franks_broken promises and redemptive yearnings

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Broken Promises and Redemptive Yearnings: Jewish Intellectuals and German

Universities before the Second World War

Paul FranksSenator Jerahmiel S. and Carole S. Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy

Centre for Jewish Studies and Department of Philosophy

University of Toronto

Imagine a world in which, regardless of their religion or ethnicity, you may

pursue their intellectual interests, whatever they may be; a world in which you maypursue the course of education that best matches your interests and education, and in

which you may, if you are the best candidate, find a job that enables you to investigate

the questions that most concern you, with all necessary institutional support and security.

Do citizens of western countries such as Canada inhabit this world today?For many generations of Jewish intellectuals, such a world was no more than a

pipe-dream. To be sure, the establishment of schools has long been a priority of Jewish

communities. But formal education for girls is a recent development, the provision of

general as well as Jewish studies has been the exception rather than the rule, and jobssuited to intellectuals have been few and far between. It is hard not to be astonished at

the productivity of scholars such as Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), who needed to earna living in areas at some remove from their intellectual pursuits, often while contributing

greatly to communal affairs. To be sure, a few were fortunate enough to be supported,

along with their students, by personal or communal wealth, and rabbinic studies havefrequently been pursued at high levels of sophistication and in communication with

similarly minded specialists in other, often far-flung parts of the Jewish world. However,

with the exception of medical studies at Padua and, later, a handful of other schools, Jews

had no access to the university: the institutional framework developed by EuropeanChristians and dedicated to teaching and research, which has been the key to the wests

intellectual and economic successes. Jews could obtain knowledge of the latestdevelopments in areas of study that are not tied specifically to Judaism, and interactionwith a broader community of thinkers and scholars, only with the help of a prodigious

amount of that rarest of commodities: good luck.

The exclusion of Jews from general intellectual life was, of course, part andparcel of their exclusion from the general political life of Europe. In the seventeenth

century, however, Barukh Spinoza (1632-1677) the Dutch Jewish philosopher of

Portuguese descent, who had been banned from the Jewish community of Amsterdam

envisaged a new kind of state, which would grant citizenship to all, regardless of theirreligious and philosophical opinions, and which would guarantee freedom of thought. In

the most liberal European country, he was tolerated despite his dangerous ideas, and he

survived several hostile campaigns, but it would take a century or more before Jewswould be granted civil rights in accordance with his vision. When, remarkably, Spinoza

was offered a professorship at the University of Heidelberg in 1673, he wisely declined,

since the friendly configuration of interests leading to the offer could hardly be expectedto last long. Without a guarantee of academic freedom, Spinoza preferred the life of a

lens-grinder, who earned enough to support his intellectual pursuits and who had been

fortunate enough to make contact with other philosophers and natural scientists. Still,

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1673 marks the beginning of the long romance between German universities and Jewish

intellectuals, a romance that would end in bitter betrayal.

In the eighteenth century, leading Jewish intellectuals who wanted to pursue andcontribute to general studies would have to follow Spinozas model though, fortunately,

excommunication was not obligatory. Like him, they were autodidacts who applied the

analytical skills attained through their rabbinic educations to other areas, and theysupported themselves in whatever way they could. If they were fortunate and persistent,

they might enjoy fruitful relations with Christian thinkers and scholars, and they could

also become part of an informal network of like-minded Jews. Thus Raphael LeviHannover (1685-1779), a private tutor, became the informal student and secretary of

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), and Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), a

bookkeeper, would not have published his work in philosophy and literary criticism

without the support of his friend, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781). Whateveradvantages these men had flowing from their Talmudic educations were unavailable

to female Jewish intellectuals, such as Henriette Herz (1764-1847), Rahel Levin (1771-

1833) and Mendelssohns daughters, Dorothea (1764-1839) and Henriette (1775-1831),

who could only cultivate intellectual friendships by hosting salons. None of them, maleor female, had an institutional framework to support their intellectual pursuits.

