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Previous Post in Series: The Kittsee Kehilla

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Digression: The Road to Jewish Emancipation

For Jews, the journey of assimilation into modern urban society promised great rewards. Nevertheless, for those who had grown to maturity in the Kehilla, this new life could be difficult, confusing, and fraught with a host of momentous personal choices. The traditional Jewish way of life had been a profoundly integrated one. The long shutting-off of the Jewish people from the central institutions of European society had led to the world that Leopold Kompert so eloquently, so nostalgically described: a sensuous world, rich in feeling and faith, close-knit, traditional, autonomous, and largely untouched by progressive ideas and ideals. In Kittsee, it may not have occurred to the Joachims to consider their ethnic, religious, political and cultural identities as discrete and separable. It may never have occurred to many traditional Jews to question how their sense of themselves might change, should those various identities somehow become disaggregated. What would it mean to abandon time-honored ways of living, to loosen the bonds of family and friendship, and attempt to navigate their way in the dangerous, unpredictable waters of an alien culture? To what extent was it possible to do so? What new skills, what new ways of thinking would be required? What new social habits? What obligations did those who departed bear to those whom they left behind? Did accepting the new imply an outright rejection of heritage — or a rejection of those individuals and communities that continued to honor traditional ways?

The issues that confronted the Joachims were common among their generation. Could one remain an observant Jew while living within a dominant Christian culture? [1]  Could one retain a Jewish identity without necessarily being religious? What did it mean to an increasing number of Jews to follow the route of conversion, whether out of expediency or conviction? What became of the authority of Jewish leaders as their kehillot dispersed, and as the state began to engage Jews directly as individuals — not as a “nation” through their official representatives? How should those leaders respond? What, at the end of the day, were the consequences for Jews of attempting to embrace a culture that often eyed them with suspicion and contempt, as pariahs and parvenus? [2] The commonly accepted term “assimilation” hardly begins to anticipate the wide variety of issues that faced the Joachims and other nineteenth-century Jews, or the diversity of responses that they gave, as they took up the challenges of contemporary European life. More importantly, it does not hint at the cultural riches and spiritual gifts that they brought with them on their journey, or acknowledge the magnitude of their contribution to the society that they sought to enter.

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The bewildering identity crisis that beset nineteenth-century Jewry can in many ways be seen as an unintended, delayed consequence of an attempt at philosophical clarity and sectarian harmony amongst the Christian majority. The modern notion of religious tolerance originated early in the course of the Enlightenment, in the intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century English and French deism, amid concerns for promoting peaceable co-existence among conflicting Christian denominations. In A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), John Locke argued that religious doctrine should lie beyond the reach of state power. “Speculative opinions […] and articles of faith (as they are called) which are required only to be believed, cannot be imposed on any Church by the law of the land,” he wrote. “For it is absurd that things should be enjoined by laws which are not in men’s power to perform. And to believe this or that to be true does not depend upon our will.” [i]

The democratic ideals that characterized the Atlantic Revolutionary Era were likewise at odds with the traditional legal segregation and exclusion of religious minorities. Revolutionary France led Europe in the drive for the civic emancipation of its Jewish population, consistent with its faith in the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, and its espousal of the quintessential Enlightenment notion that what is good and true for one people, time and place must necessarily be good and true for all.

Aside from philosophical issues of fairness, the belief that motivated enlightened leaders was largely this: that the problems besetting an empire — besetting mankind, generally — were not inherent and intractable, but the result of poor education and bad administration; that the development of human potential in all sectors of society could not but lead to an age of happiness and prosperity; that with proper laws and proper incentives, proper rewards and proper punishments, with proper schooling promoting a common language and culture, human ignorance, superstition, and prejudice could be conquered, and a better way of life could be secured for all of the citizens or subjects of the realm.

Joseph II

Hungarian Jews, who had suffered under the repressive regime of Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780), enjoyed considerable political advancement under the enlightened rule of her son, Emperor Joseph II (1741-1790). Immediately upon accession to the throne, Joseph pressed a series of reforms aimed at rationalizing and centralizing the administration of his dominions. Some of Joseph’s reforms have become familiar to musicians through the biography of Mozart: his insistence on the use of the German language throughout the Empire, for example, led to the establishment of a German-language opera company in Vienna, for which Mozart wrote his Singspiel, Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Even in death, Austrians were affected by Joseph’s Enlightened thinking. Mozart was buried in an unmarked grave pursuant to the conditions of the Emperor’s funeral ordinance, which required, as a matter of hygiene and efficient land use, that cemeteries be located outside of the city, and that decomposed corpses be exhumed and gravesites reused.

