There are numerous ways of confronting a complicated question laden with nuance. Across these few, non-exhaustive pages, in rapid and discontinuous strokes, I shall attempt to offer a synthesis of many centuries of history, referring the reader to a far more detailed analysis contained in books of hundreds of pages. Besides, the aim of this contribution is not so much to give convincing answers as to provoke new questions.
The history of the Jewish people is full of paradoxes, sometimes obvious, sometimes more discreet, yet always rich in meaning. Perhaps the first of all, in chronological order, is bound up with the separation between Judaism and Christianity, twenty centuries ago.
Christianity, born as a universal religion, sought to take the opposite course from another religion bound to a nation, to a people. Despite its popular success, it endowed itself, on the contrary — and no doubt against its will — with rigid and hierarchical structures, whereas the Jewish world more closely resembles a joyful band of jazz players, in which a sense of liberty and spontaneity prevails — exaggerated, perhaps, but anti-totalitarian.
Exile and the diaspora uprooted the Jewish traditions from their milieu of origin and fostered, among the Jews, a latent and fecund mentality of fervent and natural cosmopolitanism. After twenty centuries, one may say that the Jewish religion was obliged to go beyond its own physical and mental borders, whereas Christianity seems to have fallen back upon hierarchical models that stand in contrast to modernity.
Moreover, not without weaknesses and without contradictions, the Jewish people resolutely maintained its struggle against idols, whether these be statues of clay or mental representations. The plurality of expressions within the Jewish world, as well as its innate nonconformism, seem in some cases to be a troublesome element, but they are also the expression of a surprising vitality.
Even the ghetto does not escape the rule of paradox.
“The Jews shall all dwell together in the set of houses situated at the Ghetto, near San Girolamo. And so that they shall not circulate all night long, we decree that two gates shall be set in place on either side of the Old Ghetto, which shall be opened at dawn and closed at midnight by four Christian guards employed to that effect and paid by the Jews themselves at the rate agreed upon by our college.”
We are in Venice, in 1516, the 29th of March. This decree could be one among all those issued by the Senate of the Republic. It is not. These words mark, in the torment of the history of the Jews of the diaspora in Europe, a stage to be kept in memory: the beginning of the age of the ghettos, the beginning of the separation from the others, the Christians, the birth of a precise, physical, and impassable limit that would then become a tenacious symbol over the centuries.
The Jewish quarter, closed and controlled, became a negative model widely diffused throughout Europe. These walls were, in many cities, a symbol of oppression, but they ended up fostering not only the preservation of Jewish identity but also the formation of a new mentality, not devoid of defects but which also had its qualities.
It was in Venice that, for the first time, a ghetto was set in place, and yet men of the first rank such as Isaac Abrabanel, David De Pomis, and Simone Luzzatto nourished, for a hundred and fifty years, in varied forms and at different periods, the glorious myth of La Serenissima.
Exiled from Spain, Abrabanel had arrived in the city at the beginning of the sixteenth century, after wandering through the Mediterranean ports, when the ghetto did not yet exist.
De Pomis had been driven from Perugia on account of the pope’s intolerance. He had found, in his new situation in the lagoon, honors and protections, even though these were precisely the crucial years of the battle of Lepanto. This is why it seems understandable that these exiled intellectuals should have wished to manifest their gratitude and their thanks.
Luzzatto, by contrast, came from the ghetto: his family, originally from Germany, had been one of the first to go and dwell there, more than a century earlier. And yet this rabbi, singularly attentive to economic phenomena, was the most attentive and faithful interpreter of the Venetian myth.
In the first decades of the seventeenth century, precisely at the moment when the city was at the apogee of its splendor, Luzzatto had the intuition of a possible decadence to come. New dangers threatened the Jews. Imminent crises were the cause, as well as certain contingent events: there had been thefts in the city, and certain Jews had been mixed up in them. He then wrote a celebrated text: Discorso circa il stato de gl’Hebrei et in particolar dimoranti nell’inclita città di Venetia (Discourse Concerning the Condition of the Jews, and in particular of those dwelling in the illustrious city of Venice), a text in which an economic theory was elaborated in an original mode.
The myth of Venice, to which Abrabanel and De Pomis had given metaphysical connotations, was interpreted by Luzzatto, by means of historico-political considerations, on the basis of the mercantile reality of his time.
