Karl Popper on Jewish Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

This paper re-contextualizes Karl Popper's thought within the anti-nationalist cosmopolitan tradition of the Central European intelligentsia. It argues that, although Popper was brought up in an assimilated Jewish Viennese household, from the perspective of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah tradition, he can be seen to be a modern day heterodox Maskil (scholar). Popper's ever present fear of anti-Semitism and his refusal to see Judaism as compatible with cosmopolitanism raise important questions as to the realisable limits of the cosmopolitan ideal. His inability to integrate an understanding of Jewishness in his cosmopolitan political ideal resulted in his strong opposition to Zionism and the state of Israel. By comparing Popper's positions with those of Hermann Cohen, another neo-Kantian philosopher, I argue that although their solutions fall short in certain respects, their arguments have continuing purchase in recent debates on cosmopolitanism and the problem of the integration of minority groups. In addition, the arguments of the Jewish Enlightenment thinkers offer important insights for the current debates on minority integration and xenophobia.

Notes

This paper was originally given as a lecture on 12 August 2008 at the University of Queensland, chaired by the Reverend David Bentley of the Brisbane Jewish Congregation. I would like to thank David Bentley and Associate Professor Ghil’ad Zuckermann for inviting me to present this paper and for their support.

1. The complex ideology of Revisionist Zionism emerged in the interwar period in opposition to Labor Zionism. For a detailed study of the philosophical basis of Revisionism, see E. Kaplan, Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

2. Andrea Poma, “Hermann Cohen: Judaism and Critical Idealism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy, ed. Michael Morgan and Peter Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 93.

3. Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (London: Routledge, 1974), 105.

4. Malachi Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 28. For an insight into the prevailing social circumstances underpinning this social migration and subsequent cultural transformation characteristic of the liberal Jewish families in Vienna of a high social standing, see P. Singer, Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna (Pymble, NSW: HarperCollins, 2004).

5. David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein's Poker (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), 83.

6. Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 26–27.

7. Hacohen relates how Humanitas was the oldest and largest lodge in Vienna, which was heavily represented by Jews seeking an alternative to the established social hierarchy. See Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 41–42.

8. William McCagg, A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670–1918 (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 39.

9. Frankism or the followers of Jakob Frank (1728–91) was an influential messianic movement amongst Central European Jewry which had strong Masonic connections. See McCagg, A History of Habsburg Jews, 32–35.

10. Edmonds and Eidinow, Wittgenstein's Poker, 83.

11. Popper, Unended Quest, 53.

12. Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 29. S. Volkov had previously mentioned besitz and bildung as the two indispensable marks that characterised how the German Jews turned into a segment of the German bourgeoisie. See S. Volkov, “The Dynamics of Dissimilation: Ostjuden and German Jews,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. J. Reinharz and W. Schatzberg (Hanover: University Press of New England 1985), 206. On the extent to which Gibbon's and Locke's ideas of the transformative value of property became central to German Enlightenment values, see J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 115–19.

13. David Weinstein and Avihu Zakai, “Exile and Interpretation: Popper's Re-invention of the History of Political Thought,” Journal of Political Ideologies 11.2 (June 2006): 201.

14. Smith to Popper, 28 July 1982.

15. Popper to Smith; Penn-7-82. Karl-Popper-Sammlung. Box 407.17.

16. Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 31.

17. Karl Popper to Michael Wallach, Editor, Jewish Year Book, 6 January 1969 (Jewish Chronicle)

18. Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 32–33.

19. Malachi Hacohen, “Dilemmas of Cosmopolitanism: Karl Popper, Jewish Identity, and ‘Central European Culture’,” The Journal of Modern History 71.1 (March 1999): 114.

20. Unpublished letter: Karl Popper to Ernst Gombrich, 25 September 1969, Karl-Popper-Sammlung. Box. 3005 Letters. Grombrich, Ernst 1956–83.

21. Harry Zohn, “Fin-de-siècle Vienna: The Jewish Contribution,” in Reinharz and Schatzberg, The Jewish Response to German Culture, 146.

22. For the assimilatory drive of the German and Austrian Jewish bourgeoisie, see Volkov, “The Dynamics of Dissimilation,” 195–211.

23. Popper, Unended Quest, 11, 109. Also see Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945), chap. 18, n. 22; chap. 19, nn. 35–40, chap. 20, n. 44.

24. Zohn, “Fin-de-siècle Vienna: The Jewish Contribution,” in Reinharz and Schatzberg, The Jewish Response to German Culture, 141–44.

25. Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 307, 306.

26. Karl Popper to Smith; Penn-7-82. Popper Archive, 407.17.

27. For Popper's support and criticism of Berlin's famous lecture on the two concepts of liberty, see Popper to Berlin, 17 February 1959, Karl-Popper-Sammlung, Box 276–10. For their similar positions on the problem of historical inevitability and the friction that this caused, see Joseph Agassi, A Philosopher's Apprentice: In Karl Popper's Workshop (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 12. Also see Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 41–117. However, Weinstein and Zakai suggest that “Berlin was probably inspired by Popper in attacking historicism, and, in the process, set out a method of textual interpretation congenial to rationally reconstructing political theory's cannon in Popperian fashion” (“Exile and Interpretation: Popper's Re-invention of the History of Political Thought,” 201). It is clear from the work of Popper and Berlin that there was an element of mutual influence, but in light of Agassi's remarks on the uneasy relationship between the two as well as their letters, it can be easily seen why this is something that they both would not care to emphasise.