The French Revolution changed everything though not all at once by issuing apromise honoured more in its breach than in its fulfilment. In France in 1791, Jews were

granted civil rights, and the idea of emancipating Jews spread to other European countries

by means of Napoleons sword. However, implementation fell far short of the ideal, andthere was considerable resistance to the emancipation of the Jews, not least in regions

conquered by Napoleon, where, in addition to attracting the resentment of those who

feared increasing competition for livelihoods and resources, it was now branded as a

foreign imposition. Notably, it was during the Napoleonic occupation of Prussia that theaforementioned salon hostesses converted to Christianity, in part because Prussian

resentment of French Revolutionary ideas, including the idea of equality for Jews, put

them under intense pressure to demonstrate where their loyalties truly lay: with theFrench, as well as their fellow-Jews, or with their German, Christian, intellectual

comrades.

Still, the promise of equal involvement in general political and intellectual lifehad now been made. Over the next century and a half, it would repeatedly be betrayed,

undermined and repudiated. Occasionally, it would be kept. But it could not be unmade.

In the course of the nineteenth century, Jewish intellectuals from Germany and Eastern

Europe entered German universities, in search of educations and, with far less success, insearch of careers. Between the French Revolution and the First World War, Germany

invented the modern research university, and Jews who studied there including Jewish

women, after 1908 contributed greatly to all disciplines, while laying the foundationsfor much of what we now call Jewish Studies.

All too often, however, the price to be paid for a professorship was conversion to

Christianity. Consider the members of the Verein fr Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden(Association for the Culture and Science of the Jews), founded at the University of Berlin

in 1819, not long after Napoleons defeat. They sought to apply to the study of Judaism

the new historical methods developed in German universities, partly out of the conviction

that Judaism mattered, and partly out of zeal for the new scholarship. As students, they

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were determined to remain Jews, and their hopes rested on the Prussian Emancipation

Edict issued in 1812, under French occupation, which opened academic positions to all.

In 1822, however, when their erstwhile leader, Eduard Gans (1789-1837), philosopher oflaw and Hegels assistant, applied for a position, the law was changed to bar Jews once

again. Three years later, in order to take the job, Gans converted. He was followed

with famous reluctance by his fellow Verein-member: the critic and poet, HeinrichHeine (1797-1856), who remarked, The baptismal certificate is the ticket of admission

to European culture.1

Another member of the Verein, Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), whose meticulousstudies of synagogue sermons and liturgies established a new paradigm for Jewish

history, took a different path. He did not convert, and never attained a university

position. Instead, he helped to run one of the Jewish communitys own educational

institutions: a Jewish teachers training seminary, founded in Berlin in 1840.The seminary at which Zunz taught was one of several institutions arising from an

educational revolution in the Jewish community, necessitated by the fact that, in the

nineteenth century, the oldyeshivot, associated with the kehillotthat had enjoyed relative

autonomy in Europe before the rise of the nation-state, and run by the chief rabbis ofsignificant communities and/or scholarly reputations, died out in Germany and faded

away in Eastern Europe. In Lithuania, they were eclipsed by newyeshivoth, attractingboth funding and students from throughout the country and beyond by dint of their

rigorous teachers, elitist reputations and distinctive traditions. The paradigm, which was

to some extent a return to theyeshivotof thegeonim a thousand years earlier, wasestablished in 1802 by Hayyim of Volozhin (1749-1821), student of the renowned Vilna

Gaon (1720-1797). Meanwhile, the Hasidic movement gave rise to dynasties and courts

which, in their own ways, replaced the old kehillot. By the end of the nineteenth century,

some of these would also foundyeshivoton the new model. In Germany, the old, localyeshivotwere replaced by seminaries for the training of rabbis and teachers. The

Jdisches-Theologisches Seminar (Jewish Theological Seminary) in Breslau, which

combined the scholarly approach pioneered by the Verein with a conservative attitudetowards observance, opened in 1854, and the traditionalist orthodox Israelitische

Lehrerbildungsanstalt (Jewish Teacher Training Institute) began training teachers in

Wrzburg in 1863; while the liberal Hochschule fr die Wissenschaft des Judentums(Advanced School for the Science of Judaism) began operating in Berlin in 1872,

followed a year later in the same city by the Rabbiner Seminar fr das Orthodoxe

Judentum. Unlike the Lithuanianyeshivot, which dedicated themselves to Torah lishmah

(Torah study for its own sake), the German seminaries undertook to train religious andeducational functionaries. But they also provided institutional bases for the teaching and

research of major scholars, whose contributions were foundational for Jewish Studies

and, sometimes, for scholarship in general. Thus, for example, Jakob Bernays (1824-1881) son of the renowned Hakham Bernays, and uncle of Sigmund Freuds wife

taught at the Breslau seminary from its inception, and made a decisive contribution to the

historical study of classical Greek texts. Meanwhile, the orthodox seminary in Berlincame to represent the coexistence of German historical scholarship and Lithuanian

Talmud scholarship, embodied in its two final rectors, both products of the Lithuanian

yeshivah of Slabodka: Rabbi Abraham Eliyahu Kaplan (1890-1934) and Rabbi Yehiel

Yaakov Weinberg (1878-1966).