In 1782, Joseph issued a Toleranzpatent, for Bohemian Jewry, with the intent of making Jews “useful and serviceable to the State, principally through better education and the enlightenment of their youth, and by directing them to the sciences, the arts, and the crafts.” [ii] In 1783 he issued a similar Edict of Toleration (Systematica gentis Iudaicae regulatio) for Hungary, for the first time permitting Hungarian Jews to attend any school or university, and to work at almost any occupation. With proper authorization, and in fixed numbers, Jews were henceforth to be allowed to reside in most places within the empire — with the exception of mining towns. During Joseph’s reign, Jews were required to use the German language for all but religious purposes and were required to take German-sounding surnames. Joachim’s maternal grandfather, previously known as Victor Schul because he lived near the Kittsee synagogue, took the variant name (Isaac) Figdor. [iii]

The increasing importance of capital in modern life undoubtedly played a role in the Emperor’s thinking as well. With the growth of international trade and banking, in which Jews played a predominant role, economic self-interest coincided with philosophical conviction to dictate a more pragmatic, tolerant policy toward this traditionally despised minority. (An early hint of this change of policy occurred as early as 1744, when the famously intolerant Maria Theresa was dissuaded from enforcing her banishment of Prague’s Jewish community by the argument that their expulsion might injure the Habsburg economy). [iv]

Count Stanislas-Marie-Adélaide de Clermont-Tonnerre (1757-1792)

Portrait by Adolf-Ulrik Wertmuller, 1781

For Hungary’s Jews, the strongest winds of change blew from the northwest. On December 23, 1789, in a debate before France’s National Constituent Assembly, Count Stanislas-Marie-Adélaide de Clermont-Tonnerre (1757-1792) rose to address the question of political and social rights for executioners, actors and Jews, none of whom were then permitted to vote or hold office. A classic expression of the temper of the times, his Speech on Religious Minorities and Questionable Professions conveys some idea of the reasoning that was current among Enlightened leaders, and that helped to promote Jewish emancipation throughout Europe. Concerning the rights of executioners, Clermont-Tonnerre said: “It is against reason to tell [them], do this, and if you do it, you will be considered infamous.” As for actors: “I will certainly have less trouble disarming a prejudice that has been weakened for a long time by the influence of the Enlightenment, the love of the arts, and reason…. We should either forbid plays altogether or remove the dishonor associated with acting. Nothing infamous should endure in the eyes of the law, and nothing that the law permits is infamous.” Turning to the Jews, he argued:

Every creed has only one test to pass in regard to the social body: it has only one examination to which it must submit, that of its morals. It is here that the adversaries of the Jewish people attack me. This people, they say, is not sociable. They are commanded to loan at usurious rates; they cannot be joined with us either in marriage or by the bonds of social interchange; our food is forbidden to them; our tables prohibited; our armies will never have Jews serving in the defense of the fatherland. The worst of these reproaches is unjust; the others are only specious. […] Is there a law that obliges me to marry your daughter? Is there a law that obliges me to eat hare, and to eat it with you? No doubt these religious oddities will disappear; and if they do survive the impact of philosophy and the pleasure of finally being true citizens and sociable men, they are not infractions to which the law can or should pertain.

But, they say to me, the Jews have their own judges and laws. I respond that is your fault and you should not allow it. We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals. We must withdraw recognition from their judges; they should have only our judges. We must refuse legal protection to the maintenance of the so-called laws of their Judaic organization; they should not be allowed to form in the state either a political body or an order. They must be citizens individually. But, some will say to me, they do not want to be citizens. Well then! If they do not want to be citizens, they should say so, and then, we should banish them. It is repugnant to have in the state an association of non-citizens, and a nation within the nation. […] In short, Sirs, the presumed status of every man resident in a country is to be a citizen. [v]

