The respected Marxist historian and biographer of Stalin and Trotsky Isaac Deutscher gave a lecture on the topic of antisemitism to the World Jewish Congress held in London in September 1958, the year I first arrived in the UK at the age of 15. It provides important insights for an understanding of the accusations of antisemitism currently being levelled at populist parties and movements which feature prominently in the pages of the Guardian in its general denunciation of populism. The lecture was entitled ‘Message of the Non-Jewish Jew’.
The lecture starts with Deutscher’s reminiscence of a story which he first came across as a child and which had made a deep impression on him. This is how Deutscher tells the story:
I REMEMBER that when as a child I read the Midrash I came across a story and a description of a scene which gripped my imagination. It was the story of Rabbi Meir, the great saint, sage, and the pillar of Mosaic orthodoxy and co-author of the Mishna, who took lessons in theology from a heretic Elisha ben Abiyuh, nicknamed Akher (The Stranger). Once on a Sabbath, Rabbi Meir went out on a trip with his teacher, and as usual they became engaged in deep argument. The heretic was riding a donkey, and Rabbi Meir, as he could not ride on a Sabbath, walked by his side and listened so intently to the words of wisdom falling from heretical lips, that he failed to notice that he and his teacher had reached the ritual boundary which Jews were not allowed to cross on a Sabbath. At that moment the great heretic turned to his pupil and said: “Look, we have reached the boundary—we must part now: you must not accompany me any further—go back!” Rabbi Meir went back to the Jewish community while the heretic rode on—beyond the boundaries of Jewry.
Deutscher goes on to explain why this story made such an impression on him and the questions it raised in his own mind. He felt attracted to the heretic and wondered why an orthodox Rabbi would defend the heretic and why the heretic would show respect for the orthodoxy of the rabbi in reminding him not to cross the border. In the story, the boundary is both geographical and metaphorical. The orthodox Jews live in a well-defined geographical area but they also inhabit a particular cultural and religious world. The heretic transcends both these limitations. Deutscher argues that the story itself, in being part of Jewish folklore, demonstrates that the heretic is integral to the Jewish tradition. The story implies that the heretic could be seen as a metaphor for the Jews themselves. The reason for this is, Deutscher points out, that ‘as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures. They were born and brought up on the borderlines of various epochs’. Deutscher contends that this position of the Jews made them special. In transcending boundaries and borders they had the opportunity to experience different cultures and lands beyond their own. The non-Jewish Jew, or heretic, was him or herself a product of the Jewish condition. He points to the large number of non-Jewish Jews who played a major role in revolutionising European culture. Their contact with non-Jewish cultures had enabled them to transcend the limitations of Jewish orthodoxy but, being Jews, they were also outsiders to the cultures within which they lived. This enabled them to push and significantly move the boundaries and borders of cultures. The non-Jewish Jew revolutionaries that Deutscher discusses include Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Freud and Einstein. Of them Deutscher says:
All these great revolutionaries were extremely vulnerable. They were, as Jews, rootless, in a sense; but they were so only in some respects, for they had the deepest roots in intellectual tradition and in the noblest aspirations of their times. Yet, whenever religious intolerance or nationalist emotion was on the ascendant, whenever dogmatic narrow-mindedness and fanaticism triumphed, they were the first victims. They were excommunicated by Jewish rabbis; they were persecuted by Christian priests; they were hunted down by the gendarmes of absolute rulers and by the soldateska; they were hated by pseudo-democratic philistines; and they were expelled by their own parties. Nearly all of them were exiled from their countries; and the writings of all were burned at the stake at one time or another.
Deutscher goes on to examine the roots of antisemitism in Europe. He points out that they run deep and have penetrated the core of the popular psyche. This he sees as the greatest tragedy for Jews:
The major part of the Jewish tragedy has consisted in this, that in result of a long historic development, the masses of Europe have become accustomed to identify the Jew primarily with trade and jobbing, money lending and money making. Of these the Jew had become the synonym and the symbol to the popular mind. Look up the Oxford English Dictionary and see how it gives the accepted meanings of the term “Jew”: firstly, it is a “person of the Hebrew race; secondly—this is the colloquial use—an “extortionate usurer, driver of hard bargains.” “Rich as a Jew” says the proverb. Colloquially the word is also used as a transitive verb: to jew, the Oxford Dictionary tells us, means “to cheat, overreach.” This is the vulgar image of the Jew and the vulgar prejudice against him, fixed in many languages, not only in English, and in many works of art, not only in the Merchant of Venice.
