Both Freud and Marx came from middle-class Jewish families. Freud’s was a bit more Jewish (his parents were Ostjude immigrants from Galicia to Moravia), Marx’s a bit more middle-class (his father, Herschel Levi, had become Heinrich Marx, a lawyer, a convinced Aufklärer, and a nominal Christian before Karl was born). Accordingly, each is probably best understood in the light of the other man’s doctrine: Freud became the great savior of the middle class, Marx assailed the world in order to slay his Jewish father (and insisted that capitalism would be buried by its own progeny). “What is the secular basis of Judaism?” he wrote when he was twenty-five years old. “Practical need, self-interest. What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular God? Money. Well then! Emancipation from haggling and from money, i.e. from practical, real Judaism, would be the same as the self-emancipation of our age.” To be more specific,
The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish way not only by acquiring financial power but also because through him and apart from him money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples. The Jews have emancipated themselves in so far as the Christians have become Jews.
Hence,
As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—the market and the conditions which give rise to it—the Jew will have become impossible, for his consciousness will no longer have an object, the subjective basis of Judaism—practical need—will have become humanized and the conflict between man’s individual sensuous existence and his species-existence will have been superseded.61
Any exploration of the national origins of the two doctrines is necessarily speculative—as are the many theories that try to explain their particular qualities and fortunes by relating them to the Judaic tradition. But it is undeniable that both appealed greatly to more or less middle-class Jewish audiences: Freudianism to the more middle-class, Marxism to the more Jewish (i.e., Yiddish). The two promises of nonnationalist salvation from modern loneliness were heeded by those lonely moderns who could not or would not be helped by nationalism.
No wonder, then, that the wandering Jewish apostate Leopold Bloom, who usually combated nationalism with pedestrian liberalism (“I want to see everyone, . . . all creeds and classes pro rata having a comfortable tidysized income” [U 16:1133–34]), could also envision a “new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the Future”:
I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union for all, Jew, Moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses. Compulsory manual labor for all. All parks open to the public day and night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all, Esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state. (U15:1685–93)
On cooler reflection—and in the overall design of Ulysses—Bloom forswore revolution and sought deliverance through reconciliation with his Penelope and his self, for
There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural as distinct from human law as integral parts of the human whole: the necessity of destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and death; the monotonous menstruation of simian and (particularly) human females extending from the age of puberty to the menopause. (U17:995–1000)
Freud’s science was largely “a Jewish national affair,” as he put it, with the non-Jewish Jung perceived as a stranger and cultivated as a Paradegoy.62 Marxism was much more cosmopolitan, but Jewish participation in socialist and communist movements (especially in elite positions) was impressive indeed. Some of the most important theorists of German Social Democracy were Jews (Ferdinand Lassalle, Eduard Bernstein, Hugo Haase, Otto Landsberg), as were virtually all “Austro-Marxists” with the exception of Karl Renner (Rudolf Hilferding, Otto Bauer, Max Adler, Gustav Eckstein, Friedrich Adler). Socialists of Jewish descent—among them the creator of the Weimar constitution, Hugo Preuss, and the prime ministers of Bavaria (Kurt Eisner, 1918–19), Prussia (Paul Hirsch, 1918–20), and Saxony (Georg Gradnauer, 1919–21)—were well represented in various governments established in Germany in the wake of the imperial defeat in World War I. The same was true of the Communist uprisings of 1919: Spartacist leaders in Berlin included Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogisches, and Paul Levi; the Bavarian “Soviet republic” was headed (after April 13) by Eugen Leviné and at least seven other Jewish commissars (including the exuberant Ernst Toller and Gustav Landauer); and Béla Kun’s revolutionary regime in Hungary consisted almost entirely of young Jews (20 out of 26 commissars, or, if one believes R. W. Seton-Watson, who was in Budapest at the time, “the whole government, save 2, and 28 out of the 36 ministerial commissioners”).63
Between the wars, Jews remained prominent in the Weimar Republic’s Social Democratic Party, especially as journalists, theorists, teachers, propagandists, and parliamentarians. Indeed, most professional socialist intellectuals in Germany and Austria were of Jewish descent (mostly children of upwardly mobile professionals and entrepreneurs). The circle around Die Weltbühne, a radical journal that inveighed tirelessly against Weimar philistinism, nationalism, militarism, and overall thickheadedness was about 70 percent Jewish. As István Deák put it,
Apart from orthodox Communist literature where there were a majority of non-Jews, Jews were responsible for a great part of leftist literature in Germany. Die Weltbühne was in this respect not unique; Jews published, edited, and to a great part wrote the other left-wing intellectual magazines. Jews played a decisive role in the pacifist and feminist movements, and in the campaigns for sexual enlightenment. The left-wing intellectuals did not simply ‘happen to be mostly Jews’ as some pious historiography would have us believe, but Jews created the left-wing intellectual movement in Germany.64
Probably the most influential (in the long run) left-wing intellectuals in Weimar Germany belonged to the so-called Frankfurt School, all of whose principal members (Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal, and Herbert Marcuse, among others) came from middle-class Jewish homes. Determined to retain the promise of salvation but disheartened by the unwillingness of the German proletariat to bury capitalism (or rather, its apparent willingness to read Marx backward and attack Jews directly), they attempted to combine Marxism and Freudianism by means of psychoanalyzing deviant classes and collectivizing psychoanalytic practice. “Critical theory” was akin to religion insofar as it postulated a fateful chasm between the contingency of human existence and a state of complete self-knowledge and universal perfection; identified the ultimate source of evil in the world (“reification,” or the enslavement of man by quasi-natural forces); foretold a final overcoming of history by way of merging necessity and freedom; and originated as a fully transcendental prophecy (because critical theorists were not subject to reification, for reasons that could not be supported by the critical theory itself). It was a feeble prophecy, however—elitist, skeptical, and totally lacking in the grandeur, certainty, and intensity of its heroic parents: a prophecy without an audience, Freudianism without the cure, Marxism without either scientism or imminent redemption. The critical theorists did not promise to change the world instead of explaining it; they suggested that the world might be changed by virtue of being explained (provided the blindfold of reified consciousness could be magically removed). They were not true prophets, in other words—resembling as they did therapists who had found their patients’ condition to be serious, expressed full confidence in their eventual recovery (as a group), but were unable to either prescribe a course of treatment or present credible credentials. This stance proved productive on college campuses in the postwar United States, but it could hardly sustain the embattled opponents of nationalism in interwar Europe.