“Yidn un Yiddishkeit,” in Yidn un Yiddishkeit (New York: Dr. Chaim Zhitlovsky Verlag-Komite, 1939).
Chaim Zhitlowsky (1865–1943) was a socialist and Jewish writer, and one of the chief advocates of Diaspora nationalism and Yiddishism. Born in Vitebsk, Russia, Zhitlowsky lived in St. Petersburg before moving to Berlin and Zurich, where he was active in socialist and Jewish politics. In 1908 he moved to New York, where he continued his work as a writer, editor, and political activist. This article was first published in the Yiddish newspaper Der Tog (New York), May 31, 1927. See the entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica, 16:1009–11.
Who and what is a Jew? What is Jewishness (Yiddishkeit)?
The Jew and Judaism have existed on this planet for a long while; nonetheless, it appears that when it comes to these questions one can’t do without disagreement and controversy . . . Georg Brandes51 dies, and already comes the question, can we include him in the category of “Jewishness,” and can we say that he, Brandes, the great writer, was also a great “Jew”?
It appears to me that the lack of clarity here derives from the fact that with the words “Jew” and “Jewishness” we are actually designating two very different things that are everywhere and quite commonly bound together. Yet they are not so closely tied to one another that the one should not be able to exist without the other. Often we identify only one type of Jewishness and take that as the genuine article (etz toch fun dem inyan), negating all other versions and placing ourselves in contradiction to real life and to every natural classification, which it—life, I mean—expresses.
It is therefore absolutely imperative that we have a clear conception of the very real variations of Jewishness, so that we might arrive at the correct standard by which we are able to evaluate this or that Jewish essence or nature (mahut).
The simplest and clearest sort of Jewishness is the religious. This is a discrete collection of beliefs and opinions that are known around the world as either “Jewishness” (Judentum) or “Judaism.” A Jew is someone who believes in the ways of Judaism today. He may do that like the Vilna Gaon or like the New York Rabbi Stephen Wise52 [. . .] Moreover, one does not have to be a Jew from birth. The [members of the] Russian sect that called itself Gerim are kosher Jews according to Jewish law (ke-din u ke-dat). According to its internal aspirations, the Jewish faith ought to be a religion not only for the Jewish Volk but for all peoples and races, for humankind in general. That is its ideal, its greatest hope, because like its children—Christianity and Islam—Judaism too is a universal faith, for all mankind. “And He shall make everyone into one community (Agudah),” this we don’t cease to ask of God.
A former Jew, from a strictly religious standpoint, is anyone who renounces Judaism. This could be someone who formally converts to another faith, or someone who liberates himself from the formalities of religious confession.
In earlier times, when every Jew was a religious Jew, one understood that religious Jewishness alone was the meaning of Jewishness, and thus no other form of Jewishness was possible. In recent times, we’ve begun to think differently about this subject. There have emerged “Jews” who have absolutely nothing to do with the Jewish religion. In the first place there are the national Jews—or, more correctly, nationalist Jews. Furthermore, this type of Jewishness is bound up with a particular manner of thinking, a certain conscious striving, and also often with emotions that flow from such thoughts and strivings. But our Jewish consciousness insists on a solidarity with the national destiny of the Jewish people, and in the explicit desire for a national destiny that is more beautiful and more significant. Dr. Herzl and Dr. Nordau can serve as splendid examples of just such a type of nationalistic Jewishness.53 It is clear that religious considerations play absolutely no role for them. Let’s set Herzl aside; but with regard to Nordau, there is clearly no doubt that he never had and never could have had the slightest truck with “Jewish theology.”
Most people are accustomed now to looking on such figures as heretics (apikorsim), even if also as exalted national (or nationalist) Jews. However, one is not always consistent in this regard. For many, it is still quite difficult to take that final necessary step and regard as valid the idea that one can be a highly exalted “national” Jew and also disavow or deny religious Jewishness, or likewise that one can remain at the level of a high exalted national Jew even when such a person takes on another faith, either offcially or not—and this, even if this faith be Eastern Orthodox or Catholicism. Dr. Herzl’s son, who became a Catholic, insists that by means of this “conversion” or “baptism” (shmad), his “national” Jewishness has not been diminished at all. And we would like to believe him. And no individual in the world has the right to exclude him. In the Land of Israel, where Jewish national life is gradually becoming normalized, it is already coming to pass, as genuine Christians are manifesting solidarity with the Jewish national fate. One such individual, who has only recently passed away, announced before his death that he wanted to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. The rabbis have not permitted this. This is a genuine barbarity. For the time being, the barbarians have power only over the dead. Their grip, thank God, does not extend to the living. In the realm of the living, Jewish national identity (yiddishe nationalität) is increasingly liberating itself from the religious sensibility and is becoming open to all beliefs and opinions.
