The Jewish Question
Since the collapse of the world of the Middle Ages, since faith is no longer the sole force that creates a community, there has been a Jewish question. If also not for the moment for the Jews, who, encouraged by having their main locus in the East, were ever more isolated, passing through their religious-mystical renaissance movement, Hasidism, in the 18th century, the century in which religious life underwent its steepest decline in Europe. However, for the outside world, it was increasingly incomprehensible that a community lived in its midst that was built on a basis disowned by Europe, isolated by it and isolating itself.
We cannot emphasize enough how important it seems to us that Jewish emancipation did not come from within Judaism, and that thus Judaism has not developed internal power that would have given it a place in the European order. Rather, the emancipation occurred from without, from ideas of bourgeois liberalism hostile to community and connectedness. The Jews were freed from the ghetto not as “Jews,” but as “humans” and “citizens,” in the name of equality. However, that cannot mean anything else than that the Jews were freed, by destroying the bonds of Judaism: for the concept of the chosen people with its claim to totality, on which the Jewish community rests, is in fact connected with the ghetto, but is totally unable to relate to bourgeois equality, although often the Jews did not become conscious of this.
Pious Jews in central or western Europe were anxious to observe everything prescribed by their faith, and therefore really felt themselves to be Jewish, If they promoted and assumed bourgeois equality, they would no longer be proper “Jews” in accordance with the concept of Judaism, any more that a Catholic who regularly went to confession, but no longer believed that the church alone could make one holy, would be a true Catholic.
Therefore, Judaism was not able to develop any counterforce that would have given emancipated Jews a “Jewish community” able to be coupled and incorporated in the bourgeois world. Thus it happened that the emancipation appeared not just as being freed from the outer limitations, but also to the same degree as being freed from the suppression of all worldly knowledge, all worldly intellect. It appeared as being freed from the limitation to the spiritual and spatial confinement of waiting for the Messiah and of mourning lost greatness, from the banning of all culture and everything of beauty, as being freed from Judaism itself.
Through emancipation, Jews lost their Jewish community and connectedness. Therefore, of necessity, the emancipated Jew makes his claim in society not on the basis of his “Jewishness,” but rather on the basis of his “no-longer-Jewishness,” on the basis of the bourgeois equality of all. Therefore, of necessity, released through the forces of liberalism, he is a representative of liberal ideas. Following the destruction of his own community, these ideas alone could give him a place in human society. What a paradox the result of this development in fact is, only becomes clear, when one considers that only the most devoted conservatism has held the Jews together through all those centuries. Two factors have provided support to emancipated Jews’ acceptance of bourgeois liberalism throughout Europe, and promoted maintenance of it. First, liberalism emancipated the Jews only in western and central Europe. But in terms of numbers, in the east, where Jews preponderantly lived, it failed to do so. There the ghetto continued to exist, and suppressions and persecutions persisted. Therefore, Jews constantly emigrated to the west- to freedom- and the problems of emancipation could not reach equilibrium. Owing to Jewish persecution in the east, the western, totally emancipated, totally “de-judified” Jews were constantly being shaken awake, and in them a common feeling of responsibility for the fate of eastern European Jews was aroused, which reminded them of their common origin with them. Although naturally given a predominantly religious emphasis, this feeling of community could not help but lead to strengthened accentuation of liberalism, to summoning the “liberal world conscience,” since the pogroms were religious persecutions. This was because the sole salvation for eastern Jews lay in victory of liberal ideas, religious tolerance and bourgeois equality.
The failure of liberalism to create a society based on the equality of all persons led to its becoming purely a negative force that only dissolved. For emancipated Jews, and for Jews “released” from their community, this produced a problem of assimilation, i.e., of fitting into the European community-forming connections: the connection of the church, and the counterforce that developed from liberalism, the Nation. This problem is different in its particulars in every country, depending on how much liberalism penetrated, and in what manner. For example, in England, where the basic concept of religion as a “private matter” triumphed totally, the problem of assimilation is purely a populace one: the Jew there is seen by the populace as other, to the point where proving the opposite as extraordinarily difficult. The reverse is true in France, where the populace’s conception became fully wedded with the French version of liberalism. There the Jewish question assumes a predominantly religious tone, and it is no accident that the Dreyfuss Affair has led to lay partisanship (“Laizismus”). The situation is much more complicated in Germany, which we will be addressing in greater detail. Before that, however, we must spend some time on the overall problems of assimilation. The tragedy of assimilation is that emancipated Jews, who are bereft of community and connections, must of necessity view the problems as solvable by the individual and through the good will of the individual – of which there has never been a lack on both sides. Meanwhile the community, due to its character as such, is seen as a community problem, and every effort of individuals to solve it as an individual, is perceived as contradictory to its basic principles, and as hostile. This is most salient in the problem of Jews and the Church. Jews, emancipated although they are heretical, could not acknowledge the demand of the Christian Church that they be members of it as a prerequisite to membership in European communities as well as individual national communities, because it directly contradicted the principles emancipating them. If they stayed religious Jews, naturally they had to defend this claim vis-à-vis the “Religion-is-a-private-matter” principle, and thus deny the communal nature of the Church, in other words the Church itself. Therefore, membership in the Jewish religion means being Other and Outside. Individual assimilation without an inner, and not merely superficial, assumption of the Christian faith, is just as impossible as is a full solution of the problem of community of Jews if a Jewish religious community worth the name is to continue, in our opinion. (We hope that from this determination no one in any manner will read a denial, enmity or intolerance against Jewish faith. We only believe that it is necessary clearly to express the either-or nature of the assimilation problem.)