Delusions of the Grandeur of Belonging: Jews in Pre-Holocaust Europe

by Norman Simms (November 2017)

Self portrait, Peter Kien, Theresienstadt Museum

Yet Jewish tradition also invites us to consider complexities in the nature of
truth. Truth depends on context, and it is, at times, subservient to other values.[1]

Even when authors write books about important Jewish intellectuals and artists, what is often neglected, if mentioned at all, is the way in which Jews and Judaism exist in the world, that is, in the consciousness and unconsciousness of the cultures that form the context to Jewish existence. Most people who write, review, and read such historical books consider Jewishness to be a kind of incidental matter,[2] particularly when the subjects were themselves not very concerned or educated about their own Jewish identities,[3] sometimes to the point of outright denial. And if they do touch on the matter, contemporary authors tend to operate out of a mindset shaped by presuppositions: models that are at best irrelevant to, and at worst distortive of, the formative experiences and personalities created in opposition to an environment Jews in the past two centuries assumed to be secular, tolerant and just. Even more than that, these historians and sociologists seem to deal with of a sense of Judaism that they treat as equal to late twentieth-century (and all too often North American) Ashkenazi practice—in other words, religious according to post-World War Two’s Orthodoxy, Conservatism and Reform paradigms of Jewishness, and a folklore vision of ghettoes, shtetls and parents awkwardly assimilated into Western communities.

However, for nineteenth-century Jews in France and in German-speaking lands who believed they had transitioned into successful novelists or essay writers, artists and art historians, academics and museum directors, medical professional and scientists and other intellectuals, the situation was quite different. The limited civil rights granted by Napoleonic decrees and the political Emancipation partly gained in some Central European states could not be assumed to be permanent and open to further consolidation, welcome as these advances were.

[4]

[5] The new configurations are recognizable, however, as arising from sources further back than most people can remember or imagine. This reminds us of what one of Rabbi Israel Chait’s students says as a note to his recent close-reading of Ecclesiastes (Koholet):

Rabbi Chait explained that King Solomon employed contradictions in order to keep the ideas hidden for the wise men to discern. Perhaps the use of apparent contradictions is the King’s method of enabling discernment. Mere facts do not engage the mind.[6]

Aby Warburg, the great art historian, saw this series of processes as following a trajectory from traumatic event to ephemeral and often somatic memories to collective attempts to create shared stories public images and transformative rituals (Pathosformeln or pathos-laden icons) and then on to a culturally-sanctioned series of renewals and repetitions (the Nachleben or afterlife of the codified triggers and soothing myths), leaving a fascinating but also uncomfortable and not transparent series of aesthetic artefacts, visual and verbal iterations, and gestural stimulants to further intellectual exploration.

For the Jews of France, until large numbers of immigrants from the Eastern Yiddish-speaking lands began to arrive in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the cultural base was Sephardic, especially in the south along the Mediterranean coast, mixed with Italianate families around Avignon. After the Great Expulsion from Castille in 1492 and the forced conversion and escape from Portugal a few years later, many of these Sephardim arrived as nominal Christians, conversos more or less sincere in their new religious affiliation.[7] For those who maintained a secret commitment to Judaism—both as Crypto-Jews and Marranos[8]—they formed new communities of their own, although the coastal towns like Perpignan and Montpellier remained under the aegis of the older Sephardi culture, strongly mystical followers of Nachmanides and the creators of Kabbalah (medieval Jewish spirituality and mysticism). Maimonidean rationalism (Aristotelian logic filtered through Arabic translations) was also evident in some groups. Early in the nineteenth century, Jews who belonged to Haskallah movement or the Enlightened values of Moses Mendelsohn arrived from German states, and from these middle-class and professional families arose quite a few of the social, cultural and intellectual leaders of the age. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when Alsace and a large part of Lorraine were absorbed into the new German Empire (The Second Reich), many Jews chose to emigrate to France rather than accept Prussian hegemony. It was with French culture they identified and had come to esteem as the essence of Western Civilization—despite their own background in Yiddish language and religious practice. Fewer Jews came from Vienna and other cities in the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire.[9] Many Alsatians had family and commercial ties with northern Italy and the Mediterranean region now in France but then still part of Italian culture, such as the ancestors and siblings of Alfred Dreyfus. 

[2] In reaction against the notion of Orientalism, I have written many times about the phenomenon of Incidentalism, whereby the Jewish presence in the arts, music, science, medicine and so forth is treated as incidental to what is real and important.  Without arguing in a essentialist manner (with all its racist concomitants) my studies try to place Judaism and Jewish identity as integral to European history. 

[3] This might be, when practices by the non-Jew are included, taken as a type of asemitism, which Shimon Markish in Erasmus and the Jews defines as “a form of practiced indifference,” which at best can lead to an “open-ended, multivalent approach to Jews’ but more often is a wilful blindness or just another snobbish brand of incidentalism. See Kimberlee Cloutier-Blazzard, review of Debra Higgs Strickland, The Epiphany of Hieronymous Bosch: Imagining Antichrist and the Other from the Middle Ages to the Reformation (Turnbout: Brepols Publishers, 2016) H-Low-Countries. H-Net Reviews (August 2017) online at https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=50337.

[4] Jonathan Sacks, Radical Then, Radical Now: On Being Jewish (London and New York : Continuum, 2000) p. 186.

[6] Rabbi Israel Chait, Koholes: Man’s Quest for Happiness and its Inextricable Tie with the Inescapable Frustrations of Ambition (Yeshiva B’nei Torah, 2017) p. 41.

[7] Norman Simms, Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in Jewish Experience (New York: Peter Lang, 2005).

[9] One must recall that for a long time Vienna was the capital of an Empire that included Spain and her possessions in Europe (e.g.,  the Low Countries, many Mediterranean islands and parts of Italy) and the New World and that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a place from which Sephardi Jews in the Levant and the Balkans would trade, settle and consider the essence of western civilization.  Things are not as simple as they sometimes appear to be.

http://www.tabletmagaizne.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/246994/why-yiddishisfunny ?utmsource = tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=4f99ed7ee6-E

[11] Norman Simms, “Universal and Intimate: Acquired Languages in Elias Canetti” in New Zealand and the EU: Perspectives on European Literature, ed. Hannah Brodsky, The Europe Institute 3:2 (Auckland, NZ:   2009) pp. 43-70.

[12] See the novels of another Sephardic Nobel Prize-winning Jewish author, Albert Cohen, such as Belle du Seigneur, about his family background on the Greek island of Corfu.

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Jews in an Illusion of Paradise; Dust and Ashes, Comedians and Catastrophes, Volume I, and his newest book, Jews in an Illusion of Paradise: Dust and Ashes, Falling Out of Place and Into History, Volume II. Several further manuscripts in the same vein are currently being completed.  Along with Nancy Hartvelt Kobrin, he is preparing a psychohistorical examination of why children terrorists kill children.

More by Norman Simms here.

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