The prominence of Jews in the administration of Germany’s spiritual possessions posed a problem. First, because there seemed to be more to Germany than spiritual possessions. In the words of Gershom Scholem, “for many Jews the encounter with Friedrich Schiller was more real than their encounter with actual Germans.” And who were the actual Germans? According to Franz Rosenzweig, they were “the assessor, the fraternity student, the petty bureaucrat, the thick-skulled peasant, the pedantic school master.” If one wished to be German, one had to join them, embrace them, become them—if one knew how.47 “We meet the Russian people through their culture,” wrote Vladimir Jabotinsky in 1903, “mostly their writers—or rather, the best, highest, purest manifestations of the Russian spirit.” However, he continued,
Because we do not know the daily life of Russia—the Russian dreariness and philistinism—we form our impression of the Russian people by looking only at their geniuses and leaders, and of course we get a beautiful fairy tale as a result. I do not know if many of us love Russia, but many, too many of us, children of the Jewish intelligentsia, are madly, shamefully in love with Russian culture, and through it with the whole Russian world.48
This is a “distorted image,” to borrow Sidney Bolkosky’s expression. Not only because “stupid Ivan” remained—in the shtetls, at least—the dominant Jewish representation of their non-Jewish neighbors, but also because the assessors, petty bureaucrats, and thick-skulled peasants were themselves trying to learn who their geniuses were and how to love them madly. The meaning of nationalism and the point of state-run mass education systems is to persuade large numbers of vaguely related rural Apollonians that they belong to a chosen tribe that is much bigger than the local community of shared customs and meals, but much smaller than the more or less universal Christianity of shared humanity and devotion. The various assessors, petty bureaucrats, and thick-skulled peasants had to learn—along with Jabotinsky’s Jewish children but with much greater difficulty—that “the whole Russian world” was a reflection of Russian culture, and that Russian culture, like any other high culture worthy of the name, had its auspicious folkloric beginnings, its glorious golden age, its very own Shakespeare, its many geniuses who sprouted in his wake, and—if they were lucky—its own mighty state that defended and promoted that culture and its proud bearers. No one was supposed to love the “dreariness” and the “daily life” for their own sake, and no one was seriously expected to become a thick-skulled peasant (except perhaps in the summer, when colleges were not in session).
The non-Jewish “intelligentsia children” had as much trouble trying to embrace “the people” as the Jewish ones did, because both had become accustomed, as a result of intensive training, to viewing “actual Germans” through Friedrich Schiller. The “people,” meanwhile, were scratching their heads trying to combine authenticity with education. Like all great religions, nationalism is based on an absurd doctrine, and it so happened that the two high-culture areas where most European Jews lived failed to come to terms with it. In Germany, the assessor, the fraternity student, the petty bureaucrat, the pedantic schoolmaster, and the thick-skulled peasant were able to lash out against the impossible demands of modernity by identifying them with the Jews and staging the world’s most brutal and best-organized pogrom; in Russia, the children of the intelligentsia (many of them Jewish) took power and attempted to implement an uncompromising version of the “French model” by waging the world’s most brutal and best-organized assault against the assessor, the fraternity student, the petty bureaucrat, the pedantic schoolmaster, and the thick-skulled peasant. Especially the thick-skulled peasant.
In any case, the Jewish problem with national canons was not that the Jews loved Pushkin too much (it is impossible to live in Russia and love Pushkin too much) but that they were too good at it. It was the same problem, in other words, as the one faced by Jewish doctors, lawyers, and journalists—except that the object in question was the “spiritual possessions of a nation.” In pre–World War I Odessa, according to Jabotinsky, “assimilated Jews found themselves in the role of the only public bearers and propagandists of Russian culture,” with no choice but “to honor Pushkin . . . in total isolation.” Something similar—allowing for Goldstein’s polemical hyperbole—was happening in Vienna and Budapest. Much to their own surprise and discomfort (as well as pride), Jews became extremely visible in the occupations whose function was to disguise the irreversibility of what was happening to yesterday’s Apollonians. To promote liberalism, they took up national canons, and by promoting national canons, they undermined liberalism and their own position—because the point of national canons was to validate therapeutic claims to tribal continuity. Pushkin, Mickiewicz, Goethe-Schiller, Petőfi, and their successors enacted and symbolized the conversion of legendary Slavic, Germanic, and Magyar pasts into modern high cultures, to be used by the putative descendants of those pasts. Jews could not and mostly did not pretend to partake of that tribal connection and thus were seen as interlopers. To complete the quotation from Moritz Goldstein, “We Jews administer the spiritual possessions of a people that denies us the capability of doing so.”49
The stronger the denial, the greater the perceived Jewishness of the “administrators,” many of whom never agreed to become German on German terms in any case. As Eugen Fuchs, the president of the largest German Jewish organization, said in 1919, “We are German and want to remain German, and achieve here, in Germany, on German soil, our equal rights, regardless of our Jewish characteristics. . . . Also, we want inner regeneration, a renaissance of Judaism, not assimilation. And we want proudly to remain true to our characteristics and our historical development.”50 This statement can serve as a useful explication of the paradox contained in the title of Fuchs’s organization: Zentralverein für deutsche Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, or Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith. In the Age of Nationalism, one could not be German without sharing the German “historical development” any more than one could separate “the Jewish faith” from ethnic belonging.
But being unable or unwilling to be German in Germany or Russian in Russia was only half the problem, because most Jews of Central and Eastern Europe did not live among Germans or Russians. At the turn of the twentieth century, most Jews of Central and Eastern Europe were “the bearers and propagandists” of German culture among Czechs, Latvians, and Romanians; Magyar culture among Slovaks, Ukrainians, and Romanians; Russian culture among Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, and Poles; and Polish culture among Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Belorussians (to simplify a dizzyingly diverse picture). The Jews allied themselves with powerful states and cohesive national elites because that was their path to Progress; many of their neighbors strongly objected to those states and those elites—and therefore to the Jews—because they were on a different path to Progress. And so while the Jews worshiped Goethe-Schiller and Pushkin, their old Apollonian clients were learning how to express their love for Shevchenko and perhaps dreaming of a savior-state that would unite them for eternity. To the traditional Apollonian dislike of Mercurians was added a new resentment of the Jewish association, however tenuous, with a foreign nation-state, as well as the Jewish monopoly of the jobs that more and more Apollonians now wanted for themselves. Slovaks moving into towns found Jews occupying many high-status jobs and persisting in speaking German or Hungarian. The old secret language of Mercurian trade had been replaced by the new secret language of alien modernity. What pogroms, persuasion, and competition could not accomplish, perhaps one’s “own” state would.