that offense in a different light. In a brilliant essay, “Remedial Interchanges,” Erving Goffman shows how in social interaction, when we violate a norm of civility, we resort to certain rites—accounts, apologies, and requests—thus “transforming what could be seen as offensive into what can be seen as acceptable … by striking in some way at the moral responsibility otherwise imputed to the offender.”⁹

The intellectual elite of a modernizing, decolonized, or emancipated people performs, on the level of the culture system—through the creation of ideologies (socialism, liberalism, psychoanalysis, Zionism)—the functional equivalent of what are accounts, apologies, and excuses on the everyday level of social system behavior. This intelligentsia “explains,” “excuses,” and “accounts” for the otherwise offensive behavior of its people. All the “moves” made in the long public discussion of the Jewish Emancipation problematic constitute, in the case of the detraditionalized intellectuals, an apologetic strategy.

Attention must be paid to the deeply apologetic structure of Diaspora intellectuality. Why, for example, did psychoanalysis, as Martin Jay notes, prove to be “especially congenial to assimilated Jewish intellectuals”?¹⁰ Because Freudianism, like Marxism, supplied the transformation formulas by which the “Jewish question”—that is, the normative “social conflicts” of emancipating Jewry (their “offensive behavior”)—could be translated into cognitive “scientific problems.” In this way, ritual social interaction offenses were “accounted for” as “depth” problems for which the offending parties were not responsible. Social conflict—i.e., the “Jewish problem”—was thus honorably buried in cognitive structures. Social delicts became mental symptoms. Relations in public became public relations. The apologists of Jewry—the Jewish intellectuals—thus made Jewry less disreputable.

This apologetic posture of Diaspora intellectuals toward their fellow Jews and toward the gentile host culture—the “virtual offender” and “virtual claimant,” respectively, to use Goffman’s phrases—is exactly analogous to that of second-century Christian apologists toward pagan thought. As the Christian fathers clothed their kerygma in Greek, the better to defend it, they ipso facto made it more acceptable and, ultimately, more respectable. The “offense” that Christ constituted in the Greco-Roman world—“folly to the Greeks, a scandal to the Jews,” Saint Paul had said—underwent, in remedial interchange with the Hellenistic world and conducted in its language, a subtle sea change in the direction of intellectual respectability. In fact, pagan critics, Jaroslav Pelican tells us, often acknowledged the stubborn singularity of Jesus Christ in a manner “more trenchant than the theology of the Christian apologists,” thus calling forth a more profound defense. Eventually, “as Christianity became more respectable socially, its apologetics became more respectable philosophically.”¹¹

In the era of the Jewish Emancipation, the nineteenth century, the prestige of science, not Greek logic, conferred intellectual respectability. Therefore, the “pariah capitalism” of emancipating Jewry and the social conflict it engendered, anti-Semitism—“the socialism of fools,” Bebel said—were subsumed and “honorably buried” in “the socialism of the Jewish intellectuals,” in Marxian or “scientific socialism.” Later in the century, when social emancipation supervened on economic emancipation, giving rise to the bourgeois problem of “social anti-Semitism,” Freud transformed various social offenses against the goyim into various psychological defenses against the id of the offending party (the ten Freudian “mechanisms of defense”).

Public misconduct was, for each of these ideologies, symptomatic behavior. For the ordinary Gentile, these Jews were simply “troublemakers” who showed the wrong deference and improper demeanor. By treating this behavior of the ordinary Jew symptomatically—as a symptom of economic exploitation, or of regression, or of homelessness (Marxism, Freudianism, or Zionism)—the Jewish intellectual could rescue his fellow Jews from the demeaning implications of the normative “reality definitions” of their Gentile interactants. The result of Marx’s argument, Richard Bernstein tells us, was to deemphasize the significance of anti-Semitism, “to see the ‘Jewish Question’ as only a symptom of the state of bourgeois society”¹² (my emphasis). Normative problems of behavior could be decorously buried in cognitive problems of understanding. Social issues became social science. When, during a didactic analysis with Freud, Joseph Wortis—thinking of the social behavior problem of Jews—challenges Freud’s belief that they are “a superior people,” Freud immediately moves to the cognitive: “I think nowadays they are,” Freud replied. “When one thinks that 10 or 12 of the Nobel winners are Jews, and when one thinks of their other great achievements in the sciences and in the arts, one has every reason to think them superior.” When Wortis, himself a Jew, cites Jewish “bad manners,” Freud concedes the fact, attributes it to the fact that since Jewish Emancipation they have not always adapted to the social life of a “mixed society,” and ends by translating the normative problem into a cognitive one: “They have had much to learn”¹³ (my emphasis). In Freud’s remedial work with Wortis on a face-to-face basis we see epitomized the apologetic thrust of psychoanalytic theory construction.

