Capitalism and the Jews by Muller Jerry Z.; Muller Jerry Z. Z.;

Author:Muller, Jerry Z.; Muller, Jerry Z. Z.; [Muller, Jerry Z.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 483576
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

Aborted Revolutions in Germany

In central Europe, and especially in Germany, the story differed somewhat.10 By 1918, most German Jews had already moved into the middle and even upper classes, and so there was no goad of poverty driving them toward socialism. On the contrary, in their voting and in their political activism, German Jews, largely reflecting their social and economic status as members of the middle class, identified as far to the right as the political spectrum allowed. That, however, was not very far. As in most of Europe, the doors to the political Right were slammed in Jewish faces by parties that regarded Christianity as integral to national identity. (In Italy, where the Right was least prone to anti-Semitism, bourgeois Jews joined the Fascist party and some rose to positions of prominence.)

And so most German Jews voted for the liberals in the decades before World War I. However, most political activists of Jewish origin were to be found in the ranks of the socialists. Some of them were led to the socialist camp by their quest for greater political and social equality. For while German Jews had already been guaranteed their civil and political rights, as they moved up the social and educational ladder, they often found their path to governmental posts blocked and their opportunities for academic advance limited not by law but by prejudice. But other Jews were drawn to a more apocalyptic conception of socialist revolution.

The high culture of the educated classes of western and central Europe in the decade before 1914 was marked by a disaffection from liberal, bourgeois “society” and a search for new sources of “community.” In time, this disaffection would lead many young German intellectuals to the radical Right, to a new nationalism that promised a sense of collective purpose based on a purportedly shared past. For those Jewish intellectuals steeped in the antiliberal ethos but by definition excluded from movements seeking a return to Germanic roots, the alternatives were a turn to Zionism (which only a few embraced before 1918) or toward a visionary socialism that promised to replace the supposedly atomizing civilization of liberal capitalism with a new culture of shared purpose that would unite all men regardless of origin.

With the collapse of the German monarchy in November 1918, Jews moved into positions of government responsibility and saliency for the first time. Like their non-Jewish counterparts, most Jewish socialists in Germany welcomed the breakthrough to full parliamentary democracy produced by the mass demonstrations of the working class at the close of the war. Real power was temporarily shared between a provisional government made up of parliamentary representatives of the socialist and liberal parties, on the one hand, and the councils of workers and soldiers on the other. The Left thus confronted a political choice. The Social Democrats favored parliamentary sovereignty, to be decided by democratic elections among the entire populace. To their left were the Spartacists, who formed the new Communist party, devoted to the sovereignty of the councils (the German equivalent of the soviets).

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