Jewish Intellectual Inquiry at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Jewish Perspectives on Social Science and Philosophy

The Posen Library brings together texts by Jews in more than a dozen languages that fall into two broad categories: historical and social scientific inquiry into the Jewish past and present grounded at least to some degree in empirical inquiry, and texts of speculative reason and theoretical reflection about matters both metaphysical and social, that is, philosophy and social theory. To lump these two mixed bodies of writing under the imprecise term intellectual culture and to relegate other bodies of writing to other sections begs many questions. First, between 1880 and 1918 as never before, modernizing Jews used fiction, poetry, drama, and reportage as spaces to think searchingly about modernity and Jewish fate. Second, traditional religious genres remained sites of both social criticism and philosophical inquiry regarding matters both divine and human. Our selections feature a fair number of religious and even Orthodox thinkers alongside the secularized and secularist. Similarly, readers will also find much philosophical inquiry amid our religious culture selections.

Critical Inquiry into the Self and the World

Nevertheless, we needed some way to capture the extraordinary outpouring of critical inquiry into self and world that the 1880–1918 era provoked among all sorts of Jews, no less than among their neighbors. And although both historical and philosophical modes of writing had plenty of precedent in Jewish cultures before 1880, it is at least arguable that the 1880–1918 period marked a watershed in Jewish intellectual inquiry in several ways. With acculturation essentially complete in Western Europe and speeding up from a trot to a gallop in Eastern Europe and parts of the Mediterranean world, a generation of university-educated scholars of Jewish origin was primed and intellectually equipped to play decisive roles in the formation of the social sciences, particularly in France, Germany, and, to a surprising degree, Russia. For reasons that continue to intrigue, the great breakthrough in the psychological sciences—the recognition that the chief object of psychological inquiry could be not madness but the unreason in all of us—was largely worked out by a coterie of Central European Jews, most famously Sigmund Freud. By the same token, from the turn of the century, Jews played an increasingly vital role in European philosophy. Jewish thinkers appeared on both sides of continental philosophy’s increasingly urgent struggle between those championing the power of reason to ground knowledge and ethics and those who embraced vitalist, proto-existentialist, and neo-religious creeds with figures such as Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Rosenzweig injecting Jewish engagements into this general philosophical and critical conversation.

Inquiry into the Jewish Past and Present

At the same time, many of the texts in the Posen Library issue from a very different point of departure: inquiry into Jewish life past and present for its own sake, or, better put, for the sake of intracommunal agendas and interests. Both in metropolitan and in Jewish languages, the years 1880 to 1918 saw an outpouring of writing about Jewish history, folklore collection and analysis, and critical scrutiny of contemporary Jewish life. Where Jewish national consciousness flourished, such writing came to seem intrinsically important. For those who saw Jewish collectivity as a fact and a value, history was collective biography, folklore the preservation of one’s own culture, and critical social analysis the precondition of proper communal policies and cures. Conversely, much writing about Jewish history and society in metropolitan languages reflected other, more outward-facing concerns. Apologetic and defensive scholarship flourished as new forms of antisemitism gained traction, and antisemitism itself drew urgent investigation from such figures as Bernard Lazare (a decisive influence on Hannah Arendt in later years) and Freud. Bucking communal agendas altogether, Jewish socialists turned unsentimental eyes and applied the critical tools of Marxism to Jewish life, with disenchanting effect. Some of these socialists also elaborated feminist critiques of Jewish religious and social patriarchy; so did liberal or liberal-nationalist Jewish feminists, but from a commitment to reform Jewish life rather than to transcend it. Finally, despite all these disparate agendas, much Jewish thought was bound together by a growing sense that modernity meant not a quiet resolution of questions about Jewish identity and Jewish political fate—what the Hebraist intellectual Ahad Ha-Am called the Question of Judaism and the Question of the Jews, respectively—but rather new complexity and urgency on both fronts.