In Freud’s “science,” the social troubles of a modernizing Jewry receive a self-enhancing cognitive gloss: social malaise becomes a medical symptom, offenses become defenses, kvetches become hysterical complaints, tsuris becomes basic anxiety, social shame becomes moral guilt, deviance becomes incapacity, strangeness becomes alienation; to be badly behaved is to be mentally ill.

As Jewish intellectuals with cultural aspirations constructed putatively value-free social sciences with which to talk about the social encounter of Jew with Gentile in the West, rank-and-file Jews with social aspirations were seeking religiously neutral places in which to interact with bourgeois Gentiles. Sociologically, the quest of the Jewish intellectual for value-neutral social sciences and the quest of the Jewish bourgeois for value-neutral social places are one event.¹⁴ The salon of Rahel Varnhagen, of the first generation of Emancipation, was to have been “a socially neutral place,¹⁵ cutting across class, religion, and ethnicity. Neutral social interaction meant interaction between secularized and modernized Jews and Christians. Thus when, at the prompting of Moses Mendelssohn, the marquis d’Argens wrote Frederick the Great, asking that Mendelssohn be given the needed special permission to live in Berlin, he couched his request as follows:”An intellectual [philosophe] who is a bad Catholic begs an intellectual who is a bad Protestant to grant the privilege [of residence in Berlin] to an intellectual who is a bad Jew."¹⁶

The lure that Masonry constituted for a socially aspirant Jewry lay in the fact that it offered a place—a piece of social space—the masonic “lodge,” in which bad Christians and bad Jews could interact as social equals, and this at the very time when Jews were not “making it” socially in the larger society. (Later, in America, the “meetinghouses” of the Ethical Culture Society were to have become the analogously neutral places where socially and culturally aspiring Jews, for whom Reform Judaism had become an impossible option, could “meet” socially with their Christian counterparts.) “The novelty of Freemasonry,” writes Jacob Katz, “was that it offered diverse sects and classes the opportunity to meet in neutral territory.”¹⁷ The “Enlightenment” stemming from Mendelssohn’s circle in Berlin constituted a kind of prefiguration of the “neutral” society thought possible by both “enlightened” Jews and Gentiles of good will. All the ideologies constructed by secular Jewish intellectuals, from the Haskalah to Reform Judaism, from Marxism to Freudianism, from assimilationism to Zionism, form a continuing tradition which I call “Jewish Intellectual Culture.” The “Jews of modernity” (as Milton Himmelfarb calls them) in each generation renew themselves, and sustain their intellectual morale in Galut, by drawing on various strands of this tradition. Secular Jewish intellectuals speak out from the predicament bequeathed to them by Jewish Emancipation and modernization.

I have never found particularly convincing the patently self-serving theory that intellectuals construct about themselves—that they are “classless,” or constitute an “interstitial” stratum (in Karl Mannheim’s version), or are “unattached” (in Lewis Coser’s version). Intellectuals I have known are “attached.” To their productions, as to those of the truck driver, we must address the nervy, vulgar little sociology-of-knowledge question “Says who?” as Peter Berger puts it. There are many forms of “attachment”: if we are not particularly class-bound, perhaps we are region-bound, or time-bound, or culture-bound, or subculture-bound.

The present volume, being an essay on the culture of secular Jewish intellectuals, is a study in subculture-boundedness. To make any kind of sense, it should be placed in the context. of my interests and convictions and a certain indulgence will be asked, allowing me simply to assert these convictions and interests, rather than to argue them: otherwise, my study will never get off the ground.