This, Deutscher argues, is what enabled the holocaust to take place to the relative indifference of the people of Europe. It is also the reason that when people lose faith in capitalism, but do not understand that its core nature lies in its productive relationships, in production being for profit rather than for need, profit being obtained from labour, that antisemitism most strongly raises its ugly head.
A critique of nationalism runs through the whole of Deutscher’s talk, starting with his central argument that cultural progress comes from the intermixing of cultures, not in the defence of the borders they create. The challenge for the socialist ideal of universal brotherhood and a world without borders that nationalism provides, and its relation to antisemitism, is also apparent in Deutscher’s description of Trotsky’s perplexity when, during his struggles in Russia with Stalin, he was faced “with vicious allusions to his Jewishness and even with plain anti-Semitic insults” at meetings of the party. It was not by accident that this occurred when Stalin decided to prioritise socialism in one country and succeeded in making defence of the Soviet Union the main task of the international socialist movement.
However, he also argues that the decay of Europe, and the resulting antisemitism, had driven the Jews to seek their own state as the way out. This Deutscher characterizes as ‘the ultimate consummation of their own tragedy’, at a time when he thinks nation-states have become an anachronism.He makes an impassioned case against the nation-state, in 1958 terms which have been greatly strengthened in the 60+ years that have elapsed since:
We live in an age when the nation-state is fast becoming an archaism—not only the nation-state of Israel but the nation-states of Russia, the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and others. They are all anachronisms. Do you not see it yet? Do you not see that when atomic energy daily reduces the globe in size, when man starts out on his own interplanetary journey, when a sputnik flies over the territory of a great nation-state in a minute or in seconds, that at such a time technology renders the nation-state as ridiculous and out-lived as medieval little princedoms were in the age of the steam engine?
Deutscher’s analysis provides an invaluable contribution to an understanding of what is being referred to as populism and to the role that antisemitism plays in it which greatly supports the themes I have been highlighting in my blogs. I have been stressing throughout that the popular reactions that we are witnessing are largely a result of the political and economic crisis of capitalism and the loss of faith in the system that people have felt. In my analysis of the gillets jaunes movement in France in particular, I have highlighted how the movement carries a primary tension between two competing narratives structured as nationalism and class. The popular reaction has had the common characteristics of blaming the people’s woes on the remote elites. This could be described as a form of incomplete class consciousness. However, in right wing populism the elites share the blame with foreigners in general and it is the latter who carry the greater share. The anti-capitalist element is present in right-wing populism also, but its role is secondary. Nationalism is dominant and the nastiest capitalists are the foreign ones. Antisemitism contains the expression of nationalism and of anti-capitalism. As Deutscher points out, this is because popular myth conflates in the Jew the twin identities of foreigner (the wandering Jew with no land) and member of the financial elites. In left-wing populism, the elites carry the greater blame, but the foreigner isn’t altogether absent as nationalism remains a component. An imperfect understanding of the real nature of capitalism as a system, as Deutscher again stresses, allows antisemitism to sometimes be used as a proxy for anti-capitalism because of people’s incomplete understanding of the true nature of capitalism as a system. In this sense, ironically, responsibility for the existence of antisemitism in the Labour Party could be placed at the door of Tony Blair when he managed to complete the deletion from the soul of the party of the understanding of the real nature of capitalism and of the task to be achieved. This happened when he succeeded in removing from its constitution the clause 4 which read:
To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.
It should be noted that this clause doesn’t mention nationalisation.
Deutscher provides an explanation, even though he doesn’t elaborate it, for why the myth of the Jew is buried deep in the popular psyche. What he doesn’t do is provide an explanation as to why the myth of the nation is also deeply embedded in popular consciousness. This is a task that still needs to be done if we are to devise a strategy to eradicate it and retain hope for the future.
Alvaro de Miranda
Alvaro de Miranda is retired from the University of East London where he co-founded a Department of Innovation Studies. He came to the UK in 1958 aged 15 to join his parents who were exiles from the Salazar regime in Portugal. Having experienced fascism, he is particularly alarmed with the recent worldwide electoral rise of the far-right and has been following it comparatively in this blog.
24 May 2019