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In Germany, university teachers were civil servants, so academic appointments

required a change in the law, and no affirmative action policy was ever implemented to

design to change attitudes. Until the unification that followed the Franco-Prussian Warof 1870, the various regions proceeded at their own paces. The natural and exact

sciences were also less hostile than other disciplines. Prussia changed its law in 1847,

whereupon Robert Remak (1815-1865), a physiologist, became the first unbaptized,JewishPrivatdozent(non-stipendiary lecturer). Moritz Abraham Stern (1807-1894), a

mathematician, became the first ordinary (full) professor at Gttingen in 1859, but this

hardly opened the floodgates. Jews tended to spend longer in unpaid positions, and somedistinguished scholars such as Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903), one of the founders of the

discipline ofVlkerpsychologie (psychology of peoples) received much recognition

without any regular appointment. By the end of the 1870s, although the civil service law

had been altered throughout Germany, and although many Jews were already well-established within a variety of disciplines, there were only twenty unbaptized Jewish

professors in the country.2

Still, this was progress. Slowly, it seemed, the promise was being kept. Nobody

better represented this fulfilment, during the heyday of Jewish intellectual life in ImperialGermany, than Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), who, on his second attempt, was appointed

to a chair in philosophy at the University of Marburg in 1876. First, chairs in philosophyplayed a special role in German national culture. They were secular pulpits whose

occupants at the University of Berlin, founded during the French occupation as an act

of resistance and hope, figures such as Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, who remain centralto philosophy today helped to create the self-understanding of a nation that still existed

more as an idea than as an actuality. Second, Cohen was not only a masterful writer and

teacher; he was the founder of a school the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism and,

through his students and junior colleagues as well as his own work, his profound impacton contemporaneous philosophy would endure until the 1920s. Third, and not least,

Cohen was a knowledgeable, proud and articulate Jew. Beginning in 1880, he heeded the

call to respond to the anti-semitic attacks that were, along with the increasinginvolvement of Jews, a growing feature of political and intellectual life. Without ever

becoming merely parochial or forfeiting his status as a systematic philosopher of the first

rank, Cohen became increasingly interested in Judaism and its philosophical importance,culminating in his late classicReligion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism (1919).

No wonder Jewish students, among others, came to hear Cohen lecture at

Marburg. After he retired from Marburg, he began teaching at the Hochschule in Berlin,

where his classes were attended by some of the stars of the next generation: FranzRosenzweig (1887-1929), Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) and Leo Strauss (1899-1973).

Cohen had come full circle: he had begun his higher education within one communal

institution, at the Breslau seminary, and he now ended his career at another.Nevertheless, the university had provided the setting for the core of his career, enabling

his ideas and relations to reach far beyond the Jewish community within which he had

begun and ended.In Cohens case, the promise had been kept. But this hardly meant that the next

generation had no obstacles to overcome. Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), Cohens closest

student, could not obtain a stipendiary appointment for many years, despite his

undisputed accomplishments. During the First World War, nationalist fervour led to

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increasing anti-semitism, notwithstanding Cohens argument thatDeutschtum and

Judentum (Germanness and Jewishness, or Germanism and Judaism) were so interlinked

that Jews throughout the world should support the German cause, or should at leastprevent America from intervening to defeat it.3 When, in a 1916 issue of the Kant

Societys periodical, Bruno Bauch distinguished between the essentially German

philosophy of Kant and the essentially Jewish views of Cohen, both Cohen and Cassirerresigned from the journals editorial board.