Edward Shils has remarked the curiously oppositional stance of the modern intelligentsia from the nineteenth century and earlier up to our own period. With perhaps unpardonable oversimplification, I should like to name the essential thrust of what they were opposing: they were opposing modernity. Hereby hangs a paradox: most of them were very “modern” men supposedly engaged in attacking the status quo, and the fact that their “traditional” opponents also considered them to be a dangerously modernist avant-garde only confirmed them in this, their cherished illusion.

What, then, is this “modernization” process? Its greatest theorist, in my conviction, is Talcott Parsons. His work culminates in a theory of the modernization process accurately described as the “differentiation model” of modernization. Modernization, in this conceptualization, is passing from the left to the right column of Parsons’s famous pattern-variable scheme: from affectivity to affective neutrality, from particularism to universalism, from ascription to achievement, from diffuseness to specificity. Parsons, as an intellectual descendant of Calvin, has displayed, according to the conventional wisdom, an all but sovereign indifference to the high cost of this “passing of traditional society,” as Daniel Lerner calls it, this “passage from home,” as Isaac Rosenfeld calls it in his haunting novel by that name. Members of the Protestant core-culture, like Parsons, theorize from within the eye of the hurricane of modernization, where all is calm and intelligible. But for the underclass below, as. for the ethnic outside, modernization is a trauma. Parsons views modernization—correctly, I contend—as a secularization of Protestant Christianity, much as Hegel, the secularizing Lutheran, viewed it in the nineteenth century.

Both of these theorists lived at what Shils calls the charismatic “center” of Western culture. What this center demands, as Parsons above all has seen, is differentiation: the differentiation of home from job; the differentiation of political economy (Marx) into politics and economy; differentiation of the culture system from the personality and social systems; differentiation of economy from society (Weber and Parsons and Smelser); differentiation of fact from value, of theory from praxis; differentiation of art from belief.

Differentiation is the cutting edge of the modernization process, sundering cruelly what tradition had joined. It splits ownership from control (Berle and Means); it separates church from state (the Catholic trauma¹⁸), ethnicity from religion (the Jewish trauma); it produces the “separated” or liberal state, a limited state that knows its “place,” differentiated from society. Differentiation slices through ancient primordial ties and identities, leaving crisis and “wholeness-hunger” in its wake. Differentiation divorces ends from means (Weber’s “rationalization”), nuclear from extended families. It frees poetry from painting, and painting from representation. Literary modernism differentiates the medium from the message.

Beneath the politics of the oppositional intelligentsia the antimodernist thrust is all too audible. Demodernization, from Marx to Mao, is dedifferentiation. In the Chinese Cultural Revolution, structural differentiation and the division of labor were denounced violently and explicitly and uprooted as such. This violent Maoist challenge to differentiation, Nettl and Robertson note, was “a much more open prise de position regarding differentiation than the uncomfortable and often contradictory Stellungnahme to the problem in the Soviet Union in recent times; even in the early days after the Bolshevik Revolution, differentiated modernity was hardly ever attacked as specifically as this. But then,” they add, “the clearly expressed current notion of differentiated modernity did not exist [then] to this extent either”¹⁹ (my emphasis).

Parsons is the sociologist par excellence of “differentiated modernity.” He has seen it steadily and, like Hegel, he has seen it whole. Stemming from the Protestant Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and the English, French, and American revolutions, modernization constitutes the infrastructure of what Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba call “the civic culture.” Introduction into this long and continuing revolution of differentiation is what we mean today by being “civilized.” Inward assent to the disciplines of differentiation, and the practice of its rites, may be viewed as the paideia of the West. “Ideology” is the name we give to the various resistance movements mounted to stem the onslaught of the differentiation process.²⁰ Essentially, these movements are demodernizing, dedifferentiating, rebarbarative. Winston White, in a neglected masterpiece, defines the oppositional intelligentsia as “resisting the emerging distinctions” and defines ideology as “the attempt to suppress differentiation.”²¹ And David Little notes that modern man, situated within the modernization process, socialized into “a differentiated social order containing the principles of voluntarism, consensualism, private initiative and toleration,” finds himself, paradoxically, “compelled to be free.”²² The social change fostered by modern differentiations frees man from the old ascriptive cushions, and thus, White observes, it cannot—unlike previous changes—“be absorbed for the individual by the family, the church, a class, or an economic or political interest. It is one that the individual must confront by making choices without dependence on ascriptive guidance. He is, indeed,’ White concludes,”forced to be free"²³ (White’s emphasis). Acculturation into modernity on the part of premodern and underdeveloped personalities and cultures is like the pleasure principle colliding with the social reality principle.²⁴ Strain and deprivation are undergone, together with intimations of freedom.

