Chamberlain and Sombart seemed to be right, according to Shternberg, in describing Judaism as a peculiar combination of relentless rationalism and exuberant messianism, for it was this very combination that had assured the final liberation of humanity.
The first heralds of socialism in the nineteenth century were non-Jews, the Frenchmen Saint-Simon and Fourier. But that was utopian socialism. . . . Finally, the time was ripe for the emergence of scientific socialism. It was then that the rationalist Jewish genius arrived on the scene in the shape of Karl Marx, who alone was capable of erecting the whole structure of the new teaching, from the foundation to the top, crowned by the grandiose monistic system of historical materialism. But what is particularly striking about the Jewish socialists is a remarkable combination of rationalist thinking with social emotionalism and activism—the very psychic peculiarities of the Jewish type that we see so clearly in all the previous periods of Jewish history, especially in the prophets. Nowhere is it more evident than in the cases of Marx and Lassalle. Marx combined the genius of theoretical, almost mathematical, thinking with the fiery temperament of a fanatical fighter and the historical sense of a true prophet. The works of Marx are not only the new Bible of our time, but also a new kind of book of social predictions! Even now, the exegetics of Marx’s teachings and social predictions exceeds all the volumes of the Talmud. Lassalle, though of a different caliber, belonged to the same psychological type, with the addition of a great talent as a popular tribune and political organizer.76
Another political organizer, perhaps the most efficient of them all, was Stalin’s “iron commissar,” Lazar Kaganovich, who remembers having to divide his early education between the Russian poets and Jewish prophets. According to his Reminiscences of a Worker, Communist-Bolshevik, and a Trade Union, Party, and Soviet-State Official,
We used to study the Bible when we were children. We sensed that Amos was denouncing the tsars and the rich people, and we liked it very much. But, of course, we had an uncritical attitude toward the prophets who, while expressing the dissatisfaction of the popular masses and criticizing their oppressors, urged patience and expected salvation from God and his Messiah instead of calling for struggle against the oppressors of the poor people. Naturally, when I was a child, I did not understand the correctness of this conclusion, but I remember how in 1912 in Kiev, when I had to speak against the Zionists, I used Amos’s words well and with great success, this time drawing appropriate Bolshevik conclusions.77
Possible Jewish origins of important Communist rituals and styles (as well as words) were widely alleged by contemporaries, many of them Jewish, Communist, or both. Ilya Ehrenburg, who was a certified fellow traveler when he published The Stormy Life of Lazik Roitshvanetz, caricatured early Soviet orthodoxy by making it seem indistinguishable from Talmudic exegesis. Both were built around the division of the world into “clean” and “unclean” spheres, and—as Lazik the Wandering Jew was meant to discover—both pursued purity by multiplying meaningless rules and by pretending to reconcile them to each other and to the unruly reality of human existence.
Now I see that the Talmudists were the most ridiculous of pups [says Lazik on being asked to purge the library in the manner of the “spring cleaning before Passover”]. For what did they think of? That Jews shouldn’t eat sturgeon, for example. Is it because sturgeon is expensive? No. Is it because it doesn’t taste good? Not at all. It’s because sturgeon swims around without the appropriate scales. Which means that it’s hopelessly unclean and that the Jew who eats it will desecrate his chosen stomach. Let other, lowly people eat sturgeon. But, Comrade Minchik, those pups were talking about meals. Now, at last, the real twentieth century has arrived, men have become smarter, and so instead of some stupid sturgeon we have a man like Kant and his 1,071 crimes. Let the French on their volcano read all those unclean things. We have the chosen brains and we cannot soil them with insolent delusions.78
Jaff Schatz, in his study of the generation of Polish Jewish Communists born around 1910, reports that some of them (with the retrospective perspicacity of political disgrace and ethnic exile) considered their Marxist education to have been primarily Jewish in style. “The basic method was self-study, supplemented by tutoring by those more advanced. Thus, they read and discussed, and if they could not agree on the meaning of a text, or when issues proved too complicated, they asked for the help of an expert whose authoritative interpretation was, as a rule, accepted.” The mentors were more experienced, erudite, and inventive interpreters of texts. “Those who enjoyed the highest respect knew large portions of the classical texts almost by heart. In addition, those more advanced would frequently be able to quote from memory statistical data, for example, on the production of bread, sugar, or steel before and after the October Revolution, to support their analyses and generalizations. . . . ‘We behaved like yeshiva bokhers and they like rabbis,’ one respondent summed up.”79 True knowledge was to be found in sacred texts, and “consciousness” depended, in part, on one’s ability to reconcile their many prescriptions, predictions, and prohibitions. “The texts of the classics were regarded with utmost veneration, as the highest authority in which all the questions that could possibly be asked were answered. The practical difficulty was to find the most suitable fragment of the texts and to interpret it correctly, so that the hidden answer would appear. In discussing such texts, as well as in debating social or political questions, there was the characteristic, hair-splitting quality of analysis that many respondents themselves today call ‘Talmudic.’ ”80
“Talmudic” was a label widely used by Eastern European Communists to refer to sterile theorizers of all backgrounds (and of course there were more than enough non-Jewish hairsplitters to make the connection dubious), but it does seem possible that Jews were overrepresented among Communist writers and ideologues because they were, on average, better prepared than their non-Mercurian comrades for the work of scriptural interpretation (the non-Jewish workers’ circles were similar in style to the Jewish ones but much less successful at producing professional intellectuals). It is also quite possible that the beneficiaries of a “Jewish education,” religious or secular, were likely to introduce some elements of that education into the socialism they were building (or journalism they were practicing). What seems striking, however, is that many Jewish radicals associated their revolutionary “awakening” with their youthful revolts against their families. Whatever the nature of their radicalism, their degree of assimilation, or their views on the connection between Judaism and socialism, the overwhelming majority remember rejecting the world of their fathers because it seemed to embody the connection between Judaism and antisocialism (understood as commercialism, tribalism, and patriarchy).81
All revolutionaries are patricides, one way or another, but few seem to have been as consistent and explicit on this score as the Jewish radicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Georg Lukács, the son of one of Hungary’s most prominent bankers, József Lőwinger, was probably as typical of the wealthier rebels as he was influential among them.