Whether such statements are examples of self-assertion or reflective thought, the statistical connection between “the Jewish question” and the hope for a new species of mankind seems fairly strong. In Hungary, first- or second-generation Magyars of Jewish descent were overrepresented not only among socialist intellectuals but also among communist militants. In Poland, “ethnic” Jews composed the majority of the original Communist leadership (7 out of about 10). In the 1930s, they made up from 22 to 26 percent of the overall Party membership, 51 percent of the Communist youth organization (1930), approximately 65 percent of all Warsaw Communists (1937), 75 percent of the Party’s propaganda apparatus, 90 percent of MOPR (the International Relief Organization for Revolutionaries), and most of the members of the Central Committee. In the United States in the same period, Jews (most of them immigrants from Eastern Europe) accounted for about 40 to 50 percent of Communist Party membership and at least a comparable proportion of the Party’s leaders, journalists, theorists, and organizers.71
Jewish participation in radical movements of the early twentieth century is similar to their participation in business and the professions: most radicals were not Jews and most Jews were not radicals, but the proportion of radicals among Jews was, on average, much higher than among their non-Jewish neighbors. One explanation is that there is no need for a special explanation: in the age of universal Mercurianism, Mercurians have a built-in advantage over Apollonians; intellectualism (“cleverness” and “reflective thought”) is as central to traditional Mercurianism as craftsmanship and moneylending; and in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe, most intellectuals were radicals (intelligentsia members) because neither the economy nor the state allowed for their incorporation as professionals. According to Stephen J. Whit-field, “if Jews have been disproportionately radicals, it may be because they have been disproportionately intellectuals”—the reason being either traditional strangeness or a newfound marginality. Whitfield himself preferred the “Veblen thesis” as formulated by Nikos Kazantzakis (the author of new versions of the Bible and the Odyssey, among other things): the “Age of Revolution” is a “Jewish Age” because “the Jews have this supreme quality: to be restless, not to fit into realities of the time; to struggle to escape; to consider every status quo and every idea a stifling prison.” Or rather, Marx and Trotsky are to politics what Schoenberg and Einstein are to the arts and sciences (“disturbers of the peace,” in Veblen’s terminology). As Freud put it, “to profess belief in a new theory called for a certain degree of readiness to accept a position of solitary opposition—a position with which no one is more familiar than a Jew.”72
The “marginality” argument was not the only one that fit revolution as nicely as it did entrepreneurship and science. Most explanations of the Jewish affinity for socialism mirrored the explanations of the Jewish proclivity for capitalism. The Nietzsche-Sombart line (with an extra emphasis on “ressentiment”) was ably represented by Sombart himself, whereas the various theories involving Judaic tribalism and messianism were adapted with particular eloquence by Nikolai Berdiaev. Socialism, according to Berdiaev, is a form of “Jewish religious chiliasm, which faces the future with a passionate demand for, and anticipation of, the realization of the millennial Kingdom of God on earth and the coming of Judgment Day, when evil is finally vanquished by good, and injustice and suffering in human life cease once and for all.” No other nation, according to Berdiaev, could ever create, let alone take seriously as a worldly guide, a vision like Isaiah’s:
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like an ox. And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’s den. (Isa. 11:6–8)
Add to this the fact that Jewish liberty and immortality are collective, not individual, and that this collective redemption is to occur in this world, as a result of both daily struggle and predestination, and you have Marxism.
Karl Marx, who was a typical Jew, solved, at history’s eleventh hour, the old biblical theme: in the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread. . . . The teaching of Marx appears to break with the Jewish religious tradition and rebel against all things sacred. In fact, what it does is transfer the messianic idea associated with the Jews as God’s chosen people to a class, the proletariat.73
Or maybe it was the other way around, as Sonja Margolina has argued recently (echoing Isaac Deutscher’s genealogy of the “non-Jewish Jews”). Maybe Marx appeared to preserve Judaism in a new guise while in fact breaking with the Jewish religious tradition—in the same way as the most famous, and perhaps the most Jewish, Jew of all.
His name is Jesus Christ. Estranged from orthodox Jews and dangerous to the rulers, he dispossessed the Jewish God and handed him over to all the people, irrespective of race and blood. In the modern age, this internationalization of God was reenacted in secular form by Jewish apostates. In this sense, Marx was the modern Christ, and Trotsky, his most faithful apostle. Both—Christ and Marx—tried to expel moneylenders from the temple, and both failed.74
Whatever their thoughts on Christianity as a Jewish revolution, some Jewish revolutionaries agreed that they were revolutionaries because they were Jewish (in Berdiaev’s sense). Gustav Landauer, the anarchist, philosopher, and martyred commissar of culture of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, believed that the Jewish god was a rebel and a rouser (Aufrührer and Aufrüttler); that the Jewish religion was an expression of the “people’s holy dissatisfaction with itself”; and that it was “one and the same to await the Messiah while in exile and dispersed, and to be the Messiah of the nations.” Franz Rosenzweig, who considered “a relinquishing of the free and unrestricted market” a precondition to the coming of the Kingdom of God, rejoiced that “liberty, equality, and fraternity, the canons of the faith, have now become the slogans of the age.” And Lev Shternberg, a onetime revolutionary terrorist, a longtime Siberian exile, and the dean of Soviet anthropologists until his death in 1927, came to see modern socialism as a specifically Jewish achievement. “It is as though thousands of the prophets of Israel have risen from their forgotten graves to proclaim, once again, their fiery damnation of those ‘that join house to house, field to field’; their urgent call for social justice; and their ideals of a unified humanity, eternal peace, fraternity of peoples, and Kingdom of God on earth!” Let anti-Semites use this in their arguments: “anti-Semites will always find arguments” because all they need are excuses. The important thing is to nurture and celebrate “what is best in us: our ideals of social justice and our social activism. We cannot be untrue to ourselves so as to please the anti-Semites—we could not do it even if we wanted to. And let us remember that the future is on our side, not on the side of the dying hydra of the old barbarism.”75