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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253339348 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/31/2001 |
| Series: | Jewish Literature and Culture |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity
By Ken Koltun-Fromm
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2001 Ken Koltun-FrommAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-33934-8
CHAPTER 1
Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity
In Rome and Jerusalem (1862), Moses Hess imagined a new Jewry, one progressive and traditional, religious and socialist, nationalist and humanitarian. But such a utopian vision would not go unchallenged. Hess's colleagues in Germany were the first to recognize the alarming tensions in his thought. Ludwig Philippson, the editor of the popular nineteenth-century German Jewish paper Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, complained in an unsigned article that Hess, who himself did not observe Jewish laws or customs, could demand from every Jew strict observance to the commandments and commitment to a Judaism unchanged in its traditional form: "What do we have here, dear reader?" chided Philippson. "This is the newest form of hypocrisy in Judaism." Humiliated, Hess insisted that Philippson had missed his point about religious reform, and such personal attacks on his character would do nothing to reinforce Jewish national identity.
Hess's passionate and often conflicted views invited attacks on his works, and even on his character. Philippson, with obvious disdain for Hess's shallow display of piety, dismissed those conflicts as symptoms of a confused mind. But Philippson could not appreciate how those confusions addressed complex issues in modern Jewish identity. This was especially true in Hess's image of Jewish sacrificial worship as the beloved but hideous "scar":
True love, the love that dominates spirit and mind, is in actuality blind. Blind because it does not desire, philosophically or aesthetically, the perfection of the beloved being, but rather loves it just as it is with all its excellences and faults. ... The scar on the face of my beloved does not harm my love, but rather makes it even the more precious — who knows? — perhaps more precious than her beautiful eyes, which can be found in other beautiful women, while just this scar is characteristic of the individuality of my beloved.
The face of Jewish tradition is scarred by ancient sacrificial worship, but loved all the more for its imperfections. Its appeal lies not in beauty but in individuality, not in perfection but in realism, not in reason but in passion. For Hess, modern Judaism, like the ancient sacrifices, must be unique, concrete, material, and meaningful. But it also must be connected to a past, however scarred. Hess's Judaism is a passionate commitment touched with doubt ("who knows?"), and so his appeal to a scarred past reveals profound tensions in modern Jewish identity. Rather than dismiss those tensions, as many scholars of Hess have done, we should embrace them as insightful reflections on identity. This book turns to Hess's passionate struggle for an authentic modern Judaism in order to grasp better the dynamics of modern Jewish identity. The tensions in Hess's works, I want to argue, reveal in new ways the inescapable conflicts facing modern Jewry.
Contemporary scholars, following Philippsons lead, have criticized Hess for his lack of philosophical sophistication (though unlike Philippson, they still admire his character and commitment). Edmund Silberner, Hess's biographer, noticed the eccentric and erratic ordering of topics in Rome and Jerusalem. He responded by rewriting Hess's claims in a more "systematic" form. Jonathan Frankel likened the "personal, fragmented, often emotional form" of Rome and Jerusalem to writing a confession. Hess's work did not have the philosophical weight to be anything more. Even Isaiah Berlin, who fiercely defended Hess before his critics, complained that Hess's style was "sentimental, rhetorical, and at times merely flat; there are a good many digressions and references to issues now totally forgotten." If, as I will argue in chapter 4, Berlin and Frankel poorly understood the rhetorical power of Hess's narrative style, others often dismissed Hess's religious thought entirely. In a book entitled Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism, Shlomo Avineri ignored Hess's constructive proposals for modern Jewish religious identity, labeling Hess instead an "agnostic socialist" who did not want to get "bogged down in religious observance." Hess was too passionate, unsystematic, conflicted, and secular to be taken seriously as a religious philosopher. Yet Hess's readers all maintained, with Berlin, that Rome and Jerusalem was indeed "a masterpiece." So despite the confusing, passionate, and outdated jargon, Rome and Jerusalem still had something to offer.