The defeat of Germany and the establishment of the Weimar Republic brought the

tensions inherent in German-Jewish intellectual life to an almost unbearable tension. Onthe one hand, Jews were more central than ever to intellectual affairs, and they attained

academic stature to an unprecedented degree. Ernst Cassirer became, not only professor

of philosophy at the University of Hamburg in 1919, but also the countrys first

unbaptized Jewish rector in 1929-1930. On the other hand, since Jews were widelyblamed for Germanys defeat and were seen as the beneficiaries of a political regime that

seemed a foreign imposition, anti-semitism continued to hamper Jewish aspirations. In

any event, like many German intellectuals who had come of age in the war years, Jewish

intellectuals were alienated from the classical German culture that had captivated theirparents. Cohens German-Jewish symbiosis was hollow. If the promise required one to

fit in with desiccated ideas and a corrupt culture, then it was not worth pursuing.When, in a debate at Davos in 1929, Ernst Cassirer championed the humanism of Kant,

Schiller and Cohen against Martin Heideggers retrieval of questions suppressed by

western civilization since antiquity, the Jewish students present including EmmanuelLevinas (1906-1995) and Leo Strauss took Heideggers side, and Franz Rosenzweig

argued that Heidegger, not Cassirer, was in tune with the profound insights of Cohens

late work at the Hochschule.4 Not one of them anticipated that Heidegger would join the

Nazi party, volunteering in 1934 to help bring the University of Freiburg into line withthe ideology of national purity and dictatorial governance.

The generation of the First World War were not, like their forbears, seeking to

establish themselves within German culture. They had been born into the world ofGerman ideas, and several knew more about being German than about being Jewish. To

be sure, many of them would have been happy to attain university positions enabling

them to think, teach and write. But they yearned, above all, for what no academic careercould provide: redemption.

Some, like Hans Ehrenberg (1883-1958), converted to Christianity not under

pressure, like Gans and Heine, but out of a deep, religious conviction that was in revolt

against bourgeois life, whether Jewish or not. Others, like his cousin, Franz Rosenzweig,returned to the Jewish community, in order to revitalize its cultural life. Friedrich

Meinecke, a prominent intellectual historian who had supervised Rosenzweigs doctoral

dissertation, must have been astonished to receive a letter informing him that Rosenweigwould not be pursuing an academic career after all, because of a dark drive, which he

named, my Judaism.5 Even before the disaster of 1918, Rosenzweig had lost faith in

the ideal German state, which would live up to all its promises to its citizens, regardlessof religion or ethnicity the state for which Cohen and Meinecke longed. Instead,

Rosenzweig responded to a call from Nehemiah Nobel (1871-1922), a prominent

Frankfurt rabbi who had distinguished himself as a talmudist at the orthodox seminary in

Berlin, and who had then taken time off from his rabbinical duties to write a doctoral

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dissertation under Cohen at Marburg. Nobel invited Rosenzweig to head a recently

established bet ha-midrash of an innovative kind: theFreies Jdisches Lehrhaus

(Independent Jewish Study House), where Jews of every religious persuasion andbackground would be welcome to study Jewish tradition. During the war, Rosenzweig

had written the single most important work of modern Jewish philosophy, The Star of

Redemption (1920), and he now established new directions in popular Jewish education,attracting a circle of remarkable people who brought their university educations into

mutually challenging relations with Jewish tradition. Some, like Rosenzweig himself,

returned to Jewish observances that had long been abandoned by their parents, or eventheir grandparents. For him, redemption would be found, not in politics, but in the

traditional, messianic hope of everyday Jewish life.

The twenties saw a renaissance in German-Jewish intellectual, religious and

cultural life. German universities attracted some of the greatest products of bothLithuanianyeshivotand Hasidic courts including Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik (1903-

1993) and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994). But the storm-clouds

were gathering, and some sought redemption in radical alternatives to German-Jewish

life. The philosopher and literary critic, Georg Lukcs (1885-1971), who had knownEhrenberg and Rosenzweig at Heidelberg, was attracted to Marxism, and the Russian

Revolution ignited his imagination. Lukcs served as deputy to the Commissar forEducation in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. His classic work,History and

Class Consciousness (1923), articulated the ideas that became the basis for the Western

Marxist tradition, developed by the mostly Jewish members of the Frankfurt Schoolbased at the Institute for Social Research, making explicit the critique of capitalist

reification, which served as an analogue of the Jewish rejection of idolatry, and the

messianic role of the proletariat.

