The Jewish Age was also the Age of Anti-Semitism. Because of their Mercurian training, the Jews excelled in the entrepreneurial and professional occupations that were the source of status and power in the modern state; because of their Mercurian past, they were tribal strangers who did not belong in the modern state, let alone in its centers of power. This was a completely new “Jewish problem”: in the traditional society, Apollonians and Mercurians had lived in separate worlds defined by their different economic roles; their need and contempt for each other had been based on the continual reproduction of that difference. Now that they were moving into the same spaces without becoming interchangeable, the mutual contempt grew in reverse proportion to mutual need. Except that it was the Apollonians who wanted the Mercurian jobs and the Apollonians who “owned” the nation-state. The better the Jews were at becoming Germans or Hungarians, the more visible they became as an elite and the more resented they were as tribal aliens (“hidden” and therefore much more frightening, to be defined as “contagion” and combated by “cleansing”). Even when the transformation, or disguise, seemed successful, the never-ending influx of immigrants from the East, with their secret language, distinctive appearance, and traditional peddling and tailoring occupations, continually exposed the connection. The Jews were associated with both faces of modernity: capitalism and nationalism. As capitalists and professionals, they seemed to be (secretly) in charge of a hostile world; as the “administrators” of national cultures, they appeared to be impostors.
The “Jewish problem” was not just the problem that various (former) Christians had with the Jews; it was also the problem that various (former) Jews had with their Jewishness. Like other modern intelligentsias that did not have a secular national canon or nation-state to call their own, the “enlightened” Jews had some apocalyptic things to say about their fathers’ world. In 1829, Petr Chaadaev, the first prophet of Russian national despair, had written that Russians lived “like illegitimate children: without inheritance, without any connection to those who went before, without any memory of lessons learned, each one of us trying to reconnect the torn family thread.”51 By the turn of the twentieth century, many Jewish writers felt the same way about their own paternity. According to Otto Weininger, the Jew was lacking in a “free intelligible ego,” “true knowledge of himself,” “the individual sense of ancestry,” and ultimately in a “soul.”52 And in 1914 Joseph Hayyim Brenner wrote:
We have no inheritance. Each generation gives nothing of its own to its successor. And whatever was transmitted—the rabbinical literature—were better never handed down to us. . . . We live now without an environment, utterly outside any environment. . . . Our function now is to recognize and admit our meanness since the beginning of history to the present day, and the faults in our character, and then to rise and start all over again.53
This is “self-hatred” as the lowest and earliest stage of national pride. Chaadaev, Weininger, Brenner, and many more like them, Jews and non-Jews, were prophets reminding their people of their chosenness. “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider” (Isa. 1:3). All three were martyrs: Chaadaev was declared insane; Weininger committed suicide; and Brenner was killed in Palestine. All three suffered in the name of national salvation—including Weininger, who appeared uncompromising in his negation: “Christ was a Jew, precisely that He might overcome the Judaism within Him, for he who triumphs over the deepest doubt reaches the highest faith; he who has raised himself above the most desolate negation is most sure in his position of affirmation.”54
But what would be the salvation of secular Jews? One year after Chaadaev published his “First Philosophical Letter,” Pushkin was killed in a duel and Russia acquired its national poet and cultural legitimacy along with an inheritance and a future. To most Jewish intellectuals, meanwhile, the nationalist solution (proposed by the Zionist Brenner) seemed neither likely nor desirable. Were they not already Mercurian? Would they not have to go backward (away from Progress)? Did they really want to transform themselves into thick-skulled peasants now that the actual peasants had, for all practical purposes, admitted the error of their ways? Some did (by posing the questions differently), but the majority continued to battle, tragically, with various ethnic editions of European Enlightenment. The Jewish embrace of Pushkin was not being returned, and the more they loved him, the less fond he seemed to be of them (to paraphrase a line from Eugene Onegin).
With all their success—because of all their success—the highly cultivated children of upwardly mobile Jewish businessmen felt lonely indeed. The great modern transformation did not just combine tribalism with “ascetic rationalism.” As far as the European Jews, at least, were concerned, it was primarily—and tragically—about tribalism. By acting in a Weberian (ascetic rational) fashion, many of them found themselves in an impossible, and possibly unique, situation. Deprived of the comforts of their tribe and not allowed into the new ones created by their Apollonian neighbors, they became the only true moderns.
Thus the Jews stood for the discontents of the Modern Age as much as they did for its accomplishments. Jewishness and existential loneliness became synonyms, or at least close intellectual associates. “Modernism” as the autopsy and indictment of modern life was not Jewish any more than it was “degenerate,” but there is little doubt that Jewishness became one of its most important themes, symbols, and inspirations.
Modernism was a rebirth of Romanticism and the next great Promethean, prophetic revolution. (Realism did not propose a brand-new universe and thus never left the shadow of Romanticism.) Once again, would-be immortals set out to overcome history and reinvent the human by improving on Homer and the Bible. This time, it was an internal odyssey in search of the lost self: the confession, and perhaps salvation, of the Eternal Jew as the Underground Man. Modernism was a rebellion against the two bodies of modernity, and no one expressed or experienced it more fully than the chosen Jewish son who had rejected the capitalism and tribalism of his father and found himself all alone. It was a culture of solitude and self-absorption, a personification of Mercurian exile and reflexivity, a manifesto of the newly invented rebellious adolescence as a parable for the human condition.
Of the three most canonical voices of this revolution, one belonged to Franz Kafka, who classified—and damned—his businessman father as belonging to that “transitional generation of Jews which had migrated from the still comparatively devout countryside to the cities” and failed to retain, much less pass on, any meaningful Judaism beyond “a few flimsy gestures.” According to his filial denunciation (a genre that another modern Jewish prophet would make compulsory), “this sense of nothingness that often dominates me (a feeling that is in another respect, admittedly, also a noble and fruitful one) comes largely from your influence.” Brutally but “guiltlessly,” his father had created a perfect witness to the continual Fall of Man (as the junior Kafka described it). “What have I in common with Jews?” he wrote in his diary on January 8, 1914, at the age of thirty. “I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in the corner, content that I can breathe.” But of course he did no such thing, because it was precisely his “sense of nothingness”—which is to say, his Jewishness—that enabled him to “raise the world into the pure, the true, and the immutable.”55