Broken Promises and Redemptive Yearnings: Jewish Intellectuals and German Universities before the Second World War

Paul Franks Senator Jerahmiel S. and Carole S. Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy Centre for Jewish Studies and Department of Philosophy University of Toronto Imagine a world in which, regardless of their religion or ethnicity, you may pursue their intellectual interests, whatever they may be; a world in which you may pursue the course of education that best matches your interests and education, and in which you may, if you are the best candidate, find a job that enables you to investigate the questions that most concern you, with all necessary institutional support and security. Do citizens of western countries such as Canada inhabit this world today? For many generations of Jewish intellectuals, such a world was no more than a pipe-dream. To be sure, the establishment of schools has long been a priority of Jewish communities. But formal education for girls is a recent development, the provision of general as well as Jewish studies has been the exception rather than the rule, and jobs suited to intellectuals have been few and far between. It is hard not to be astonished at the productivity of scholars such as Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), who needed to earn a living in areas at some remove from their intellectual pursuits, often while contributing greatly to communal affairs. To be sure, a few were fortunate enough to be supported, along with their students, by personal or communal wealth, and rabbinic studies have frequently been pursued at high levels of sophistication and in communication with similarly minded specialists in other, often far-flung parts of the Jewish world. However, with the exception of medical studies at Padua and, later, a handful of other schools, Jews had no access to the university: the institutional framework developed by European Christians and dedicated to teaching and research, which has been the key to the wests intellectual and economic successes. Jews could obtain knowledge of the latest developments in areas of study that are not tied specifically to Judaism, and interaction with a broader community of thinkers and scholars, only with the help of a prodigious amount of that rarest of commodities: good luck. The exclusion of Jews from general intellectual life was, of course, part and parcel of their exclusion from the general political life of Europe. In the seventeenth century, however, Barukh Spinoza (1632-1677) the Dutch Jewish philosopher of Portuguese descent, who had been banned from the Jewish community of Amsterdam envisaged a new kind of state, which would grant citizenship to all, regardless of their religious and philosophical opinions, and which would guarantee freedom of thought. In the most liberal European country, he was tolerated despite his dangerous ideas, and he survived several hostile campaigns, but it would take a century or more before Jews would be granted civil rights in accordance with his vision. When, remarkably, Spinoza was offered a professorship at the University of Heidelberg in 1673, he wisely declined, since the friendly configuration of interests leading to the offer could hardly be expected to last long. Without a guarantee of academic freedom, Spinoza preferred the life of a lens-grinder, who earned enough to support his intellectual pursuits and who had been fortunate enough to make contact with other philosophers and natural scientists. Still,

1673 marks the beginning of the long romance between German universities and Jewish intellectuals, a romance that would end in bitter betrayal. In the eighteenth century, leading Jewish intellectuals who wanted to pursue and contribute to general studies would have to follow Spinozas model though, fortunately, excommunication was not obligatory. Like him, they were autodidacts who applied the analytical skills attained through their rabbinic educations to other areas, and they supported themselves in whatever way they could. If they were fortunate and persistent, they might enjoy fruitful relations with Christian thinkers and scholars, and they could also become part of an informal network of like-minded Jews. Thus Raphael Levi Hannover (1685-1779), a private tutor, became the informal student and secretary of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), and Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), a bookkeeper, would not have published his work in philosophy and literary criticism without the support of his friend, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781). Whatever advantages these men had flowing from their Talmudic educations were unavailable to female Jewish intellectuals, such as Henriette Herz (1764-1847), Rahel Levin (17711833) and Mendelssohns daughters, Dorothea (1764-1839) and Henriette (1775-1831), who could only cultivate intellectual friendships by hosting salons. None of them, male or female, had an institutional framework to support their intellectual pursuits. The French Revolution changed everything though not all at once by issuing a promise honoured more in its breach than in its fulfilment. In France in 1791, Jews were granted civil rights, and the idea of emancipating Jews spread to other European countries by means of Napoleons sword. However, implementation fell far short of the ideal, and there was considerable resistance to the emancipation of the Jews, not least in regions conquered by Napoleon, where, in addition to attracting the resentment of those who feared increasing