The two types of Jewishness that we invoked above, the religious and the national, both depend on a certain sort of subjective point or position (moment). There is a certain type of consciousness that makes religious Jews religious, and nationalist Jews nationalist. Life, however, offers up two other types of Jewishness, which do not depend on subjective consciousness but only on factual, objective being.
One type of Jewishness (the third in our account) is what one might call racial Jewishness, if one understands by the word “race” not what the anthropologists study when they speak about the Caucasian, the Malaysian, [and] the Mongolian races, the way humanity is divided into categories. Rather, I mean by this what the sociologists, psychologists, and cultural researchers have in mind when they speak about the role of “race” in the history of culture and in the creation of humanity’s cultural treasures. Moses Hess, Gobineau, Duhring, [Eduard von] Hartmann, Chamberlain, [Ludwig] Gumplowicz (with his sociological theory of “racial war”), Hippolyte Taine, Georg Brandes—to name just the best-known figures—have collected an enormous amount of material and brought forth numerous contradictory and extravagant theories on the topic of “race” in its specific sense.
It is understood that each Volk is endowed with certain characteristic traits, some bodily, some mental. Such traits are transmitted hereditarily from generation to generation, and determine how in fact a people receives the phenomena of the external world and how it reacts to these phenomena. On such traits depend the particular and specific national customs or manners (ofen), insofar as the blessed children of a people, the most gifted by nature, bring forth human cultural treasures.
Are there, in fact, such objective characteristic traits among peoples? I shall leave the other peoples aside for the moment. I only wish to mention here the plain fact that no reputable researcher has denied such traits: this is evident from the fact that specific inherited traits are passed on through “flesh and blood” and automatically implanted in the inheritance from generation to generation; this from every learned man who stands within the tradition of Weismann54 and who denies completely that acquired characteristics can possibly be transmitted through natural inheritance to offspring. Now, indeed, the Weismannian noise-makers, out of necessity, retain and cherish a belief in the purity of the racial Volk (Volksrasse), if it is of a “higher type.”
Furthermore, I must add that all authorities completely recognize that such racial traits cannot be thoroughly investigated with the help of natural science alone, with a microscope or with chemical reagents. Other, more complex methods and forms of analysis are required.
Does the Jewish Volk in fact have such racial traits—that is, unambiguously identifiable physical and mental features, which are to be found exclusively among the Jews, or with greater frequency and more intensively [there] than among others, or in an alternative, purely “Jewish” combination?
The day-to-day experience and the theoretical and scientific observation of the Jewish essence, the Jewish nature, the Jewish character offer a unanimously positive response to the question. Allow me to bring a few facts and examples to illustrate this idea.
Even in the distant Jewish past, the fact was known that “malkay beit Yisrael . . . malkay hesed hamah.”55 At that time, tribes organized around religious consciousness or identity did not exist, since religious people in this period—even the Jews—were still permeated with a savage hatred of foreigners, particularly during those times of war. At the same time, tribes were not organized around nationalist consciousness, because even though they did have national interests according to the notions of the time, the same sort of savage hatred of foreigners was required, particularly during times of war; and certain ancient prophets had become highly dissatisfied with the measure of righteousness of the Jewish kings (Samuel with Saul; Elisha with Joash, the king of Israel). This measure of righteousness came not from a Jewish consciousness, but rather from a deeper, hidden or concealed Jewish being (sein). This is the same quality that the sages of the Talmud later captured in the words “Israel is merciful, the children of mercy are they”; Jews possess this manner of mercy “in the blood,” as an inheritance from their ancestors. This is the same manner that we perceive daily, and because of which we—a thoroughly peaceful Volk—suffer to such an astounding degree living among other peoples of a completely different, warlike, being; ours is a manner of character that can be summed up in the words “a Jewish heart” (a yiddishe hartz).
The same everyday experience also testifies to the characteristic qualities of the Jewish mind or intellect, and is expressed in the phrase “a Jewish head” (a yid-disher kop). We are still not able to describe what these natural intellectual traits consist of; indeed, it will require a great deal more research in order to clarify this fully. At present, we have, for example, Professor Möbius’s56 discovery, made while studying the conditions that play a role in mathematical ability. Among the conditions identified, he claims one is “race.” He demonstrates that German and French geniuses in mathematics express their creativity in two totally different ways: the Germans in a “geometric” or “synthetic” way; the French in an “algebraic” or “analytical” way. Jewish geniuses, who were educated within the sphere of influence of German mathematics, nonetheless do not in their work demonstrate the influence of the German type, but rather the French (the results of my own investigations into the field of Jewish theoretical research must be left aside for the moment).
Furthermore, when we speak of a “Jewish” facial feature (the “Jewish nose,” “Jewish eyes”), we mean by this something akin to or having to do with a Jewish corporeal “being” and not with a Jewish “consciousness.” And it is indeed true that it is difficult to pinpoint in which anatomical features such traits reside. But anyone who at any time has seen them, knows them and understands them to be Jewish. And what is significant in this is that the same exact features that we find on the monuments from the ancient world have become identifiable with the Semitic people in general, and with the Jews in particular (Babylonia, Egypt, Rome.)
