Thus, the concept of neo-romanticism helps us to understand more clearly the resurgence, the rapprochement through elective affinity, and the occasional convergence and fusion of Jewish messianism (in its restorative/utopian interpretation) and libertarian utopia. The two had their roots in the same ethico-cultural and ‘ideological’ ground and grew in the same spiritual climate, that of the anti-capitalist romanticism of the German intelligentsia. Indeed, that cultural movement, particularly in its revolutionary romantic version, could not but favour the discovery, the revitalization or the development of both a restorative/utopian interpretation of messianism and a restorative/utopian interpretation of revolution (anarchism).
This dual process characterized a number of Jewish intellectuals from Central Europe, who made up an extremely heterogeneous group but were united by a common problematic. Among them were several of the greatest minds of the century: poets and philosophers, revolutionary leaders and religious guides, people’s commissars and theologians, writers and cabbalists, and even writers-cum-philosophers-cum-theologians-cum-revolutionaries: for example, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Gustav Landauer, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Ernst Toller, Erich Fromm, Manes Sperber, Georg Lukács (to name but a few).
These authors have all been studied in sufficient detail, but until now no one has ever suggested that their thinking could have had a fundamental dimension in common. It seems paradoxical and even arbitrary to group under the same roof personalities so diverse and remote from each other. But let us note, first of all, that although they did not form a group in the concrete and immediate sense of the word, they were linked together by a complex and subtle social network: relationships based on deep friendship and/or intellectual and political affinity united Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Gustav Landauer and Ernst Toller; Scholem was attracted by Buber and Landauer; Buber corresponded with Kafka, Bloch and Lukács; Erich Fromm was a student of Scholem. At the heart of this network, at the intersection of all the threads of this cultural fabric, embodying opposite poles, was Walter Benjamin. On very close terms with Scholem, he was also a friend of Bloch, was profoundly influenced by Lukács, Rosenzweig and Kafka, and was a critical reader of Landauer, Buber and Fromm.
This is not, however, the most important reason why these personalities (and others lesser known, whom I will also discuss, such as Hans Kohn, Rudolf Kayser, Eugen Leviné and Erich Unger) can be thought of as a group. The key point is that their work, resting upon a neo-romantic cultural basis and a relationship of elective affinity, contained a Jewish messianic and a libertarian-utopian dimension. For some, this relationship is but a brief episode in their intellectual journey (Lukács); for others, it is the central axis of their entire work (Benjamin). Of course, the relative weight of the two dimensions is not the same: for some the religious component is decisive (Rosenzweig), while for others the utopian/revolutionary project is predominant (Bloch); yet, both aspects are found in every one of these personalities.
It would be pointless to look in these writers for a systematic and explicit presence of the two configurations in their entirety. Both Jewish messianism and libertarian utopia are powerful currents in their work, sometimes running beneath the surface, at other times more clearly visible. Now one theme and now another is manifest, depending on the author or the period in his life. Sometimes the themes are separate, sometimes combined (or merged), sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit or ‘deep set’. At one point they may dominate the thinker’s entire work, while at others they may do no more than flash here and there in his writings.
According to whether one dimension or the other plays the dominant role, it seems possible to divide this network into two distinct poles. First, the religious Jews with anarchist tendencies: Franz Rosenzweig, Rudolf Kayser, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and Hans Kohn, among others. The latter were Zionists, the former rather hostile or reticent toward Zionism. Despite their refusal to assimilate and despite their return to Judaism as a religion and a national culture, universal political and social concerns (utopian and libertarian) were present in their work and removed them from narrow or chauvinistic nationalism. Thus, Scholem and Buber led organizations in Palestine (Brit Shalom for Scholem, Ihud for Buber) which preached fraternization with the Arab population and opposed the establishment of an exclusively Jewish nation-state. To a certain extent, Kafka could be added to this current, but his relationship with the Jewish religion was much more problematic, and his attitude towards assimilation was less negative.
At the other pole are the assimilated (religious-atheist) libertarian Jews – that is to say, anarchists, anarcho-bolsheviks and anti-authoritarian Marxists: Landauer, Bloch, Fromm, Toller and Lukács, among others. Unlike those in the first category, they more or less distanced themselves from their Jewish identity, all the while maintaining a (more or less explicit) link with Judaism. Their religious atheism (a phrase coined by Lukács) drew on both Jewish and Christian references, and several of them developed their anarchist ideas in the direction of Marxism or Bolshevism.
Outside all currents (as Adorno put it), at the crossing of the ways, and linked to both the above groups at the same time was the person who, more than any other, personified the German-Jewish messianic/libertarian culture: Walter Benjamin.
That a distinction can be made between the two groups shows that, within the elective affinity between Jewish messianism and libertarian utopia, there is also a tension, if not a contradiction, between the Jewish (national-cultural) particularism of messianism and the universal (humanist/internationalist) nature of the emancipatory utopia. In the first group, the predominance of Jewish particularism tends to limit the universal revolutionary aspect of utopia, without causing it to disappear altogether; in the second group, the universality of utopia is the preponderant dimension, and messianism tends to be stripped of its Jewish specificity – without being entirely erased.
Why did this political and cultural phenomenon arise in Central Europe and not in another European Jewish community? And why at that precise moment in history? To answer these questions, and to understand the specific reception of anti-capitalist romanticism by Jewish intellectuals of German cultural origin, we need to examine from a sociological point of view their peculiarly contradictory situation within the social and cultural life of Central Europe.
Pariahs, Rebels and Romantics:A Sociological Analysis of the CentralEuropean Jewish Intelligentsia
As we noted at the outset, the term Mitteleuropa designates an area united by German culture: the area of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The specific situation of the Jewish community of the region (and of its intellectuals) cannot be understood without first examining the historical changes that took place in Mitteleuropa from the late nineteenth century onward. And the changes in the cultural and religious forms of life cannot be comprehended without relating them to changes in the economic and social structure. Rather than speak of ‘determination’ by the economy, we should speak, as did Mannheim, of Seinsgebundenheit, the culture’s attachment to (or dependence on) socio-economic reality.
In other words, the starting-point for analysing the figures of the German and Jewish intellectual world during this period has to be a basic social fact: the dizzying growth of capitalism and the rapid industrialization that took place in Germany, Austria and Hungary during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Between 1870 and 1914, Germany was transformed from a semi-feudal and backward country into one of the world’s principal industrial powers. Only one example is needed to illustrate this change: in 1860 Germany was behind France, and far behind England, in steel production (a typical sector of modern industry); in 1910 Germany produced more steel than France and England