In the first consideration, of the eighteen that articulate the apologetic text, the author insists on:
“the usefulness of negotiation: human society is nothing other than an ensemble of reciprocal needs, or rather of conveniences, of inter-negotiations (in times of opulence as in times of penury), and of what Morality calls the superfluous: luxury and the vain objects of our avidity.”
Thus the Venetian rabbi does indeed ask for tolerance, without any inferiority complex, with great respect toward his interlocutors, and this through a convincing logic that admits no objection, in the name of an explicit economic reason. He writes, among other things:
“To come to the particular treatise that has been proposed to me, I maintain that of all the advantages and benefits that the Jewish nation brings to the city, one sees in the first place the profit that results from the exercise of commerce, from which exercise there arise for the city five fundamental benefits.”
These are, in brief: the increase of the tax on imports and exports; the transport of merchandise to distant countries, which not only meets the needs of men but also constitutes an ornament of civil life; the supply of raw material, wool and silk, to the artisans, by which those who work maintain a good standard of living, in peace and quiet, without the agitations and tumults provoked by the lack of provisions; the exportation of finished products, the disposal of numerous manufactured goods, made and elaborated in the city; and commerce and exchange, the foundation of peace and tranquility among neighboring peoples.
It is to all of this that the Jews contribute, Luzzatto explains, with “the industry of their persons and the investment of their capital.”
Although he devotes a large part of his Discourse to the commercial problems that his interlocutors, the Venetian nobles, certainly took more to heart than any other consideration, Luzzatto does not forget the questions relating to moneylenders:
“The Jews are required to provide for the daily needs as well as the emergencies of the poor wretches with an interest rate of only five percent per year, a rate so insignificant that the expenses of renting lands, of farmers, of money, and other occurrences, very far exceed so small an interest.”
And he observes that “this decree is particular to the city of Venice and that, elsewhere in Italy, the Jews lend at eighteen percent interest.”
What happened in Venice was borne out in many other European countries. These same Jews, although trampled underfoot, ended up exalting the places where they lived, or at least feeling at home on these lands, not always hospitable. Here is the paradox: although driven from power, the Jews often made themselves the most zealous interpreters of the local realities. In the broad sense, they showed themselves more French than the French, more German than the Germans, or more Italian than the Italians. This attachment to the lands and cities where they lived seemed made on purpose to provoke, among the other citizens, irrepressible jealousies and acrimonies.
In Paris, for example, many were irritated that Jacob Offenbach, a Jew from Frankfurt, should be able to understand in depth the soul of the city, and that his unbridled Cancan should become the symbol of a historical period unique of its kind.
The Jews were, in centuries past, the victims and the protagonists of European civilization and history. Sometimes, and not necessarily by deliberate choice, they crossed the narrow borders, geographical and mental, of the countries in which they lived. In fact, in their forced peregrinations, they anticipated a vigorous cosmopolitan spirit, a forerunner of a modern and more rational Europeanism.
Ghetto and cosmopolitanism seem to have become the complementary expressions of an identical destiny. This rupture of limits, the pure fruit of the restrictions of the ghetto, allows a few essential lines to be traced. The expulsion from Spain in the fifteenth century, the century of the Enlightenment, followed by that of the most total emancipation, were crucial moments in this history laden with unsuspected psychological and intellectual consequences.
The year 1492 represents a capital moment. It is of extreme importance, and not only because Christopher Columbus opened the route to the Americas. In January of that year, Spain in fact completed its own political unification. Barely three months had passed when, from the sumptuous palace of the Alhambra, King Ferdinand and his wife, Queen Isabella, proclaimed their will to expel all the Jews from the country.
Historians have attempted, with difficulty, to evaluate this forced migratory phenomenon as a whole: according to certain sources, three hundred thousand persons departed and made their way toward all the ports of the Mediterranean.
The violent repression that struck the Spanish Jewish social fabric like a hammer blow expressed itself first through the forced conversions, then through the abrupt expulsion. This was the origin of a new category of men, whose identity ended up feeding on the existential tragedies undergone, and which was built out of elements of an extraordinary richness, but not devoid of ambiguities.
Constrained to a Christianity of appearance, Jews in their souls, the Marranos lived their condition enclosed in fear and taking refuge in family microcosms impermeable to outside reality, surviving like a multitude of droplets of oil on the surface of the water. Families and individuals ended up defending themselves by the only means granted to them: by hiding like underground rivers ready to reappear.
