Central European intellectuals in Palestine

Judaism, Spring, 1996 by George L. Mosse

This group of Central Europeans contained an impressive list of intellectuals whose public influence was greater than their small numbers, even if they did not in the end succeed in realizing their own vision of a Jewish homeland. They included among other intellectuals men like the philosopher Hugo Bergman, the historian Hans Kohn, Gershom Scholem, Arthur Ruppin - the key figure in Zionist settlement - and the journalist Robert Weltsch; Martin Buber was a member of this group, and from the outside Judah Magnes, the president of the new Hebrew University, participated frequently in their discussions. Many more names could be added, professors at the new Hebrew University, or writers. They were defined not by their specific place of origin, whether Berlin, Prague, Vienna, or Lemberg, but by the common intellectual background and shared nationalist vision which they brought to the Zionist enterprise.

Though the core of this group remained surprisingly stable, its outer limits are more difficult to reconstruct. Obviously not all Central European intellectuals joined. Moreover, the affinity between their ideas and those of Ahad Ha'am and A.D. Gordon blurred some of the specifically Central European ideals they advocated. Nevertheless, a common core of attitudes and perceptions document the cohesive Zionist vision of this group. There was also a self-image and social reality which further defined this group both in their own minds and in that of the Yishuv in general. These men, though they were committed Zionists, came to symbolize the "Yekkes" of the later Israeli imagination, their numbers reinforced by the Central European refugees who arrived after the Nazis came to power.

Not unlike the Central European immigrants in many other countries they kept their lifestyle almost intact - but then to what group of the population could they have assimilated in the Palestine of those years? I myself still remember even through the 1970s the social gatherings in Jerusalem with their earnestness and absence of small talk, the birthday celebrations with their poetry recitations, which resembled those of my own youth in Berlin over half a century earlier. And Agnon who knew these scholars, observed in his novel, Shira, which caricatured the life of some central European professors at the Hebrew University, how "they poetized every family event." They clung to the German classics as part of what it meant to be educated, and when a well respected German scholar came to Jerusalem in the 1980s to read (in German) from the then newly discovered and highly erotic love poems of Goethe, their indignation knew no bounds. His lecture was generally regarded as "Nestbeschmutzung," a fouling of one's own nest. Their life style was accompanied by a lasting commitment to the Central European ideals in which they had been raised and which, as we shall see, continues to inform important aspects of their Zionism. The Philosopher Hugo Bergman, who emigrated from Prague in 1920 and whose published diaries are a preeminent source for the history of these intellectuals - and who was to become an important force in the early history of the Hebrew University - wrote soon after he had arrived in Palestine how they lived on a lonely island, believing themselves encircled by enemies, for no one understood their kind.

Living for the most part in Jerusalem, these men constituted a close-knit circle, something like a perpetual and mobile discussion group, as they visited each other's houses and came together at the University as well. Like all intellectuals they often disagreed among themselves, and yet several influences due to their Central European background and education continued to play a defining role both in their Judaism and in their Zionist commitment as well. I want to single out neo-romanticism, liberalism, and, above all, the concept of Bildung as documenting an intellectual and cultural continuity. Germany provided the model: when Central European Jews at the time of their emancipation reached out to European culture, as Robert Weltsch put it, it was German culture they had in mind. For these Jews at emancipation the encounter with Europe took place on German soil. Such intellectuals had passed through a Germanic educational system, and most of them had spent time at what was then its pinnacle, the University of Berlin.

That text which best expressed their Jewish awakening, and which had touched many of them in their youth, came out of a specifically Jewish, but equally out of a neo-romantic tradition. Martin Buber's Three Speeches on Judaism (1911), originally given at the request of the Bar Kochba group in Prague, rejected the normative nationalism of the twentieth century, and instead returned to an earlier, neo-romantic tradition of national consciousness, turning to what he called the inner history of the Jewish people. That inner history, he believed, must be recaptured by every individual Jew, serve to change him, and give him a feeling of unity and spiritual direction. This nationalism meant a certain moral and ethical posture rather than a territorial demand. The linkage between national awakening and individual reform was typical for the rising national consciousness of all European nations, except that in these speeches reference to the environment in which this national consciousness might unfold was not stressed. Palestine, to be sure, was important, an ideal, but not essential for the Jewish awakening; while, in contrast, the "native landscape" had played a major part in German nationalism. Yet the unity of the nation and the individual, based upon shared emotions and a shared history, remained intact. This relative downgrading of Palestine as a geographic entity was suited to the diaspora but was not typical for this group, though it did, perhaps, foreshadow their emphasis upon Palestine as a necessary center for Jewish renewal without being wedded to precise geographical boundaries. They did not follow the implications of the "native landscape" in German and other European nationalisms which often served as a springboard for aggression, emphasizing the geographic claims of national sovereignty.