But there was a third prophecy, of course—as patricidal as the other two but much more discriminating: modern Jewish nationalism. Could not the Jews be transformed from a chimerical nationality into a “normal” one? Could they not have a Motherland of their own? Could they not be protected from capitalism in their own make-believe Apollonia? Could they not be redeemed like everyone else—as a nation? Perhaps they could. A lot of Jews thought it an eccentric idea (the Chosen People without a God? A Yiddish Blood and Soil?), but many were willing to try.88
“Normal” nationalisms began with the sanctification of vernaculars and the canonization of national bards. Accordingly, in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, Yiddish acquired the status of a literary language (as opposed to a shtetl jargon or Mercurian secret code); incorporated, through translation, the “treasury of world culture” (i.e., other modern nations’ secular pantheons); accommodated a great variety of genres (so as to become a universal, all-purpose vehicle); and produced its own Shakespeare. It went through the same pangs of rebirth, in other words, as Russian a hundred years earlier or Norwegian at about the same time. Homer, Goethe, and Anatole France were being translated simultaneously, as if they were contemporaries; the beauty and suppleness of Yiddish were found to be remarkable; and Mendele Mokher Sforim (Sholem Yakov Abramovich, 1835–1917) was discovered to have been “the grandfather of Yiddish literature.” And then there was Sholem Aleichem. As Maurice Samuel put it, on behalf of most readers of Yiddish, “It is hard to think of him as a ‘writer.’ He was the common people in utterance. He was in a way the ‘anonymous’ of Jewish self-expression.”89
All the elements of “normal” nationalism were there, in other words—except the main one. The point of nationalism is to attach the newly created national high culture to the local Apollonian mythology, genealogy, and landscape; to attribute that high culture to the “spirit of the people”; to modernize folk culture by folklorizing the modern state. Very little of this enterprise made sense in the case of the Jews. They had no attachment or serious claim to any part of the local landscape; their symbolically meaningful past lay elsewhere; and their religion (which stigmatized Yiddish) seemed inseparable from their Jewishness. No European state, however designed, could possibly become a Jewish Promised Land.
Perhaps most important, Yiddish-based nationalism did little to alleviate the problem of unheroic fathers. One could sentimentalize them, or craft a powerful story of their unrelieved martyrdom, but one could not pretend that they had not been service nomads (i.e., cobblers, peddlers, innkeepers, and moneylenders dependent on their “Gentile” customers). One could not, in other words, help Jewish sons and daughters in their quest for Apollonian dignity by arguing that the Yiddish past had not been an exile. Why should one, in fact, if unimpeachably proud and universally recognized biblical heroes were easily available in the dominant and still vibrant Jewish tradition? Having started out as normal, Yiddish nationalism proved too odd to succeed as a movement. In the all-important realms of politics and mythmaking, it could not compete with Hebrew nationalism and global socialism. Most Jews who were ideologically attached to Yiddish (the “language of the Jewish masses”) were socialists, and the languages of socialism in Europe—the Bund’s efforts notwithstanding—were German and Russian.
In the end, it was the Hebrew-based nationalism that triumphed and, in alliance with Zionism, became the third great Jewish prophecy. Strikingly and defiantly “abnormal” in its premises, it looked forward to a full and final normality complete with a nation-state and warrior dignity. It was nationalism in reverse: the idea was not to sanctify popular speech but to profane the language of God, not to convert your home into a Promised Land but to convert the Promised Land into a home. The effort to turn the Jews into a normal nation looked like no other nationalism in the world. It was a Mercurian nationalism that proposed a literal and ostensibly secular reading of the myth of exile; a nationalism that punished God for having punished his people. Eternal urbanites were to turn themselves into peasants, and local peasants were to be seen as foreign invaders. Zionism was the most radical and revolutionary of all nationalisms. It was more religious in its secularism than any other movement—except for socialism, which was its main ally and competitor.
But Jews were not only the heroes of the most eccentric of nationalisms; they were also the villains of the most brutally consistent of them all. Nazism was a messianic movement that endowed nationalism with an elaborate terrestrial eschatology. To put it differently, Nazism challenged modern salvation religions by using nationhood as the agent of perdition and redemption. It did what none of the other modern (i.e., antimodern) salvation religions had been able to do: it defined evil clearly, consistently, and scientifically. It shaped a perfect theodicy for the Age of Nationalism. It created the devil in its own image.
The question of the origins of evil is fundamental to any promise of redemption. Yet all modern religions except Nazism resembled Christianity in being either silent or confused on the subject. Marxism offered an obscure story of original sin through the alienation of labor and made it difficult to understand what role individual believers could play in the scheme of revolutionary predestination. Moreover, the Soviet experience seemed to show that Marxism was a poor guide in purging the body politic. Given the assumption of Party infallibility, society’s continued imperfection had to be attributed to machinations by ill-intentioned humans, but who were they and where did they come from? How were “class aliens” in a more or less classless society to be categorized, unmasked, and eliminated? Marxism gave no clear answer; Leninism did not foresee a massive regeneration of the exterminated enemies; and Stalin’s willing executioners were never quite sure why they were executing some people and not others.
Freudianism located evil in the individual human soul and provided a prescription for combating it, but it offered no hope for social perfection, no civilization without discontents. Evil could be managed but not fully eradicated. A collection of cured individuals was not a guarantee of a healthy society.
Zionism did foresee a perfectly healthy society, but its promise was not universal and its concept of evil was too historical to be of lasting utility. The evil of exile was to be overcome by a physical return home. The “diaspora mentality,” like Soviet bourgeois consciousness, would be defeated by honest toil for one’s own healthy state. Its persistence in Eretz Israel would not be easy to explain.
Nazism was unique in the consistency and simplicity of its theodicy. All the corruption and alienation of the modern world was caused by one race, the Jews. The Jews were inherently evil. Capitalism, liberalism, modernism, and communism were essentially Jewish. The elimination of the Jews would redeem the world and usher in the millennium. Like Marxism and Freudianism, Nazism derived its power from a combination of transcendental revelation and the language of science. Social science could draw any number of conclusions from the statistical data on Jewish overrepresentation in the critical spheres of modern life; racial science undertook to uncover the secrets of personal ethnicity as well as universal history; and various branches of medicine could be used to provide both the vocabulary for describing evil and the means of its “final solution.” Nazism rivaled Zionism (and ultimately Judaism) by casting redemptive messianism in national terms; compared favorably to Marxism (and ultimately to Christianity) in its promise of cathartic apocalyptic violence as a prologue to the Millennium; and equaled Freudianism in its use of modern medicine as the instrument of salvation. Ultimately, it surpassed them all in being able to offer a simple secular solution to the problem of the origins of evil in the modern world. A universe presided over by Man received an identifiable and historically distinct group of human beings as its first flesh-and-blood devil. The identity of the group might change, but the humanization and nationalization of evil proved durable. When the Nazi prophets were exposed as impostors and slain in the apocalypse they had unleashed, it was they who emerged as the new devil in a world without God—the only absolute in the Post-Prophetic Age.