competition for livelihoods and resources, it was now branded as a foreign imposition. Notably, it was during the Napoleonic occupation of Prussia that the aforementioned salon hostesses converted to Christianity, in part because Prussian resentment of French Revolutionary ideas, including the idea of equality for Jews, put them under intense pressure to demonstrate where their loyalties truly lay: with the French, as well as their fellow-Jews, or with their German, Christian, intellectual comrades. Still, the promise of equal involvement in general political and intellectual life had now been made. Over the next century and a half, it would repeatedly be betrayed, undermined and repudiated. Occasionally, it would be kept. But it could not be unmade. In the course of the nineteenth century, Jewish intellectuals from Germany and Eastern Europe entered German universities, in search of educations and, with far less success, in search of careers. Between the French Revolution and the First World War, Germany invented the modern research university, and Jews who studied there including Jewish women, after 1908 contributed greatly to all disciplines, while laying the foundations for much of what we now call Jewish Studies. All too often, however, the price to be paid for a professorship was conversion to Christianity. Consider the members of the Verein fr Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Association for the Culture and Science of the Jews), founded at the University of Berlin in 1819, not long after Napoleons defeat. They sought to apply to the study of Judaism the new historical methods developed in German universities, partly out of the conviction that Judaism mattered, and partly out of zeal for the new scholarship. As students, they

were determined to remain Jews, and their hopes rested on the Prussian Emancipation Edict issued in 1812, under French occupation, which opened academic positions to all. In 1822, however, when their erstwhile leader, Eduard Gans (1789-1837), philosopher of law and Hegels assistant, applied for a position, the law was changed to bar Jews once again. Three years later, in order to take the job, Gans converted. He was followed with famous reluctance by his fellow Verein-member: the critic and poet, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), who remarked, The baptismal certificate is the ticket of admission to European culture.1 Another member of the Verein, Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), whose meticulous studies of synagogue sermons and liturgies established a new paradigm for Jewish history, took a different path. He did not convert, and never attained a university position. Instead, he helped to run one of the Jewish communitys own educational institutions: a Jewish teachers training seminary, founded in Berlin in 1840. The seminary at which Zunz taught was one of several institutions arising from an educational revolution in the Jewish community, necessitated by the fact that, in the nineteenth century, the old yeshivot, associated with the kehillot that had enjoyed relative autonomy in Europe before the rise of the nation-state, and run by the chief rabbis of significant communities and/or scholarly reputations, died out in Germany and faded away in Eastern Europe. In Lithuania, they were eclipsed by new yeshivoth, attracting both funding and students from throughout the country and beyond by dint of their rigorous teachers, elitist reputations and distinctive traditions. The paradigm, which was to some extent a return to the yeshivot of the geonim a thousand years earlier, was established in 1802 by Hayyim of Volozhin (1749-1821), student of the renowned Vilna Gaon (1720-1797). Meanwhile, the Hasidic movement gave rise to dynasties and courts which, in their own ways, replaced the old kehillot. By the end of the nineteenth century, some of these would also found yeshivot on the new model. In Germany, the old, local yeshivot were replaced by seminaries for the training of rabbis and teachers. The Jdisches-Theologisches Seminar (Jewish Theological Seminary) in Breslau, which combined the scholarly approach pioneered by the Verein with a conservative attitude towards observance, opened in 1854, and the traditionalist orthodox Israelitische Lehrerbildungsanstalt (Jewish Teacher Training Institute) began training teachers in Wrzburg in 1863; while the liberal Hochschule fr die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Advanced School for the Science of Judaism) began operating in Berlin in 1872, followed a year later in the same city by the Rabbiner Seminar fr das Orthodoxe Judentum. Unlike the Lithuanian yeshivot, which dedicated themselves to Torah lishmah (Torah study for its own sake), the German seminaries undertook to train religious and educational functionaries. But they also provided institutional bases for the teaching and research of major scholars, whose contributions were foundational for Jewish Studies and, sometimes, for scholarship in general. Thus, for example, Jakob Bernays (18241881) son of the renowned Hakham Bernays, and uncle of Sigmund Freuds wife taught at the Breslau seminary from its inception, and made a decisive contribution to the historical study of classical Greek texts. Meanwhile, the orthodox seminary in Berlin came to represent the coexistence of German historical scholarship and Lithuanian Talmud scholarship, embodied in its two final rectors, both products of the Lithuanian yeshivah of Slabodka: Rabbi Abraham Eliyahu Kaplan (1890-1934) and Rabbi Yehiel Yaakov Weinberg (1878-1966).