The great and elusive experience of the Marranos presents an original characteristic: for the destiny of the group there were substituted innumerable destinies, of singular families and even of particular men, who acquired specific characteristics over the course of the generations. In the end, regarded with animosity by Jews as well as by Christians, these uprooted men crossed the narrow national borders but above all went so far as to break every preconceived ideological scheme. They presented themselves — unconsciously, to be sure, in the Europe of that time — as men without roots and as disenchanted citizens of the world.
Moreover, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain definitively shattered an illusion, already compromised, besides, for decades: the possible civil cohabitation in the Iberian peninsula between the three religions, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. This event changed not only the face of the Jewish presence but, further, left a deep and persistent trace in the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of Europe.
The Jewish element and the Marrano Jewish element were sometimes in harmony, sometimes in dialectical opposition. Over the course of the centuries, in their intrinsic psychological complexity, these two elements revealed themselves to be, in fact, the powerful catalysts of numerous cultural processes.
In the twentieth century, there was another illusion that evaporated into tragedy: the presumed Judeo-German symbiosis.
The sixteenth century was thus a crucial period for the whole Jewish community of Europe, whose setting underwent a profound transformation. On the formal plane, the marginalization of the Jewish world was accentuated, and the ghettos — composite and multicolored microcosms — enjoyed, despite the segregation, in Venice as in Lvov, a broad autonomy with respect to the surrounding society. Within these ghettos a very lively debate developed, feeding not only on the Jewish tradition but also on numerous and heterogeneous influences that came from the outside world.
These historical experiences — namely the forced migrations, the precariousness of everyday life, and the vexations of a daily marginalization — formed, little by little, a new mentality. This new mentality had as its characteristics being open to international relations and strongly anti-dogmatic, for it had been nourished for centuries on Talmudic debate.
A few centuries later, even the Hofjuden, that is to say the court Jews,1 built up in large part their strength and their influence on the recourse to the international relations at their disposal and on the support that the Jewish communities offered them in exchange for protection. Deprived of political rights, they were close to power in the service of the princes, becoming in some cases very influential and, at the same time, on account of this, they were extremely detested.
In the course of the eighteenth century, the Jewish communities, despite their marginal position, lived in symbiosis with the society that surrounded them — with tensions and debates, to be sure. A further complication arose, however: if the populations of Europe could content themselves with the concept of equality, defended by the Enlightenment, the Jews, by contrast, had — already in that time — a supplementary demand, for reasons more instinctive than rational. Indeed, driven by the necessity of defending their threatened identity, they asked for equality in diversity, as good forerunners of the present era and in sharp contrast with the tendencies toward leveling of a world that was emerging from centuries of social inequalities.
Equality in diversity: this concept is today commonly accepted, but in that period it was poorly received and little understood in its substance. The hinge period between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries saw these dilemmas become more acute in the wake of the French Revolution, first, and then of Napoleon’s political action. The problem of political and social emancipation, of which many had dreamed during the dark centuries, revealed itself, in the test of facts, to be a terrible boomerang: in the folds of the political scene that was establishing itself, new dangers emerged, directed not so much against the Jews as against the Jewish identity that risked being effaced.
In the nineteenth century, the tormented Jewish conscience suffered new scissions. Beyond the gate of the ghetto there existed a world in full transformation against which it was necessary to measure oneself, even if it showed itself sown with new pitfalls. The Revolution and the birth of the constitutional monarchies transformed the Jews into citizens, but they destroyed the old hierarchical structures of the communal organizations — perhaps a little oppressive, but which certainly constituted a sure refuge in moments of persecution.
Equality appeared possible, integration into the rest of the social body reasonably desirable but, on the other hand, the Jews were no longer an autonomous, independent body. They could not live according to their laws, and the tensions of civil life, which previously discharged themselves upon the entirety of the group, now struck the individual — more fragile, of course, and not always in a position to withstand the pressures pushing toward the disaggregation of a new society, disposed to accept the Jew but not his former identity.
Profoundly different among themselves, even ideologically, scattered across numerous countries of Europe, accustomed by an ancestral tradition to an independence of individual judgment, deprived of a structure that could decide for all, the Jews found themselves once again face to face with their history. They had to confront new problems, never until then faced, which they had to resolve and bear daily.