Others gave up on Europe altogether. In 1923, Gershom Scholem left Germanyfor Palestine, after earning his doctorate with a ground-breaking study of the early

kabbalistic work, the Sefer ha-Bahir. In 1924, the Institute for Jewish Studies was

established at the Hebrew University, whose cornerstone had been laid in 1918, andScholem, who had been hired as librarian, found a lifelong home for his teaching and

research, which would establish the groundwork for the field of kabbalistic studies.

If the French Revolution changed everything, so did the German Presidentialelection of 1932, which quickly swept Hitler to power. On 7 April, 1933, the first step

was taken to reverse the effects of emancipation in Germany: the law for the Restoration

of the Civil Service, which dismissed all non-Aryan civil servants, unless they were

First World War veterans or had been in office since August 1914, as well as those withunreliable political opinions. In practice, exemptions were not always honoured, and

most Jewish academics lost their positions. Nor did baptism help, since Judaism had

become a racial, not a religious, designation. While a handful of non-Jewish academicsobjected, for which they soon lost their jobs on political grounds, there was no mass

protest by German faculty and students. It was, in the words of Julien Benda (1867-

1956), the betrayal of the intellectuals.Expelled from the universities, German-Jewish intellectual life could subsist only

in exile or in withdrawal. One could seek an academic job in another country, against all

the odds, or one could withdraw to a Jewish community institution, either in another

country, or within Germany, where they continued to function and, indeed, enjoyed a

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new breath of life until Kristallnacht in 1938. The members of the Frankfurt School

were fortunate enough to move their Institute to New York, after a brief interlude in

Geneva, although several of them felt uncomfortable with American culture. HannahArendt (1906-1975), who had been seduced by Heidegger as a student and who

completed her second dissertation in 1933, was unable to receive the teaching license that

she had earned. When it became unsafe for her to continue gathering information onGerman anti-semitism, she joined Youth Aliyah in France, arranging for the resettlement

of German-Jewish children in Palestine, and later worked for the Jewish Agency.

Confronted by the choice between different varieties of redemption, Walter Benjamin(1892-1940) dithered. He could not decide whether to cast his lot with his Zionist friend

Scholem in Palestine, or with his Marxist friends in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, he

wrote his last, great work a portrait of the nineteenth century as crystallized in the Paris

Arcades employing an innovative method that continues to influence the humanitiestoday.6

For German Jews who had not escaped from Europe by 1939, the options had all

but run out. When war broke out, on September 1, the walls seemed to finally close in.

Benjamin was interned at a camp in Nevers, and Arendt was interned at Gurs a fewmonths later, in May 1940. As is well known, Benjamin would eventually die a

mysterious death on the Spanish border, while Arendt would proceed to Lisbon andthence to New York, carrying with her Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of

History, which he had entrusted to her in Marseilles. The ninth thesis envisaged the

Angelus Novus painted by Paul Klee a prized possession of Benjamins as theangel of history:

His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees

one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in

front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make wholewhat has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught

in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This

storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while thepile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.7

Were the Jewish intellectuals who were both formed and betrayed by the German

universities nothing more than pieces of wreckage? Or were they angels of history,looking with horror on a catastrophe that they would nevertheless survive?

To this day, their epoch-making works still bear the questions scar. Thus,

Scholems classic overview of the field of kabbalistic studies,Major Trends in Jewish

Mysticism, delivered as lectures in 1938, were dedicated when published in 1941 to thememory of his friend, Walter Benjamin. Inconceivable without the scholarly and

philosophical achievements of the German universities, the learning of Scholems

rabbinic teachers, and the conversation of his fellow German-Jewish intellectuals, thebook directs our gaze towards Benjamins obscure grave, even as it speaks to us, in the

midst of the Second World War, in a voice that Hitler could not silence.

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1The Jew in the Modern World, eds, Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),

259.2 Peter Pulzer,Jews and the German State (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 92-3.3 Hermann Cohen,Deutschtum und Judentum (Giessen: A. Tpelman, 1915).4 See Franz Rosenzweig, Transposed Fronts, inPhilosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and eds. Paul Franks and

Michael Morgan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999), 146-152.5 See Nahum Glatzer,Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), 96.6 See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Roy Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).7 Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-40, eds. Marcus

Bullock, Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392.

franks_broken promises and redemptive yearnings

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