In England, the Age of Shakespeare coincided with, and perhaps ushered in, the Universal Age of Discovery, or the Era of Universal Mercurianism. This was true of all national golden ages, but the English one proved more equal than others because England (along with Holland but much more influentially) became the first Protestant nation, the first nation of strangers, the first nation to replace God with itself—and with its Bard. By being the English national poet, Shakespeare became “the inventor of the human.” The Renaissance met the Reformation, or, as Matthew Arnold put it, “Hellenism reentered the world, and again stood in the presence of Hebraism, a Hebraism renewed and purged.”42
In this context, the French Revolution was an attempt to catch up by taking a shortcut—an attempt to build a nation of strangers by creating a world of brothers. According to Ernest Gellner, “the Enlightenment was not merely a secular prolongation and more thorough replay of the Reformation. In the end it also became an inquest by the unreformed on their own condition, in the light of the successes of the reformed. The philosophes were the analysts of the under-development of France.”43 France is the only European nation without a consecrated and uncontested national poet, the only nation for which the rational Man is a national hero. It is “ethnic” as well, of course, with its “ancestors the Gauls” and its jealous worship of the national language, but the seriousness of its civic commitments is unique in Europe. Rabelais, Racine, Molière, and Victor Hugo have failed to unseat Reason and have had to cohabit with it, however uncomfortably.
From then on, England and France presented two models of modern nationhood: build your own tribe of strangers complete with an immortal Bard, or claim, more or less convincingly, to have transcended tribalism once and for all. The English road to nationalism was the virtually universal first choice. The old “Renaissance nations” with established modern pantheons and golden ages (Dante’s Italy, Cervantes’s Spain, Camões’s Portugal) had only the Mercurian (“bourgeois”) half of the task ahead of them; the new Protestant nations (Holland, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, possibly Germany) could take their time searching for an appropriate bard; all the others had to scramble desperately on both fronts and perhaps entertain the French option when in trouble. Romanticism was a rebirth of the Renaissance and a time of frenetic Bible writing (on canvas and music sheets, as well as on paper). Those laboring in the shadow of an already canonized national divinity (Wordsworth and Shelley, for example) had to settle for demigod status, but elsewhere the field was wide open, for better or worse. The new Romantic intelligentsias east of the Rhine were all raised to be “self-hating” because they had been born in the twilight of Christian universalism and had promptly found themselves belonging to inarticulate, undifferentiated, and unchosen tribes (and possibly to illegitimate states, as well). Petr Chaadaev, the founding father of the Russian intelligentsia, was speaking for all of them when he said that Russia lived “in the narrowest of presents, without past or future, amidst dull stagnation. . . . Alone in the world, we have not given the world anything, have not taken anything from the world, have contributed nothing to the advance of human thought, and have distorted whatever traces of that advance we did receive.” His words rang out like “a shot in the dark night,” according to Herzen, and soon everyone woke up and went to work. Goethe, Pushkin, Mickiewicz, and Petőfi, among many others, were celebrated as national messiahs in their lifetimes and formally deified soon after their deaths. New modern nations were born: certifiably chosen and thus immortal, ready to tackle History in general and the Age of Mercurianism, in particular.44
Jews who wanted to join the world of equal and inalienable rights had to do it through one of these traditions. To enter the neutral spaces, one had to convert to a national faith. And that is precisely what many European Jews did—in much greater numbers than those who converted to Christianity, because the acceptance of Goethe as one’s savior did not seem to be an apostasy and because it was much more important and meaningful than baptism. After the triumph of cultural nationalism and the establishment of national pantheons, Christianity was reduced to a formal survival or reinterpreted as a part of the national journey. One could be a good German or Hungarian without being a good Christian (and in an ideal liberal Germany or Hungary, religion in the traditional sense would become a private matter “separate from the state”), but one could not be a good German or Hungarian without worshiping the national canon. This was the real new church, the one that could not be separated from the state lest the state lose all meaning, the one that was all the more powerful for being taken for granted, the one that Jews could enter while still believing that they were in a neutral place worshiping Progress and Equality. It was possible to be an American “of Mosaic faith” because the American national religion was not based on tribal descent and the cult of the national soul embodied by a national bard. In turn-of-the-century Central and Eastern Europe, it was impossible because the national faith was itself Mosaic.
Having entered the new church, Jews proceeded to worship. At first the preferred medium was German, but with the establishment of other strong, institutionalized canons, large numbers of Jews became Hungarian, Russian, and Polish believers. Osip Mandelstam’s description of his bookcase tells the story of these Jews chronologically, genealogically (his mother’s and father’s lineages), and, from his vantage point as a Russian poet, hierarchically:
I remember the lower shelf as being always chaotic: the books were not standing side by side but lay like ruins: the rust-colored Pentateuchs with their tattered bindings, a Russian history of the Jews, written in the clumsy and timid language of a Russian-speaking Talmudist. This was the Judaic chaos abandoned to the dust. . . .
Above these Judaic remnants the books stood in orderly formation; these were the Germans—Schiller, Goethe, Koerner, and Shakespeare in German—the old Leipzig and Tübingen editions, short and stout in their embossed dark-red bindings, with the fine print meant for youthful sharp-sightedness and with delicate engravings hinting at classical antiquity: the women with their hair down and arms outstretched, the lamp depicted as an oil-burning one, the horsemen with their high foreheads, and the grape clusters in the vignettes. That was my father the autodidact fighting his way into the Germanic world through the Talmudic thicket.
Higher still were my mother’s Russian books: Pushkin in the 1876 Isakov edition. I still think it was an absolutely marvelous edition and like it better than the Academy one. There is nothing superfluous in it; the type is gracefully arranged; the columns of verse flow freely, like soldiers in flying battalions, and leading them, like generals, are the sensible, distinct year headings all the way through 1837. What color is Pushkin? Every color is accidental—for what color could capture the wizardry of words?45
The secular Jews’ love of Goethe, Schiller, and other Pushkins—as well as the various northern forests they represented—was sincere and tender. (Germany was peculiar in having twin gods, as Mandelstam called them. They are still together in their Weimar mausoleum.) “At night I think of Germany / And then there is no sleep for me,” wrote Heine, with as much longing as irony, in his Parisian exile. “Were we not raised on German legends?” asked Moritz Goldstein more than half a century later, “Does not the Germanic forest live within us?” His own answer was a resounding “yes”: virtually all the Jewish households in the German lands—and far, far beyond—had their own Schiller shelves next to, and increasingly above, the “rust-colored Pentateuchs with their tattered bindings.” So strong was the passion and so complete the identification that very soon Jews became conspicuous in the role of priests of various national cults: as poets, painters, performers, readers, interpreters, and guardians. “We Jews administer the spiritual possessions” of Germany, wrote Moritz Goldstein.46