There is a further dimension to modernization that will lead us into this study of Jewish intellectuals. Once, in the office of Dr. Harry Bredemeier, apropos of my having used the word modernization, he popped a question (almost out of the blue): “What is modernization, Jack?” I was nonplussed; there was a long silent pause as I searched for a definition, and finally I came up with “refinement.” Many things funded themselves into that answer. Differentiation on the level of the culture system is the power to make distinctions between previously fused—confused—ideas, values, variables, concepts. Almost all intellectual interchange boils down to pointing out “distinctions” or “aspects” of a topic that have been ob-scured or neglected. Intellectual distinction and originality are frequently a matter of making a new and important distinction or differentiation. Learning theory teaches us that wholes must be distinguished into their parts before wider relationships can be established. Parsons sees the rhythm of modemization itself as involving first differentiation, then extension, and finally upgrading. This too is the rhythm of the intellectual life on the plane of the culture system: crude, coarse, fused, undifferentiated wholes—roles, structures, functions, topics, personalities—are “distinguished” into their elements; they are refined (like crude oil in the cracking process).

This whole dimension of modernization can be put in a formula: in the West at least, the modernization process goes hand in hand with the civilizational process. They constitute one “package.” The coarse feudal baron is refined into the gentleman. The emergence of cities, multiplying strangers, expelling us from our “tribal brotherhoods” into the “universal otherhood” of an urban “world of strangers,” enables us to live with unknown others without transforming them into either brothers or enemies. Initiation into the social interaction rituals of civility equips us “to deal with strangers routinely” in urban public space (my emphasis).²⁵²⁶ In the nineteenth century, the peasant or the “young man from the provinces” comes to Paris or London or Dublin: his “urbanization process” requires urbanity, his entry into civil society civility. For the first time, perhaps, he must differentiate relations in private from relations in public, behavior and intimate affect in private places. from decorum in public places. Acquiring this private-public differentiation is a “great transition,” neglected in sociology. "It is significant,’ Kenneth Boulding writes,

that the word civility and the word civil derive from the same root as the word civilization. The age of civilization is characterized not only by conquest, military ruthlessness, and the predominance of the threat as organizer. It is also characterized by the elaborate integrative systems of religion, politeness, morals, and manners. The dynamics of this process whereby the rough feudal baron was turned into a “gentlemen”—again the literal meaning of the word is highly significant—is a process that has never been adequately studied, yet it may well be the most important single process in the whole dynamics of the age of civilization, for it is the process which permitted the rise of civil society, without which science would have been impossible.²⁷

And it was into this “civil society” that Jewry was emancipated in the nineteenth century.

Because of “the tribal, rather than the civil, nature of Jewish culture,”²⁸ Jewish Emancipation involved Jews in collisions with the differentiations of Western society. The differentiations most foreign to the shtetl subculture of Yiddishkeit were those of public from private behavior and of manners from morals. Jews were being asked, in effect, to become bourgeois, and to become bourgeois quickly. The problem of behavior, then, became strategic to the whole problematic of “assimilation.” The modernization process, the civilizational process, and the assimilation process were experienced as one—as the “price of admission” to the bourgeois civil societies of the West at the end of the nineteenth century.

