I come from a capitalist, Lipótváros [a wealthy district of Pest] family. . . . From my childhood I was profoundly discontented with the Lipótváros way of life. Since my father, in the course of his business, was regularly in contact with the representatives of the city patriciate and of the bureaucratic gentry, my rejection tended to extend to them, too. Thus at a very early age violently oppositional feelings ruled in me against the whole of official Hungary. . . . Of course nowadays I regard it as childishly naÏve that I uncritically generalized my feelings of revulsion, and extended them to cover the whole of Magyar life, Magyar history, and Magyar literature indiscriminately (save for Petoőfi). Nonetheless it is a matter of fact that this attitude dominated my spirit and ideas in those days. And the solid counter-weight—the only hard ground on which I then felt I could rest my feet—was the modernist foreign literature of the day, with which I became acquainted at the age of about fourteen and fifteen.82
Lukács would eventually move from modernism to socialist realism and from a formless “revulsion” to membership in the Communist Party; only his love for Petoőfi would prove lifelong. This, too, is typicaclass="underline" national gods, even those most jealously guarded, were by far the most potent of the age. So potent, in fact, that their cults were taken for granted and barely noticed as various universalist creeds asserted their transcendental claims. Communists, among others, did not associate Petoőfi with the “bourgeois nationalism” they were fighting and saw no serious contradiction between the veneration of his poetry and proletarian internationalism. Petoőfi—like Goethe-Schiller, Mickiewicz, and others—stood for “culture” in his own domain, and culture (the “high” kind—i.e., the kind defined by Petoőfi et al.) was a good thing. All communism started out as national communism (and ended up as nationalism pure and simple). Béla Kun, the leader of the 1919 Communist government in Hungary, the organizer of the Red Terror in the Crimea, and a top official of the Communist International, began his writing career with a prizewinning high school essay titled “The Patriotic Poetry of Sándor Petoőfi and Janós Arany,” and ended it, while waiting to be arrested by the Soviet secret police, with an introduction to a Russian translation of Petoőfi’s poems. And Lazar Kaganovich, who probably signed Kun’s death sentence (among thousands of others), reminisced at the end of his life about beginning to acquire culture “through the independent reading of whatever works we had by Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, L. Tolstoy, and Turgenev.”83
Whereas national pantheons derived their power from their apparent transparency, family rebellions were significant because they were experienced and represented as epiphanies. Franz Boas remembered the “unforgettable moment” when he first questioned the authority of tradition. “In fact, my whole outlook upon social life is determined by the question: How can we recognize the shackles that tradition has laid upon us? For when we recognize them we are also able to break them.” Almost invariably, that first recognition occurred at home. As Leo Löwenthal, the son of a Frankfurt doctor, put it, “My family household, as it were, was the symbol of everything I did not want—shoddy liberalism, shoddy Aufklärung, and double standards.”84 The same was true of Schatz’s Polish Communists, most of whom were native speakers of Yiddish who knew very little about liberalism or Aufklärung: “Whether they came from poor, more prosperous, assimilated, or traditional families, an important common element in their situation was an intense perception of the differences separating them from their parents. Increasingly experienced as unbridgeable, expressed on the everyday level as an inability to communicate and a refusal to conform, these differences led them increasingly to distance themselves from the world, ways, and values of their parents.”85
The wealthier ones bemoaned their fathers’ capitalism, the poorer ones, their fathers’ Jewishness, but the real reason for their common revulsion was the feeling that capitalism and Jewishness were one and the same thing. Whatever the relationship between Judaism and Marxism, large numbers of Jews seemed to agree with Marx before they ever read anything he wrote. “Emancipation from haggling and from money, i.e. from practical, real Judaism, would be the same as the self-emancipation of our age.” Revolution began at home—or rather, world revolution began in the Jewish home. According to the historian Andrew Janos, Béla Kun’s young commissars “sought out traditionalist Jews with special ferocity as targets of their campaigns of terror.” According to the biographer Marjorie Boulton, Ludwik Zamenhof was not free to devote himself to the creation of Esperanto until he broke with his “treacherous” father. And on December 1, 1889, Alexander Helphand (Parvus), a Russian Jew, world revolutionary, international financier, and future German government agent, placed the following notice in the Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung: “We announce the birth of a healthy, cheerful enemy of the state. Our son was born in Dresden on the morning of November 29th. . . . And although he was born on the German land, he has no Motherland.”86
The tragedy of Parvus’s son, and the children of so many other Jewish scholars, financiers, and revolutionaries, was that most other Europeans did have a Motherland. Even capitalism, which Parvus milked and sabotaged with equal success, was packaged, distributed, and delivered by nationalism. Even liberalism, which regarded universal strangeness to be a natural human condition, organized individuals into nations and promised to assemble them de pluribus unum. Even “La Marseillaise” became a national anthem.
When the uprooted Apollonians arrived on new Mercurian shores, they were told they were at home. Some had to wait, perhaps, or move next door, or slaughter false suitors first, but one way or another, every new Ulysses was to end up on his very own Ithaca—except the original one, who, as Dante alone had divined, could never go home. Jews were no longer allowed to be a global tribe (that was “disloyalty” now, not normal Mercurian behavior), but they still were not welcome in the local ones. According to Hannah Arendt, “the Jews were very clearly the only inter-European element in a nationalized Europe.” They were also the only true moderns in Europe, or at any rate spectacularly good at being modern. But modernity without nationalism is cold capitalism. And cold capitalism by itself is, according to so many Europeans, a bad thing. As Karl Marx put it, “The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general. . . . The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”87
As Jews emerged from the ghetto and the shtetl, they entered a new world that seemed like the old one in that their skills were seen as highly valuable but morally dubious. There was one crucial difference, however: the Jews were no longer legally recognized professional strangers and thus no longer possessed a special mandate to engage in morally dubious occupations. The new license for immorality was nationalism, and Jews were not eligible. Every Jew’s father became immoral—either because he was still a professional stranger or because he was a modern without a legitimate tribe. Both were capitalists and both belonged to a chimerical nationality.
The two great modern prophecies offered two different answers to the question of Jewish patricide. Freudianism claimed that it was a universal human affliction and that the only way to save civilization-as-liberalism was to control the urge therapeutically (and grow up gracefully). Marxism attributed it to the proletariat and urged the killing (more or less metaphorical) of the bad fathers, so as to emancipate the world from Judaism and make sure that no sons would have to kill their fathers ever again.