In Germany, university teachers were civil servants, so academic appointments required a change in the law, and no affirmative action policy was ever implemented to design to change attitudes. Until the unification that followed the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the various regions proceeded at their own paces. The natural and exact sciences were also less hostile than other disciplines. Prussia changed its law in 1847, whereupon Robert Remak (1815-1865), a physiologist, became the first unbaptized, Jewish Privatdozent (non-stipendiary lecturer). Moritz Abraham Stern (1807-1894), a mathematician, became the first ordinary (full) professor at Gttingen in 1859, but this hardly opened the floodgates. Jews tended to spend longer in unpaid positions, and some distinguished scholars such as Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903), one of the founders of the discipline of Vlkerpsychologie (psychology of peoples) received much recognition without any regular appointment. By the end of the 1870s, although the civil service law had been altered throughout Germany, and although many Jews were already wellestablished within a variety of disciplines, there were only twenty unbaptized Jewish professors in the country.2 Still, this was progress. Slowly, it seemed, the promise was being kept. Nobody better represented this fulfilment, during the heyday of Jewish intellectual life in Imperial Germany, than Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), who, on his second attempt, was appointed to a chair in philosophy at the University of Marburg in 1876. First, chairs in philosophy played a special role in German national culture. They were secular pulpits whose occupants at the University of Berlin, founded during the French occupation as an act of resistance and hope, figures such as Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, who remain central to philosophy today helped to create the self-understanding of a nation that still existed more as an idea than as an actuality. Second, Cohen was not only a masterful writer and teacher; he was the founder of a school the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism and, through his students and junior colleagues as well as his own work, his profound impact on contemporaneous philosophy would endure until the 1920s. Third, and not least, Cohen was a knowledgeable, proud and articulate Jew. Beginning in 1880, he heeded the call to respond to the anti-semitic attacks that were, along with the increasing involvement of Jews, a growing feature of political and intellectual life. Without ever becoming merely parochial or forfeiting his status as a systematic philosopher of the first rank, Cohen became increasingly interested in Judaism and its philosophical importance, culminating in his late classic Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism (1919). No wonder Jewish students, among others, came to hear Cohen lecture at Marburg. After he retired from Marburg, he began teaching at the Hochschule in Berlin, where his classes were attended by some of the stars of the next generation: Franz Rosenzweig (1887-1929), Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) and Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Cohen had come full circle: he had begun his higher education within one communal institution, at the Breslau seminary, and he now ended his career at another. Nevertheless, the university had provided the setting for the core of his career, enabling his ideas and relations to reach far beyond the Jewish community within which he had begun and ended. In Cohens case, the promise had been kept. But this hardly meant that the next generation had no obstacles to overcome. Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), Cohens closest student, could not obtain a stipendiary appointment for many years, despite his undisputed accomplishments. During the First World War, nationalist fervour led to

increasing anti-semitism, notwithstanding Cohens argument that Deutschtum and Judentum (Germanness and Jewishness, or Germanism and Judaism) were so interlinked that Jews throughout the world should support the German cause, or should at least prevent America from intervening to defeat it.3 When, in a 1916 issue of the Kant Societys periodical, Bruno Bauch distinguished between the essentially German philosophy of Kant and the essentially Jewish views of Cohen, both Cohen and Cassirer resigned from the journals editorial board. The defeat of Germany and the establishment of the Weimar Republic brought the tensions inherent in German-Jewish intellectual life to an almost unbearable tension. On the one hand, Jews were more central than ever to intellectual affairs, and they attained academic stature to an unprecedented degree. Ernst Cassirer became, not only professor of philosophy at the University of Hamburg in 1919, but also the countrys first unbaptized Jewish rector in 1929-1930. On the other hand, since Jews were widely blamed for