28. Karl Popper to Berlin, 16 February 1954. Karl-Popper-Sammlung, Box 276–10. In this letter Berlin required Popper's assistance in the settling and educating in England of Yisrael Galili (1911–86), an Israeli member of the anti-communist left wing faction, who was later a member of the Knesset and a minister. The letter is imploring in tone and aimed to convince Popper of the righteous duty of helping such a man. Unfortunately, there is no known written response by Popper, which suggests that he probably refused any help.

29. John Gray, interview, A Tribute to Isaiah Berlin, 6 June 2009. The Philosopher's Zone, ABC Radio National. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2009/2586694.htm

30. Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 67.

31. Karl Popper, After the Open Society: Selected Social and Political Writings, ed. Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner (London: Routledge, 2008), 48–49.

32. According to Hacohen, Joseph Popper-Lynkeus came from Kolin, the same city that Karl's paternal grandfather Israel Popper came from. See Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 26. For Popper's familiarisation with Lynkeus's social thought, see Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2, 321, n. 7. Alexander Naraniecki, “Popper Re-appraised: New Perspectives on Karl Popper's Method and its Applications” (PhD diss., 2009).

33. “Wenn du einen Mensch tötest, hast du die Welt getöten, wenn du einen Mensch erhältst, erhältst du die Welt.” Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 111.

34. Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin 37a, 4.1.23a.

35. Karl Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (London: Routledge, 1977), 3.

36. Agassi, A Philosopher's Apprentice: In Karl Popper's Workshop, 128.

37. Weinstein and Zakai, “Exile and Interpretation: Popper's Re-invention of the History of Political Thought,” 188.

38. Zohn, “Fin-de-siècle Vienna: The Jewish Contribution,” 140.

39. Karl Popper, Introduction to The Myth of the Framework (London: Routledge, 1994), xiii.

40. Einstein's letters to sympathizers of “revisionist” Zionism are published in F. Jerome, Einstein on Israel and Zionism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2009), 175.

41. See Einstein's “Address at the Opening of Congress House for Refugees,” 30 October 1938, in Jerome, Einstein on Israel and Zionism, 121–22.

42. Malachi Hacohen, “The Strange Fact That the State of Israel Exists: The Cold War Liberalis Between Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism,” Jewish Social Studies 15.2 (Winter 2009): 58

43. Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 305.

44. I am not arguing that these are the only Jewish Enlightenments; other Jewish Enlightenments, such as that associated with Isaac Baer Levinsohn, the father of the Jewish Enlightenment in Russia, are beyond the scope of this study. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

45. Shmuel Feiner, “The Pseudo-Enlightenment and the Question of Jewish Modernization,” Jewish Social Studies, N.S., 3.1 (1996): 62–88.

46. Alexander Altmann, “Moses Mendelssohn as the Archetypal German Jew,” in Reinharz and Schatzberg, The Jewish Response to German Culture, 23–24.

47. On the importance of Bühler and the Würzburg School for Popper's early development, see Naraniecki, “Popper Re-appraised.” Also see Arne F. Petersen, “The Role of Problems and Problem Solving in Popper's Early Work on Psychology,” in Philosophy of the Social Sciences 14.2 (1984): 239–50; and William Berkson and John Wettersten, Learning from Error: Karl Popper's Psychology of Learning (La Salle, PA: Open Court Publishing, 1984).

48. Poma, “Hermann Cohen: Judaism and Critical Idealism,” 93.

49. Karl Popper, The World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment, ed. Arne F. Petersen and Jørgen Mejer (London: Routledge, 1998).

50. Alexander Altmann, “Moses Mendelssohn as the Archetypal German Jew,” in Reinharz and Schatzberg, The Jewish Response to German Culture, 55.

51. See Hermann Cohen,“Deutschtum und Judentum” (1915), in Jüdische Schriften, ed. Bruno Strauss (Berlin, 1924).

52. Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 150. Franz Rozenweig may have lamented that families such as the Gomperz had an excess of Buildung, which coincided with a paucity of Jewish substance. See Altmann, “Moses Mendelssohn as the Archetypal German Jew,” 21. See also Franz Rosenzweig, “Buildung un kein Ende,” in Kleinere Schriften (Berlin, 1937), 79–93. On the importance of the Socratic and Presocratic traditions for Popper, particularly in his later thought, see Popper, The World of Parmenides.

53. Wendell S. Dietrich, Cohen and Troeltsch: Ethical Monotheistic Religion and Theory of Culture (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986), chap. 1.

54. Feiner, “The Pseudo-Enlightenment and the Question of Jewish Modernization,” 62–88.

55. F. A. Hayek writes in the 1943 Preface to The Road to Serfdom (1944; London: Routledge, 2005): “For those who, in the current fashion, seek interested motives in every profession of a political opinion, I may, perhaps, be allowed to add that I have every possible reason for not writing or publishing this book. It is certain to offend many people with whom I wish to live on friendly terms … it is certain to prejudice the reception of the results of the more strictly academic work to which all my inclinations lead me.”