What remains to be explained is why this phenomenon – the emergence of a ‘metaphysical-anarchist’ or revolutionary-messianic movement inspired by romanticism – should have been confined almost exclusively to Central Europe.
The figure of the Jewish revolutionary had been virtually non-existent in the political and cultural arena of Western Europe. In England and the United States towards the end of the nineteenth century, Jews originating from Eastern Europe came to form a super-exploited proletariat, a breeding ground for anarchist and socialist militants. But Jews with their origins in the West were completely assimilated, both nationally and culturally, and quite conformist in social and political terms. Intellectuals stemming from this milieu identified in their whole being with the prevailing bourgeois liberalism. The roots of this were to be found in the bourgeois revolutions of sixteenth-century Holland, seventeenth-century England and post-1789 France, which had emancipated the Jews and made possible their economic, social and political integration into capitalist society. If the revolutionary Jew appeared in Central and Eastern Europe, this was principally due to the delay or failure of bourgeois revolutions – and the lagging development of capitalism – in that part of the continent, which restricted the emancipation/assimilation of Jews and maintained their pariah condition.
Romantic/revolutionary messianism never attracted the West European and American Jewish intelligentsia: on the contrary, the most important liberal rationalist polemics against utopias of religious inspiration were written by Jewish intellectuals of Anglo-Saxon cultural origins – for example, the well-known book by Norman Cohn (born in London in 1915), The Pursuit of the Millennium. Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1957); or that of Jacob Talmon (former Foreign Office official), Political Messianism. The Romantic Phase (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960).
The Dreyfus Affair was (prior to the Second World War) the only rift in the Western system of assimilation/integration, but even this traumatic event could not shake the patriotic, bourgeois-republican faith of French Jews. However, it did make possible the emergence of an exceptional messianic/libertarian revolutionary figure: Bernard Lazare. He may be the only Western Jewish thinker who can be compared to Buber or Landauer. But he was doomed to remain isolated, rejected and misunderstood by the great majority of the French Jewish community.26
The situation was completely different in Eastern Europe, notably in the Russian Empire, which, prior to 1918, included Poland and the Baltic countries. Here the Jews’ participation in revolutionary movements was far greater than in Central Europe, and unlike in Germany, not limited to intellectuals: an entire Jewish proletariat organized itself within the Bund or joined the Bolshevik or Menshevik faction of the RSDLP (Russian Social/Democratic Labour Party). This can easily be explained by the qualitatively higher degree of oppression, the different social composition of the Jewish population (with its working-class and/or impoverished mass) and the strength and violence of anti-Semitism; in short, by the much more directly pariah condition of the Jews living in the tsarist Empire. As a result, a huge and varied mass of Jewish intellectuals was present in all East European revolutionary movements, be they socialist, Marxist or anarchist, including in leadership positions as organizers, ideologists and theoreticians. As Leopold H. Haimson noted, the major role of Jews within the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia was out of all proportion to their numerical weight in the population.27
The most well-known were but the tip of the iceberg: Leon D. Trotsky (Bronstein); Rosa Luxemburg; Leo Jogiches; Julius Martov (Tsederbaum); Raphael Abramovich; Lev Deutsch; Pavel Axelrod; Mark Liber (Goldman); Fyodor Dan (Gurvytch); Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld); Karl Radek (Sobelsohn); Grigory Zinoviev (Radomylsky); Yakov Sverdlov; David Ryazanov (Goldendach); Maxim Litvinov (Wallach); Adolf Joffe; Mikhail Borodin (Grusenberg); Adolf Warski; Isaac Deutscher, and so on. In addition, of course, there were the leading figures of specifically Jewish socialist organizations, such as the Bund and the left-wing Zionists, and the numerous Jews originally from the East who participated in the revolutionary workers’ movement abroad; in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches, Parvus (Israel Helphand), Arkadi Maslow (Isaac Chereminsky), August Kleine (Samuel Haifiz), among others; in England (Aron Lieberman, Lazar Goldenberg); or in the United States (Emma Goldmann, Alexander Berkman, S. Yanofsky).
Yet all of these Jewish revolutionary ideologues, militants and leaders, who had widely different if not conflicting political orientations, and whose relationship to Judaism went from complete and deliberate assimilation in the name of internationalism to proud affirmation of a national/cultural Jewish identity, still had one element in common: rejection of the Jewish religion. Their world-view was always rationalist, atheist, secular, Aufklärer, materialist. The Jewish religious tradition, the mysticism of the cabbala, Hasidism and messianism were of no interest to them. In their eyes, these were but obscurantist relics of the past, reactionary medieval ideologies which they had to be rid of as quickly as possible in favour of science, Enlightenment and progress. When a revolutionary Yiddish writer such as Moishe Kulback wrote on messianism (with a mixture of attraction, repulsion and nostalgia), it was mainly to show the sad role of false messiahs like Jakob Frank, who had led their followers to catastrophe.28 An anarchist of Russian origins, such as Emma Goldmann, had nothing in common with the mystical spiritualism of someone like Landauer: in her libertarian universalism, there was no room for Jewish particularity, and religion (Jewish or Christian) belonged to the realm of superstition. In the best cases, as with the Bundist Medem, the first visit to a synagogue ‘made a deep impression’ because of the ‘great beauty present in the passion of mass feeling’: the actual religious content of worship was alien to him.29 The passion of revolutionary Jewish intellectuals for atheism and science is marvellously illustrated by the story that Leo Jogiches, organizer of the first Jewish workers’ circles in Vilna, began his activities as a political educator by bringing along a real skeleton and lecturing on anatomy.30
Many historians believe that, in the socialist and revolutionary convictions of Russian Jewish intellectuals, they can discern a secularized expression of messianism, a manifestation, in atheist and materialist form, of mental attitudes inherited from millennia of religious tradition. This hypothesis may prove to be applicable in certain cases. But for most of the Marxist or anarchist leaders mentioned above, it is implausible because their education and their familial and social milieux were so assimilated, so unreligious, that a real cultural link with the messianic heritage would be sought in vain. In any case, the writings of radical Russian-Jewish intellectuals, unlike those of many Central European Jewish revolutionaries, did not make the least reference to religion, nor did they display the least trace of a messianic/religious dimension.
How can this marked difference in world-view between the Jewish intelligentsia