Germanys defeat and were seen as the beneficiaries of a political regime that seemed a foreign imposition, anti-semitism continued to hamper Jewish aspirations. In any event, like many German intellectuals who had come of age in the war years, Jewish intellectuals were alienated from the classical German culture that had captivated their parents. Cohens German-Jewish symbiosis was hollow. If the promise required one to fit in with desiccated ideas and a corrupt culture, then it was not worth pursuing. When, in a debate at Davos in 1929, Ernst Cassirer championed the humanism of Kant, Schiller and Cohen against Martin Heideggers retrieval of questions suppressed by western civilization since antiquity, the Jewish students present including Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) and Leo Strauss took Heideggers side, and Franz Rosenzweig argued that Heidegger, not Cassirer, was in tune with the profound insights of Cohens late work at the Hochschule.4 Not one of them anticipated that Heidegger would join the Nazi party, volunteering in 1934 to help bring the University of Freiburg into line with the ideology of national purity and dictatorial governance. The generation of the First World War were not, like their forbears, seeking to establish themselves within German culture. They had been born into the world of German ideas, and several knew more about being German than about being Jewish. To be sure, many of them would have been happy to attain university positions enabling them to think, teach and write. But they yearned, above all, for what no academic career could provide: redemption. Some, like Hans Ehrenberg (1883-1958), converted to Christianity not under pressure, like Gans and Heine, but out of a deep, religious conviction that was in revolt against bourgeois life, whether Jewish or not. Others, like his cousin, Franz Rosenzweig, returned to the Jewish community, in order to revitalize its cultural life. Friedrich Meinecke, a prominent intellectual historian who had supervised Rosenzweigs doctoral dissertation, must have been astonished to receive a letter informing him that Rosenweig would not be pursuing an academic career after all, because of a dark drive, which he named, my Judaism.5 Even before the disaster of 1918, Rosenzweig had lost faith in the ideal German state, which would live up to all its promises to its citizens, regardless of religion or ethnicity the state for which Cohen and Meinecke longed. Instead, Rosenzweig responded to a call from Nehemiah Nobel (1871-1922), a prominent Frankfurt rabbi who had distinguished himself as a talmudist at the orthodox seminary in Berlin, and who had then taken time off from his rabbinical duties to write a doctoral

dissertation under Cohen at Marburg. Nobel invited Rosenzweig to head a recently established bet ha-midrash of an innovative kind: the Freies Jdisches Lehrhaus (Independent Jewish Study House), where Jews of every religious persuasion and background would be welcome to study Jewish tradition. During the war, Rosenzweig had written the single most important work of modern Jewish philosophy, The Star of Redemption (1920), and he now established new directions in popular Jewish education, attracting a circle of remarkable people who brought their university educations into mutually challenging relations with Jewish tradition. Some, like Rosenzweig himself, returned to Jewish observances that had long been abandoned by their parents, or even their grandparents. For him, redemption would be found, not in politics, but in the traditional, messianic hope of everyday Jewish life. The twenties saw a renaissance in German-Jewish intellectual, religious and cultural life. German universities attracted some of the greatest products of both Lithuanian yeshivot and Hasidic courts including Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik (19031993) and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994). But the storm-clouds were gathering, and some sought redemption in radical alternatives to German-Jewish life. The philosopher and literary critic, Georg Lukcs (1885-1971), who had known Ehrenberg and Rosenzweig at Heidelberg, was attracted to Marxism, and the Russian Revolution ignited his imagination. Lukcs served as deputy to the Commissar for Education in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. His classic work, History and Class Consciousness (1923), articulated the ideas that became the basis for the Western Marxist tradition, developed by the mostly Jewish members of the Frankfurt School based at the Institute for Social Research, making explicit the critique of capitalist reification, which served as an analogue of the Jewish rejection of idolatry, and the messianic role of the proletariat. Others gave up on Europe altogether. In 1923, Gershom Scholem left Germany for Palestine, after earning his doctorate with a ground-breaking study of the early kabbalistic work, the Sefer ha-Bahir. In 1924, the Institute for Jewish Studies was established