The central claim in this book is that the confusions and tensions embedded throughout Rome and Jerusalem produce a meaningful testament and witness to the complexity of modern (and even post-modern) Jewish identity. The tensions abound in both the content and structure of the work. Composed as a series of twelve letters to Josephine Hirsch (whose sister Emilie married Hess's brother Samuel), Rome and Jerusalem also includes an introductory preface, a concluding epilogue with six appendices, ten notes to the letters, and a postscript. Rome and Jerusalem is so clumsy and unyielding, loquacious and erratic, that Hess had difficulty publishing the work until Heinrich Graetz convinced a publisher in Leipzig to finance the project. But the work sold poorly when it appeared in 1862, and few of Hess's colleagues read the book or even took notice of it. No wonder, for one must jump from letter to note, sift through complex arguments and digressions in the epilogue, and again reread the letters to fully grasp Hess's claim that modern Jewish identity is rooted in a complex web of national and religious commitments. Yet Hess barely hints at this structural complexity in the preface, where he summarizes his work as a new account of national Jewish identity that evades the "illusions of the rationalists" (the Reformers) while also steering clear of the "dogmatic fanatics" (the Orthodox). Throughout the letters, Hess paints a profound religious vision of Jewish history and the religious heritage that grounds Jewish political life and practice. He argues for the rebuilding of a Jewish state in Palestine that promotes religious, social, and political commitments. This proto-Zionist theme has received the most attention from scholars, but Hess also calls for critical appraisal of modem Jewish identity, and for the religious and social goods associated with this self-awareness. Yet Hess does not guide us through this intricate maze of commitments, emotional attachments, national ties, and religious practice. We are left to pull the various fragments together. In so doing, readers of Rome and Jerusalem reproduce Hess's very complex act of constructing identity out of multiple and sometimes conflicting narrative strands. The complexity of Rome and Jerusalem itself expresses the conflicting struggles of modern Jewish identity.
To be sure, Rome and Jerusalem is a scarred work of its own. Hess often confesses his own fears, ambitions, stubbornness, and hopes for the future. To take but one example, it is clear from the letters to Josephine Hirsch that she represents female Jewish piety. In Hess's reading, female piety displays a relentless and devoted attachment to Jewish nationality. Through her faithfulness, Josephine Hirsch, and others like her, are worthy of the redemptive return home to Jewish national existence. Indeed, she is more worthy than others of her generation, who change their names and religious language to fit dominant cultural expectations. Hess suggests that faithfulness to nationality, exhibited in part by the retention of the Hebrew language and personal names, and a healthy distance from the dominant culture, are necessary preconditions for the redemption of the Jewish people. This, by a Jewish man married to a Christian woman, a man at home in European culture and philosophy, fluent in both German and French, and a man who, with the singular exception of Rome and Jerusalem, signs his name M. Hess or Moritz Hess, but never Moses Hess. Rome and Jerusalem really does appear to be "the newest form of hypocrisy in Judaism."
So even as he defended Jewish national identity, Hess was deeply ambivalent about his own relationship to Judaism and the Jewish people, to mention nothing of a "Jewish nation." Hess's ambivalence arises out of the religious and biological imagery that informs his account of Jewish nationalism. The very term nation was problematic in the context of nineteenth-century German debates on "the Jewish question," for the term could imply a religious, racial, cultural or political community. Hess employed the word nation to signify all of these meanings. At times, the Jewish nation identified a cultural and political legacy. In other texts, Hess described the nation as a religious community that continually re-evaluated (in ritual, thought, and memory) the meaning of Jewish tradition.
Yet one cannot but notice the dissonance between Hess's defense of a Jewish nation and his personal commitment to it. Born the first of five children in 1812 in Bonn, Hess entered the world just three years before Prussia would reclaim the Rhineland from France and once again restrict the rights of Jewish inhabitants-an event, according to Shlomo Avineri, that influenced a great many radical German Jewish thinkers, Hess among them. Hess received a traditional Jewish education until the age of fourteen, when, after his mother's death in 1825, he joined his father's trade business in Cologne. Here, for the first time confronting the exhilarating world of German romantic and idealist philosophy, Hess felt ill-prepared and groundless: "Wo hatte [ich] studiert? Nirgend Was? Nichts!!! [Where have I studied? Nowhere. What? Nothing!!!]." He quickly devoured Schelling, Rousseau, Schiller, Kant, Hegel, and others in what appears to be an unsystematic study of the German philosophical tradition. Hess mentioned only two Jewish works: Mendelssohn's Jerusalem and Spinoza's Tractatus, texts that would later influence his understanding of Jewish identity. In 1835 Hess entered the University of Bonn, but again did not follow any systematic course of study, and never received a university degree. He would soon become a distinguished socialist revolutionary and writer, establishing close friendships with Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Ferdinand Lassalle. But even as an influential and proud German socialist, Hess felt lost in the German culture surrounding him. His own socialist party members would desperately slander him with anti-Jewish epithets. Yet he could not retreat to the more familiar environment of Jewish community or tradition. Hess was not an observant religious Jew, and his knowledge of Hebrew was minimal, though more proficient than his understanding of Jewish history. He had only contempt for Talmudic scholarship and education, and scornfully characterized his teachers as "Unmenschen." As we shall see, Hess also detected the rift between his national claims and his personal commitments. He sought to mend the breach by appealing to nation as racial heritage. Even if he no longer embraced the Jewish religious and cultural legacy, Hess was still a Jew from birth, a product of what he called racial "integrity." Hess's racial theory offered the protection and promise of a stable and authentic Jewish identity. For Hess, so removed from the Jewish religious, political, and cultural heritage he endorsed but could not himself fully accept, race science became Jewish self-affirmation.