Emancipation thus led, on the one hand, to the assimilation of many Jews, and on the other, to the defensive reaction of many others, who took refuge in a most pronounced form of isolation and a rigid form of religious orthodoxy. A few, however, chose the path of a difficult equilibrium between fidelity to the particular Jewish identity and the choice of being citizens of singular States and of the world.
This is why the wounds of the Jewish soul, the identity conflicts of numerous European Jews, anticipated by Spinoza, exploded vividly in the nineteenth century and remain a characteristic of the Jewish soul still today. If it is true that intellectuals are the mirror of their people and express its most intimate characteristics, then it is possible to gather, in the extraordinarily diverse flowering of intellectuals of Judeo-European origin and in their tormented conscience, the substratum of a new consciousness of the Marrano type.
This consciousness, quite different from that designated by this term originally, nonetheless finds a link in symbolic correspondences that do indeed allow this term to be used in a metaphorical sense. For, like the Marranos, the new Jewish intellectuals, beginning with Spinoza, also lived the torment of their Jewish condition in a schizophrenic mode: Jews on the inside and profoundly European men on the outside.
Numerous examples, unfortunately synthetic, can give to this way of seeing a concrete consistency. They can confirm, among other things, that the crossing of the narrow nationalist barriers, whether psychological or geographical, was a constant of the most celebrated Jewish thinkers and intellectuals of the European diaspora: first out of contingent necessity, then, and more and more, out of inner vocation and by choice.
The adherence of many of them to the revolutionary struggles was important and determined. The attempt was to break the oppressive and authoritarian political systems: changing their names served Trotsky, Kamenev, Radek, or even Parvus only to mask their identity, not to save themselves.
In different moments and situations, still to remain on the terrain of political experience, it is possible to see in Rosa Luxemburg, in Clara Zetkin, in Emma Goldman, or in Gustav Landauer, or among the representatives of Austrian Marxism, Rudolf Hilferding or Victor Adler, on the one hand the desire to find in supranationality and in the crossing of barriers the meaning of the struggle for the liberation of man, and on the other hand the heritage of an origin that cannot be forgotten and that reveals itself at the most unexpected moments.
Certain intellectuals lived their Jewish origin as a burden and manifested an exacerbated self-hatred: suffice it to think, in the political field, of Karl Marx (Karl Loewy) or of Walter Rathenau, or again, in the literary domain, of Otto Weininger or Karl Kraus.
A reflection of the demands and contradictions typical of the Jews of Europe, in unstable equilibrium between emancipation and enclosure, still others gave form, without being truly conscious of it, to the most occult and persistent nightmares of the Jewish imaginary. Franz Kafka certainly does not lend himself to reductive interpretations, and yet his work, which goes beyond any wall of the ghetto, whether physical or interior, strongly maintains the dialectic between Jewish origin and the objectives common to all men: the writer, so bound to his city, Prague, may rightly be considered one of the symbols of the European twentieth century. His whole family, which was numerous, died in the Nazi extermination camps, but he did not live through that terrible drama because he had the good fortune to die before the gust of violence swept Europe away.
In Vienna, the importance of the intellectual element of Jewish origin was enormous. In the political field, we have already spoken of Austrian socialism. But it is easy to recall the central role of Schoenberg and of Mahler on the musical scene; of Stefan Zweig, of Joseph Roth, of Peter Altenberg, of Arthur Schnitzler in literature; of Freud and his circle; of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and of Ludwig Wittgenstein, men in whom other influences had been superimposed upon the Jewish roots. In the city of the Habsburgs, alongside the politics of conservatism, the most unbridled intellectual and artistic effervescence took hold, and the Jews had no difficulty in asserting themselves, in the role of a minority, as creators of new modes of expression in the face of a modernity that was violently erupting.
Today, this world to which the Jews gave so many human, scientific, and cultural contributions — this world of yesterday, as Stefan Zweig would say — has completely disappeared. But the paradoxes have not disappeared; on the contrary, contemporary modernity has accentuated many aspects that deserve a renewed attention.
In any case, the shadow of the ghettos has not vanished, and its influence still makes itself felt, even if it is amid paradoxes and contradictions.
Notes
A very limited but somewhat interesting phenomenon that had importance in the seventeenth century and that acquired a particular weight between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.↩︎