Modern medicine has also found that certain diseases such as tuberculosis (consumption), for example, affect the Jewish body in a different way than they do non-Jewish bodies.
“Racial Jewishness”—or, better: Jewishness by descent, psycho-physical Jewishness—is what Brandes had in mind when he made explicit certain Jewish character traits in his work on Lassalle and Disraeli-Beaconsfield.57 As an aside, allow me a moment here to offer up a saying by Lassalle: “At present there are two types of individuals that I hate more than any others: journalists and Jews. And I am both of these.” I know that this was meant as a joke. But it is even more certain that Lassalle, as a Jew, considers his “Jewishness” to reside not in certain subjective opinions and desires, from which at some point he might free himself, but rather in particular objective physical and mental traits that are inherent in his “Jewish blood.” And this is of course how the rest of the world looks on him. And this is of course how the rest of the world—and rightly so—looks on all eminent Jews.
Jewishness by descent, or “racial Jewishness,” must be of tremendous interest for us for two specific reasons. In the first place, [it is important] in order “to know thyself” and understand the unique Jewish nature. Second, however—and this is significant not only for us but for the entire civilized world—it is important for the history of culture to discover what each nationalist race has achieved and produced among the cultural treasures of humanity. This is necessary in order to clarify the fundamental role of biology in human progress. Here the history of culture must be considered together with racial descent in thinking about the creator of culture, and it is not a superfluous or meaningless thing to take [the biological] into account—for instance, to recall that Karl Marx descended from a long line of Jewish rabbis and scholars. Indeed, cultural history—and we, too, all of us—must consider the Brandeses, the Karl Marxes, the Lassalles and Beaconfields not only as great men but also as great Jews.
All right, enough at present about Jewishness by descent, a category to which every Jew belongs by birth. We still have to identify, if briefly, a type of objective Jewishness, which exists, so to speak, in-between the purely objective Jewish psycho-physical creative powers—from which no one [no Jew] can conceivably escape, except by dying—and the purely subjective religious and nationalistic opinions, which each and every person can contest. This is linguistic-cultural Jewishness. And this is, like racial Jewishness, absolutely independent of religion and nationalism, and in terms of identity may even be contrary to “Jewry” (Judentum) and to Jewish nationalist strivings.
Take the entire Jewish socialist and anarchist movement within the entire period of assimilation, along with the most important Jewish literature that this movement brought forth, with the richly colorful and talented gallery of leaders on display, and the thousands of high-minded workers and intellectuals that they gathered around them. No one of any intelligence would be able to deny that all of these were Jewish phenomena, and that they must automatically be associated with a certain yiddishkeit, even if they struggled fiercely against the Jewish religion and against Jewish nationalism. Now the new Jewishness, the linguistic-cultural Jewishness, arises and awakens from within itself, gaining more and more significance within our life and our historical fate.
We have, it is said, not one type of Jewishness but, on the contrary, a total of four. Each type can have its great Jews. Each type has its own criteria according to which one ceases to be a Jew. It is no great trick to pluck out one or two types from among the four and assert that only in these lie “the essence and the basic substance of the thing itself,” then to argue that this negates the other [types] as negligible58 and contradicts the proper meaning of the terms “Jews” and “yiddishkeit.” The objective historian must keep all four of the types in mind and undertake some very particular considerations, in order not to falsify the judgment by the world of our Jewish self and our Jewish achievement within the world.
51. [Georg Brandes (1842–1927) was a Danish writer and critic.]
52. [Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna (1720–97) was the leading Jewish scholar of his age and a fierce advocate of traditional Judaism, an opponent of both Hasidism and the Enlightenment. Stephen S. Wise (1874–49) was a Hungarian-born American rabbi and educator, one of the leaders of the American Reform movement.]
53. [Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was a journalist and writer, the author of Der Judenstaat (The Jewish state, 1896), and the creator of the organized mass movement of political Zionism.]
54. [August Weismann (1834–1914) was a German evolutionary biologist whose theory of the germ plasm was a highly influential explanation of how heredity works. His theory was understood to have undermined the Lamarckian theory of acquired characteristics.]
55. [1 Kings 20:30: “The kings of Israel . . . are magnanimous kings” (Jewish Publication Society translation).]
56. [Paul Julius Möbius (1853–1907), German neurologist, author of Über die Anlage zur Mathematik (On the talent for mathematics), Leipzig: Barth, 1900.]
57. [Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864) was a German Jewish socialist leader. Benjamin Disraeli, mentioned in an earlier note, took the title Earl of Beaconsfield when Queen Victoria made him a peer.]
58. [Klipat ha-shum—literally, garlic skin.]