It is in the light of this sociology-of-knowledge context of Jewish Emancipation that I shall examine Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and other figures. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, and as the problems of political and economic integration were put behind them, the advanced guard of emancipating Jewry encountered head-on the specific problem of social integration with the Gentile West. The emancipated Jew of this period, Max Nordau told the First Zionist Congress in 1897, was “allowed to vote for members of Parliament, but he saw himself excluded, with varying degrees of politeness, from the clubs and gatherings of his Christian fellow countrymen.” It was precisely the relatively rapid “promotion rates” enjoyed by this Jewry in the political, economic, and cultural spheres that brought home to it the realization of that special misery of “relative deprivation” that was long to be its lot in the social sphere. “This is the Jewish special misery,” Nordau continues, “which is more painful than the physical because it affects men of higher station, who are prouder and more sensitive…. All the better Jews of Western Europe,” he concludes, “groan under this misery and seek for salvation and alleviation.”²⁹ Freud heard their groans. Many of them were his patients and adherents.³⁰

At least some of these groans derived from what I call “the ordeal of civility.” Civility requires, at a minimum, the bifurcation of private affect from public demeanor. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch and French paintings take us inside the homes of the bourgeoisie. We speak of “bourgeois interiors.” The faces and public behavior of these same people were a kind of “bourgeois exterior.” In France, for example, the emergence of the civil persona took the form of the honnête homme—what Erich Auerbach calls the “adaptation of the individual’s inner life to the socially appropriate, and the concealment of all unseemly depths.”³¹ In England it took the form of that tactful circumspection of surfaces we call “respectability.” “Niceness” is as good a name as any for the informally yet pervasively institutionalized civility expected—indeed, required—of members (and of aspirant members) of that societal com-munity called the civic culture. Intensity, fanaticism, inwardness—too much of anything, in fact—is unseemly and bids fair to destroy the fragile solidarity of the surface we call civility. The “great cultural triumph” of the middle class, writes Norman Podhoretz, “is precisely that it brought obsession into disrepute.”³²

Civility, as the very medium of Western social interaction, presupposes the differentiated structures of a modernizing “civil society.” Civility is not merely regulative of social behavior; it is an order of “appearance” constitutive of that behavior. This medium is itself the message, and the message it beamed to the frontrunners of a socially emancipating Jewry came through loud and clear: “Be nice.” “The Jews,” writes Maurice Samuel looking back on the epoch of Emancipation, “are probably the only people in the world to whom it has ever been proposed that their historic destiny is—to be nice.”³³

This study, focusing on Freud, Marx, and Lévi-Strauss, explores a crucial dimension of this “historic destiny.” It explores a dimension of the threat posed by modernization to a traditionary subculture. It explores the danger that the prospect of being “gentled” posed to an “underdeveloped” subculture indigenous to the West.³⁴ Ostensibly about Jewry and what Jews call “assimilation,” the study is, in the end, only methodologically Judeocentric. Like Weber rummaging in India and China and ancient Israel, all the while on the prowl for his Calvinist and gleeful at not finding him—thus demonstrating once again the uniqueness of the West—my central interest also lies in the West and in the religious idea-and-value system secularized into its modernizing structures. We learn what this civilization is, in good part, from a study of the titans who, like Marx, hurled themselves against it or who, like Freud, grudgingly consented to its “discontents,” just as Jews, from time immemorial, have resigned themselves to the tsuris of Galut. The perspective of this study involves the “synthetic assimilation of multiple generalizations,” requiring “a flair for discerning hidden transformations as well as an eye for the more obvious continuities.”³⁵ This study examines the “hidden transformations” of the everyday life problems of assimilating Jewry—the Jewish Emancipation problematic—into the very thought structures of Jewry’s intellectual giants: Freud, Marx, and Lévi-Strauss. In a single sentence, Irving Howe catches the Gemeinschaft-affect of Eastern European shtetl Yiddishkeit’s “life-is-with-people”: “Having love,” he writes, “they had no need for politeness.”³⁶ But once he moved “beyond the pale” at the time of Emancipation and entered the “differentiating modernity” of the West, the shtetl Ostjude was to learn to his sorrow that in the larger society “love is not enough.” Outer, “ecological” conflict with the goyim then became inner conflict with the self. Judaism became Jewishness. The advent of Freud’s psychoanalysis is a registration of this continuing “hidden transformation.” of this continuing ordeal.