A male convert to Judaism had always cut a lonely and melancholy figure because it was not easy to “imagine” one’s way into an alien community bounded by sacralized common descent and a variety of physical and cultural markers that served as both proof of shared parentage and a guarantee of continued endogamy. The would-be Jewish converts to Germanness or Hungarianness found themselves in a similar but much more difficult position, because Germanness and Hungarianness were represented by a powerful state that claimed to be both national and (more or less) liberal while also insisting on being the sole guardian of rights and judge of identity.
The most common early strategy of the newly “emancipated” and “assimilated” Jews was to promote the liberal cause by celebrating “neutral spaces” in public life and cultivating a liberal education and the liberal professions in their own. Jews were not just the embodiment of Reason and Enlightenment—they were among their most vocal and loyal champions. They voted for liberal parties, argued the virtues of individual liberties, and faithfully served those states that allowed them to do so. The Habsburg Empire—as well as France, of course—was the object of much loyalty and admiration because, as the historian Carl Schorske put it, “the emperor and the liberal system offered status to the Jews without demanding nationality; they became the supra-national people of the multinational state, the one folk which, in effect, stepped into the shoes of the earlier aristocracy.”38
To join the later—liberal—aristocracy, one needed to acquire a new secular education and professional expertise. And that is exactly what the Jews, as a group, did—with an intensity and fervor worthy of a yeshiva and a degree of success that was the cause of much awe and resentment. Gustav Mahler’s father read French philosophers when he was not selling liquor; Karl Popper’s father translated Horace when he was not practicing law; and Victor Adler’s grandfather divided his time between Orthodox Judaism and European Enlightenment. But what mattered most—to them and thousands like them, as well as to History—is whose fathers they were. Liberal education as the new Jewish religion was very similar to the old Jewish religion—except that it was much more liberal. Secularized Jewish fathers—stern or indulgent, bankers (like Lukács’s father) or haberdashers (like Kafka’s)—did their best to bring up free, cosmopolitan Men: men without fathers. They were remarkably successfuclass="underline" indeed, few generations of patriarchs were as good at raising patricides and grave diggers as first-generation Jewish liberals. And no one understood it better than Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx.39
Liberalism did not work because neutral spaces were not very neutral. The universities, “free” professions, salons, coffeehouses, concert halls, and art galleries in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest became so heavily Jewish that liberalism and Jewishness became almost indistinguishable. The Jews’ pursuit of rootlessness ended up being almost as familial as their pursuit of wealth. Success at “assimilation” made assimilation more difficult, because the more successful they were at being modern and secular, the more visible they became as the main representatives of modernity and secularism. And this meant that people who were not very good at modernity and secularism, or who objected to them for a variety of Apollonian (and Dionysian) reasons, were likely to be impressed by political anti-Semitism. As Käthe Leichter remembered her high school days in fin de siècle Vienna, “with my [Jewish] friends I discussed the meaning of life, shared my ideas about books, poetry, nature, and music. With the daughters of government officials I played ‘house.’ ” Käthe Leichter grew up to be a socialist and a sociologist; at least some of those officials’ daughters grew up to be anti-Semites.40
But mostly liberalism did not work because it never could—not in the sense of interchangeable cosmopolitan individuals and certainly not in the Apollonian Babylon of Central and Eastern Europe. The facts that nobody spoke Liberalese as a native tongue and that the Man who had Rights also had citizenship and family attachments were easy to forget if one lived in a state that was more or less successful at equating itself with both family and the universe. It was much harder to do in a doomed Christian state or a youthful national one. Nobody spoke Austro-Hungarian, on the one hand, and on the other, it took a lot of practice to start thinking of Czech as a language of high secular culture. The Jews who did not wish to speak the language of particularism (Yiddish, for most of them) had to find the language of universalism by shopping around. The main selling points of would-be national universalisms (French, German, Russian, Hungarian) were a claim to a prestigious high-cultural tradition and, most important, a state that would give that claim some muscle and conviction. Esperanto—conceived in Białystok by the Jewish student Ludwik Zamenhof—had no chance of living to maturity. Universalism relied on the nation-state as much as the nation did.
The Jews did not launch the Modern Age. They joined it late, had little to do with some of its most important episodes (such as the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions), and labored arduously to adjust to its many demands. They did adjust better than most—and reshaped the modern world as a consequence—but they were not present at the creation and missed out on some of the early role assignments.
By most accounts, one of the earliest episodes in the history of modern Europe was the Renaissance, or the rebirth of godlike Man. But the Renaissance did not just create the cult of Man—it created cults of particular men whose job it was to write the new Scriptures, to endow an orphaned and deified humanity with a new shape, a new past, and a new tongue fit for a new Paradise. Dante, Camões, and Cervantes knew themselves to be prophets of a new age, knew their work to be divinely inspired and “immortal,” knew they were writing a new Bible by rewriting the Odyssey and the Aeneid. Even as Christianity continued to claim a complete monopoly on the transcendental, the Modern Age turned polytheistic—or rather, reverted to the days of divine oligarchy, with the various gods enjoying universal legitimacy (the “Western canon”) but serving as patrons and patriarchs of particular tribes. Dante, Camões, and Cervantes defined and embodied national golden ages, national languages, and national journeys toward salvation. Ethnic nationalism, like Christianity, had a content, and every national Genesis had an author. Cervantes may be the inventor of the modern novel and an object of much reverence and imitation, but only among Spanish-speakers is he worshiped rapturously and tragically, as a true god; only in Spanish high culture must every contender for canonical status take part in the continuing dialogue between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.41