There was the quid pro quo, and therein lay the dilemma for Jews if they wished to find a place in modern European life: emancipation under such conditions meant expansion of freedom and opportunity at the cost of their autonomy and the unraveling of that ancient ethnic-religious-political-cultural entity known to themselves and their contemporaries as the “Israelite nation.” By and large, the Enlightenment’s leaders were no friends of the Jewish religion, which they commonly viewed as retrograde, legalistic and superstitious. Like Clermont-Tonnerre, many who argued for Jewish emancipation tacitly assumed that emancipated Jews would quickly give up their “religious oddities” and traditional ways once they were allowed to become “true citizens and sociable men”— that they would become assimilated and quietly disappear from view. Many Jewish leaders feared the same. They sensed, correctly, that even as it promised religious tolerance, the universalist premise of the Enlightenment threatened the Israelite nation with dissolution, disappearance, or, to use Wagner’s much-misunderstood, untranslatable word, Untergang.

France granted Jews full rights of citizenship at a stroke on September 27, 1791 — an action that resonated throughout Europe. Prussia granted citizenship rights to Jews in 1812, during the French occupation. Progress in Germany and Hungary was precarious, however: in the period of Restoration that followed the Wars of Liberation and the Congress of Vienna, Jewish rights took a temporary step backward in German lands, as many emancipatory acts were rescinded.

Even among the enlightened, few gentiles believed that Jewish culture had anything of value to contribute to the progress of Western civilization. “It dares to spread irreconcilable hatred against all the nations; it revolts against its masters. Always superstitious, always greedy for others’ property, always barbarous, servile in misfortune, and insolent in prosperity” — this was Voltaire’s assessment of the Israelite nation. [vi] “The belief in something divine, in something great, cannot live in the dung. The lion has no room in a nutshell, the infinite spirit none in the prison of a Jewish soul, the whole of life none in a withering leaf,” wrote G. W. F. Hegel at Enlightenment’s end. [vii] What implications did such beliefs hold for the future of an artist of Joachim’s stature? How was a Jew to square that circle within the context of his own life?

Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715-1769)

Since the question of Jewish emancipation seemed to hang on the possibility of Jewish assimilation, it became important to ask whether assimilation was truly possible, and if so, to ask what a successfully assimilated Jew would look and act like. Accordingly, the didactic figure of the “noble Jew” began to appear in mid-eighteenth-century German drama, playing against stereotype as generous, selfless and unacquisitive. Christian Gellert’s Das Leben der Schwedischen Gräfin von G*** (1747) provided the first such positive portrayal of a Jew in German literature. [viii] A substantial body of mostly trivial or sentimental plays portraying Jews in often exaggeratedly sympathetic roles grew up over the next sixty years, after which, in Charlene A. Lea’s phrase, the “noble Jew” suddenly and completely “disappeared, exhausted, from the stage.” [ix]

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781)

The most important philo-Semitic works of the Aufklärung (German Enlightenment) were the plays of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781): Die Juden (The Jews, 1749), influenced by Gellert, and especially his “dramatic poem” Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779), which German Jewry came to look upon as their “spiritual Magna Carta.”  [x] The son of a Lutheran minister, Lessing had a family heritage of religious tolerance: his grandfather, Theophilus, had written an early essay On the Universal Tolerance of all Religions.  Lessing himself believed that the exclusion of Jews from the larger Christian society was unreasonable and therefore intolerable.

Lessing’s contribution to the emancipation debate went beyond the literary. When the “noble Jew” — the Jew with an enlightened moral viewpoint — came to be criticized as a mere philosophical conceit and literary fiction, a liberal fantasy, improbable and unrealistic, Lessing brought forth a suitable flesh-and-blood representative by way of demonstration. The figure of Lessing’s Nathan, revered by Jews and reviled by anti-Semites, [4] was based upon the character and thought of his real-life friend and contemporary, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786). Lessing helped to bring Mendelssohn to prominence, introducing him to influential thinkers, and supporting him in his efforts to find a new role for Jews in modern European society.

Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786)

Portrait by Anton Graff, 1773

In Judaism, the history of enlightened reform begins with Mendelssohn, who as a fourteen-year-old boy, malformed in body but brave in spirit, followed his rabbi, David Fränkel, from his native Dessau to Berlin. There, he lived in poverty “so great that on the loaf he bought every week as his only food he marked his daily allowances with lines, knowing that if he had eaten more he would have had nothing left at the end of the week.” [xi] Mendelssohn worked as a clerk at Isaak Bernhard’s silk factory, eventually rising to manager. All the while, he pursued his education largely on his own and in secret, since significant contact with Christian society was forbidden him, including access to the books on language and philosophy that he desired, and somehow found ways of obtaining. “Individual Jews achieved prominence in the culture of the world long before Mendelssohn’s time,” Alfred Jospe tells us. “But Mendelssohn was the first to make a deliberate effort not merely to acquire European culture for himself but to use his influence to bring modern culture to his fellow Jews and, speaking publicly as a Jew to the non-Jewish world, to demand respect for his people’s faith and human rights.” [xii]

Mendelssohn is known today as the most prominent progenitor and leader of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), and a central figure in the religious and social history of Reform Judaism. More than any other individual, it was he who enabled European Jews to enter the mainstream of European life and culture. [5] According to Jospe: “Mendelssohn attempted to bridge the two worlds by encouraging Jews to move from the ghetto into modernity in three ways: through civic emancipation, cultural integration, and the philosophic validation of Judaism’s religious tenets before the bar of reason. One or the other of these concerns kept Mendelssohn occupied through most of his adult life, often simultaneously.” [xiii]

Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801)

In 1769, the Swiss poet and pastor, Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801) famously challenged Mendelssohn to dispute the claims of naturalist and philosopher Charles Bonnet’s Palingénésie philosophique, [6] and in so doing either to refute Bonnet’s assertions or convert to Christianity. Though Mendelssohn evaded the direct challenge, his subsequent, reluctantly engaged defense of Judaism provided what Michael Meyer has called “the first articulate expression in the language of a larger intellectual milieu” of “an experienced consciousness of the self as Jew.” [xiv] Like Locke and Clermont-Tonnere, Mendelssohn took refuge in the argument that faith was inherently a personal response to revealed truth, a matter of individual belief; morality, on the other hand, was a question of behavior, and therefore a legitimate subject of social concern. It was on the basis of morality, therefore, not doctrine, that Mendelssohn sought common ground among religions, and hoped to promote a more tolerant attitude among their faithful. “What a happy world we would live in if all men accepted and practiced the truths that the best Christians and the best Jews have in common,” he wrote. [xv]

“I look on [Moses Mendelssohn] as the future glory of his nation if his own brethren, who always have been instigated by an unhappy spirit of persecution against men of his kind, will but let him reach maturity,” wrote Lessing [xvi] Certainly, not all Jews wished to go where Mendelssohn led. In his 1836 will, the Chatam Sofer wrote: “May your mind not turn to evil and never engage in corruptible partnership with those fond of innovations, who, as a penalty for our many sins, have strayed from the Almighty and His law! Do not touch the books of Rabbi Moses [Mendelssohn] from Dessau, and your foot will never slip! […] Be warned not to change your Jewish names, speech, and clothing — God forbid. […] Never say: ‘Times have changed!’ We have an old Father — praised be His name — who has never changed and never will change.” [xvii] In and around Pressburg, the Hungarian Jewish establishment, supported by reactionary political elements (reform-minded Jews tended to support liberal, nationalist politics), remained staunchly opposed to reform.

If there were cross-currents within Judaism, the nineteenth century saw strong cross-currents within mainstream European culture as well, arising out of the great criticism of the Enlightenment that we call Romanticism. In France, Romanticism was colored by nostalgia for the heady glory days of revolution and empire; in England — the crucible of the Industrial Revolution — it was characterized by a longing for Nature, pure and undefiled. In the more than thirty independent German states, from Prussia to Liechtenstein, Romantics yearned for unification: for the creation of a greater Germany, not so much political as cultural — familial, even — a drawing together of the German Volk around themes of language, custom, religion, music, landscape, and a shared contempt for the cold, alienating refinements of French civilization.

Enlightened thinkers like Locke, Clermont-Tonnerre and Mendelssohn had drawn clear distinctions between the rights and obligations of individuals as citizens, and their self-defined religious and cultural identities. For them, the state’s only concern was how a person behaved in public, not what he or she believed in private. Such a distinction between the universal, objective world of laws and the closed, subjective world of identity and belief had been alien to the traditional, integrated outlook of the Kehilla. In the progress of the nineteenth century, it would become increasingly alien to the culturally defined national ambitions of the German people as well.