at the Hebrew University, whose cornerstone had been laid in 1918, and Scholem, who had been hired as librarian, found a lifelong home for his teaching and research, which would establish the groundwork for the field of kabbalistic studies. If the French Revolution changed everything, so did the German Presidential election of 1932, which quickly swept Hitler to power. On 7 April, 1933, the first step was taken to reverse the effects of emancipation in Germany: the law for the Restoration of the Civil Service, which dismissed all non-Aryan civil servants, unless they were First World War veterans or had been in office since August 1914, as well as those with unreliable political opinions. In practice, exemptions were not always honoured, and most Jewish academics lost their positions. Nor did baptism help, since Judaism had become a racial, not a religious, designation. While a handful of non-Jewish academics objected, for which they soon lost their jobs on political grounds, there was no mass protest by German faculty and students. It was, in the words of Julien Benda (18671956), the betrayal of the intellectuals. Expelled from the universities, German-Jewish intellectual life could subsist only in exile or in withdrawal. One could seek an academic job in another country, against all the odds, or one could withdraw to a Jewish community institution, either in another country, or within Germany, where they continued to function and, indeed, enjoyed a

new breath of life until Kristallnacht in 1938. The members of the Frankfurt School were fortunate enough to move their Institute to New York, after a brief interlude in Geneva, although several of them felt uncomfortable with American culture. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), who had been seduced by Heidegger as a student and who completed her second dissertation in 1933, was unable to receive the teaching license that she had earned. When it became unsafe for her to continue gathering information on German anti-semitism, she joined Youth Aliyah in France, arranging for the resettlement of German-Jewish children in Palestine, and later worked for the Jewish Agency. Confronted by the choice between different varieties of redemption, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) dithered. He could not decide whether to cast his lot with his Zionist friend Scholem in Palestine, or with his Marxist friends in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, he wrote his last, great work a portrait of the nineteenth century as crystallized in the Paris Arcades employing an innovative method that continues to influence the humanities today.6 For German Jews who had not escaped from Europe by 1939, the options had all but run out. When war broke out, on September 1, the walls seemed to finally close in. Benjamin was interned at a camp in Nevers, and Arendt was interned at Gurs a few months later, in May 1940. As is well known, Benjamin would eventually die a mysterious death on the Spanish border, while Arendt would proceed to Lisbon and thence to New York, carrying with her Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History, which he had entrusted to her in Marseilles. The ninth thesis envisaged the Angelus Novus painted by Paul Klee a prized possession of Benjamins as the angel of history: His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.7 Were the Jewish intellectuals who were both formed and betrayed by the German universities nothing more than pieces of wreckage? Or were they angels of history, looking with horror on a catastrophe that they would nevertheless survive? To this day, their epoch-making works still bear the questions scar. Thus, Scholems classic overview of the field of kabbalistic studies, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, delivered as lectures in 1938, were dedicated when published in 1941 to the memory of his friend, Walter Benjamin. Inconceivable without the scholarly and philosophical achievements of the German universities, the learning of Scholems rabbinic teachers, and the conversation of his fellow German-Jewish intellectuals, the book directs our gaze towards Benjamins obscure grave, even as it speaks to us, in the midst of the Second World War, in a voice that Hitler could not silence.

The Jew in the Modern World, eds, Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 259. 2 Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 92-3. 3 Hermann Cohen, Deutschtum und Judentum (Giessen: A. Tpelman, 1915). 4 See Franz Rosenzweig, Transposed Fronts, in Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and eds. Paul Franks and Michael Morgan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999), 146-152. 5 See Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), 96. 6 See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Roy Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 7 Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-40, eds. Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392.