The tensions are so clearly felt in Hess's appeal to Jewish tradition despite (or even because) of its scars; in his defense of Jewish national identity as an inescapable racial heritage; and finally, in his adopting the name "Moses" for Rome and Jerusalem, not as his birth name, but as his "old Testament name." Jonathan Frankel has called Rome and Jerusalem Hess's most confessional work. In that confession Hess confronts the dilemmas of modern Jewish identity. The reader recognizes a Jew struggling to come to terms with the meaning of his conflicting commitments and impulses, a man at times religious, secular, socialist, and nationalist. But that struggle does not make Rome and Jerusalem any less philosophically rich or nuanced. Hess is witness to the conflicting appeals of modern goods, and reveals how one Jew negotiates their constraints and possibilities.
I read the texts that Silberner, Avineri, and Berlin find outdated and unconvincing as powerful resources for reconfiguring Jewish identity, modern and postmodern. In contrast to previous readings that narrowly focus on Hess's socialist or proto-Zionist concerns, this book stresses instead how Hess is a passionate Jewish thinker. Even as Hess highlights the specific and singular problems of nineteenth-century German Jewry, I want to claim that his dilemmas, conflicts, and tenuous solutions still confront modern Jews today. Where a previous generation discarded Hess's conflicts as bad philosophy, I reappropriate them to explore intractable dilemmas in modern Jewish identity. The goals of this book are thus two-fold: to offer a compelling and substantially new reading of Hess's corpus (especially Rome and Jerusalem), and to recommend Hess's works as rich resources for confronting the problems of modern Jewish identity.
Categories of Modern Identity
The concept of identity that informs my own thinking is taken from Charles Taylor's impressive work, Sources of the Self. Much of the philosophical groundwork for Taylor's book was developed earlier, especially in his article, "What is Human Agency?" In that article, Taylor distinguishes between the notion of a "self" and our understanding of "identity." He does this by appealing to the concept of "strong evaluation." A strong evaluator reflects about the kind of life worth living and the goods that make up this life. She reasons in terms of better and worse, and makes qualitative distinctions between baser and nobler kinds of action. Taylor claims that this kind of qualitative judgment is an inescapable feature of human personhood. We simply could not imagine a well-developed human being bereft of this capacity to contrast and judge values and commitments qualitatively. Our identities, then, are defined by our strong evaluations:
So my lineage is part of my identity because it is bound up with certain qualities I value, or because I believe that I must value these qualities since they are so integrally part of me that to disvalue them would be to reject myself. In either case, the concept of identity is bound up with that of certain strong evaluations which are inseparable from myself.
Strong evaluation is a necessary formal characteristic of human agency. To be a self is to be a strong evaluator. Individual identity is determined by the content of particular strong evaluations. I am a self because I am a strong evaluator, but I am this and not that kind of person because of the strong evaluations I make. I employ the terms Identity, person, and agent to refer to the kind of being imagined or described by strong evaluations. The word self I limit to the formal characteristics necessary to imagine or describe a recognizable human being.
Hess's works are full of strong evaluations that fit uneasily together. He appeals to moral sources that conflict, exposing the tensions in his own identity and the "national" Jews he describes. Taylor would not be surprised by these countervailing pressures. He believes such ambiguity is part of what it means to be a modern self. By the time Taylor writes Sources of the Self (1989), he suggests that the recovery of moral sources can reconcile conflicting commitments:
The moral conflicts of modern culture rage within each of us. Unless, that is, our greater lucidity can help us to see our way to a reconciliation. If I may give expression to an even farther-out hunch, I will say that I see this as the potential goal and fruit of articulacy.
Hess too yearns to reconcile his moral sources. Yet his works are littered with the strains of emotional and philosophical turmoil. If Taylor imagines a time when the moral conflicts finally abate, then I fear that his hermeneutics of reconciliation might suppress Hess's confusions. For it is precisely these confusions that make Rome and Jerusalem and Hess's other texts so profitable for modern persons. Moral conflicts certainly "rage" in Hess, and only a "greater lucidity" would lose sight of the tensions and compromises that inform and complicate modern Jewish identity. So reading Hess helps us to see the deficiencies in Taylor's approach to the modern self. Conflict and fragmentation should not be overcome by greater lucidity, but instead should be recognized as significant and constitutive features of modern life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity by Ken Koltun-Fromm. Copyright © 2001 Ken Koltun-Fromm. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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