What Are Jews For? by Adam Sutcliffe

Author:Adam Sutcliffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Nationhood and Jewish Exemplarity

After several decades of intensifying nationalism in Europe, the outbreak of the First World War was widely welcomed as an invigorating opportunity for the fortification of patriotism and valour. Western and central European Jews fully participated in this mood, in some cases with particular enthusiasm, as support for the war effort enabled them to affirm their identification with their states of residence, which the rise of antisemitism, and to some extent also Zionism, had cast into question.94 In Germany, where the war was initially embraced by almost all Jews except those on the radical Left, the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen patriotically asserted the deep affinity between Jewish and German culture. In his Germanism and Judaism (1915), he emphasized the profound resonance between Judaism and German Protestantism, and their commonality of purpose in promoting moral responsibility and the betterment of the world. Central to this endeavour was the messianic prophetic vision of the Israelite prophets, which Cohen regarded as the core of Judaism, and barely of lesser importance in the German ethical tradition, from the idealism of Kant to the social democratic movement in politics, in which he proudly noted that Jews had played a prominent role. The mission of Judaism, for Cohen, was profoundly universal in character, and Germany provided the most hospitable environment for its development. Jewish prophetic messianism was the indispensable ‘lodestar of perpetual peace’, given political substance in the contemporary world through socialist internationalism and in the bond between the cosmopolitan essences of the German and the Jewish spirit.95

Cohen was therefore firmly opposed to Zionism. In 1916, he participated in an extended public debate with the leading German cultural Zionist Martin Buber (1878–1965), in which he emphasized the necessity of the dispersion of the Jews for the fulfilment of their messianic purpose. Citing the prophet Micah—‘The remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of the many peoples, like dew from the Lord’—he argued that Jews were required to live among and for the nations of the world, diffusing the humanistic and universal moral teachings that were divinely entrusted to them as their universal mission.96 Cohen interpreted Jewish suffering as part of this moral mission: analogously to the atonement of individual Jews at Yom Kippur for the collective sins of the congregation, the Jews in a sense collectively atoned through their historical travails for the sins of all humanity. This was not, though, their eternal fate. Cohen’s messianic vision was not eschatological, but rather a political vision of a new universal dawn that was to be attained in this world.97 The structures of politics, and of the German philosophical and socialist traditions in particular, were therefore essential to his understanding of messianism. Jews could only fulfil their mission as participants in the political life of the state. They must therefore embrace the nation states in which they lived, and recognize their ethical obligation to them. Cohen rejected the Jewish particularism of Zionism, and instead cast Judaism as the universalist strand of other, particular nationalisms.

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