Ironically, the Kehilla represented nearly everything that the German nation would wistfully try to reify in the Romantic notion of the Volk — that humble, insular world of myth and magic familiar to anyone who has ever read a tale beginning: “There once was a poor woodcutter who lived with his wife in a little hut on the edge of a vast, dark forest.” As the Romantic criticism of Enlightenment began to transform German politics and the German nation began to coalesce around the notion of the Volk, the distinction between public conduct and private identity became harder to maintain. At the same time, the notion of Jewish emancipation came to be associated with some of the hot-button issues of post-Napoleonic politics: the rise of Capitalism, and the hégémonie of the hated and reviled French. Thus, Jews and Germans met on different trajectories, and Jews unwittingly found themselves on the wrong end of a great cultural bait and switch: progressive German Jews embraced the universalism of Enlightenment just as the German nation was retreating from it. Judaism was redefined as a Vernunftsreligion — a rational religion — just as ardent Young Germans were turning in large numbers to Catholic mysticism. Jews celebrated modern, capitalistic society as Germans were rediscovering the Gothic, Heiliges Römisches Reich. The Israelite nation was abandoning the Kehilla and moving to the city just as the German nation was learning to extol the virtues of folk culture, nature and the village.

The woodcutter and his wife, the miller and the huntsman and the maid—the whole cast of strong, honest, Germanic-depressive rustics that the Romantiker sent forth to do battle with the Enlightenment’s venal, over-sexed and over-civilized gods and goddesses, its insipid, indulged, eternally happy nymphs and swains—grew from German soil like the oaks of the Teutoberger forest: not citizens of a centralized state, but  members of an organically integrated German Volk. Thus, greater Germany would not be conceived politically and legalistically, as a civilization like France or ancient Rome, but as a Kulturnation based upon a constructed identity—an idealized looking-glass self. The success of the German cultural project inspired other nations like Hungary to follow suit—to discover or invent their own cultural identity as a weapon in their struggle for social unity and political autonomy.

Part of that identity grew out of a feeling for the land itself. To fully accept the myth of the Volk was to possess, and be possessed by, the spirit of the landscape. To be one of the Volk was to have roots. But to be a Jew was repeatedly to be rejected from the landscape. To be a Jew was to strike a tent. Johann Gottfried Herder, an early architect of the concept of the Volk, wrote of the Jews: “The People of God (Das Volk Gottes), to whom Heaven itself once gave its fatherland, has been for millennia, indeed almost from its beginnings, a parasitic plant on the trunks of other nations, a race of cunning dealers throughout nearly the whole world, which despite oppression never yearns for its own honor and dwelling, never for its own fatherland.” [xviii] Conversely, Franz Werfel once claimed that the Jews of Burgenland took pride in two things: their learned men, and their attachment to the land.[xix] Pride and affection notwithstanding, that attachment had to prove elusive. Joseph Joachim’s ancestors arrived in Kittsee as refugees. They lived for a time at the pleasure of the mighty Esterházy princes, huddled in a tiny German-speaking Kehilla in a place that they may have loved but could not own. Today, their bones lie untended and forgotten in Kittsee’s sacred ground, awaiting, as they would believe, the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophesy: “Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and have you rise from them, and bring you into the land of Israel.”

For Joseph Joachim, Kittsee was only a brief sojourn: the beginning of a journey in search of a congenial home—a place of companionship and belonging—a landscape in which his intellect and spirit could flourish. His youth became a Bildungsreise: a journey of education, of personal growth and maturing, in search of identity and self-realization. That journey would take him to Pest, to Vienna, to Leipzig, London, Weimar and Hanover, and ultimately to Berlin. Joachim could wax nostalgic enough about his native land. He could call it his Heimat, and evoke its memory in his Hungarian Concerto. But for him it was a good place to be from, not a place or a world to which he could ever comfortably return. Robert Frost once wrote a long poem extolling the virtues of New Hampshire that concludes:

“It’s […] restful just to think about New Hampshire.

At present I am living in Vermont.”

Joseph Joachim is buried in Berlin.

© Robert W. Eshbach, 2013.

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