Introduction

The Enlightenment plays a rather ambivalent role in modern Jewish history. While its major proponents refuted centuries-old religious prejudices and endorsed values such as the rule of law, personal liberty, and social equality, Voltaire and his companions were at the same time fierce critics of Rabbinic Judaism and an ascribed “Jewish nature.” Some even denied the Jews the right to full legal emancipation and gave voice to antisemitic accusations.¹ Recent scholarship has shown that the French Revolution did not automatically lead to the emancipation of the Jews. Rather, plans to improve the legal situation of French Jewry had already come up in the last years of the Ancien Régime. Although these plans failed, the revolutionaries were not the natural allies of the Jews either. As Ronald Schechter has demonstrated, it took the French National Assembly almost two years of heated debates to grant the Jews full civil rights.² To be sure, the Enlightenment was the first movement in history to claim that “all men are created equal” and thus deserve the same rights. From then on, it was possible to urge enlightened politicians and philosophers to fulfil their promises.

The age of emancipation, which was initiated by the French Revolution and was soon to spread all over the Western world, gradually improved the situation of Jewish individuals over the course of the nineteenth century, but simultaneously led to the dissolution of Jewish autonomy and traditional Jewish communality. The French nobleman Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre’s famous statement in the National Assembly that “the Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals” pinpoints this agenda.³ Rabbis and parts of the Jewish elite criticized this repressive universalism because both of them were anxious not to lose their privileges and positions in society. Furthermore, many Jews had to experience that the so-called universalism remained essentially Christian and it put them under immense pressure to convert, especially in Germany. The biographies of Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, and Eduard Gans illustrate the disappointment of a whole generation of German Jews.

While Heine and others appealed to the idea of a true universalism and thus adhered to the ideals of Enlightenment, it was only after emancipation seemed to have failed in the twentieth century, especially with the rise of Zionism as an answer to assimilation and antisemitism, that Jewish intellectuals harshly criticized enlightened universalism because they thought it obliterated every kind of Jewish particularism.⁴ In the Russian Empire, a specific version of the Haskalah intertwined with Zionism, since both of them aimed at strengthening Jewish culture against total assimilation. The poet Judah Leib Gordon, a major proponent of the Russian Haskalah, leaned towards Zionism after the pogroms in the 1880s,⁵ and such an eminent figure as Ahad Ha'am had his ideological roots in East-European Haskalah as well.⁶

Criticism of the Enlightenment, however, was not restricted to Zionism. Neo-Marxist philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that the Enlightenment so far was incomplete. Against the background of the Holocaust, they famously detected a negative “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” a conjunction of human progress and social domination in the form of a rational irrationality. During and after the catastrophe, Jewish philosophers in particular became increasingly fascinated by the philosophers of the “Counter-Enlightenment” (Isaiah Berlin) in order to uncover the negative potential of the Enlightenment itself. Resting upon Heraclitus’s notion of the Dunkler Denker (dark thinker), Counter-Enlightenment philosophy seemed to provide deep insights into the hidden nature of modernity: “The dark writers of the bourgeoisie, unlike its apologists, did not seek to avert the consequences of the Enlightenment with harmonistic doctrines,” concluded Adorno and Horkheimer in their masterpiece Dialectic of Enlightenment.⁷ They continued that those thinkers

did not pretend that formalistic reason had a closer affinity to morality than to immorality. While the light-bringing writers protected the indissoluble alliance of reason and atrocity, bourgeois society and power, by denying that alliance, the bearers of darker messages pitilessly expressed the shocking truth.⁸

The special section at hand goes back to the conference “Dunkle Denker: Jewish Readings of the Counter-Enlightenment,” which the Institute of Jewish History and Culture at the University of Munich organized in May 2018 in the beautiful mansion of the Historisches Kolleg in Munich. The conference addressed numerous examples of Jewish readings of dark men in dark times. It was concerned with the motives and strategies of Jewish philosophers in their contentions with those who reject equality, freedom, and the priority of reason. Hence, it sought to identify a “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment” in the Jewish readings of their most ferocious adversaries. Four of these contributions are presented in a revised version in this issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies.⁹

Philipp Lenhard’s article focuses on the presumed inventor of the term “Counter-Enlightenment,” the British intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin. Given Berlin’s fascination for thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and Johann Georg Hamann, who were outspoken critics of enlightened universalism and at the same time in a troubled relationship with Moses Mendelssohn, it is surprising that Berlin never devoted any of his studies to the patriarch of the Haskalah. Lenhard argues that this is even more astonishing given the fact that the Haskalah itself represents a certain kind of Counter-Enlightenment. In a Jewish perspective on the so-called general Enlightenment, the maskilim time and again pointed to the fallacies and insincerities of their Christian colleagues. In fact, they proposed an open and pluralistic universalism, which shared many traits with Isaiah Berlin’s concept of pluralism. Lenhard suggests that Berlin’s Zionism, particularly his admiration for the late Moses Hess, prevented him from delving into the commonalities between his own reading of the Counter-Enlightenment and the Haskalah.

In his article about Gershom Scholem’s Counter-Enlightenment, Daniel Weidner highlights Scholem’s early encounters with antisemitic literature. The great scholar of Kabbalah depicted himself as a “disillusioned skeptic,” notes Weidner, and because he was familiar with “the dark side of history,” he vehemently rejected Jewish apologetics. Similar to Isaiah Berlin, Scholem perceived faith in enlightened universalism, progress, and liberty, as a form of self-deception on the part of German Jewry. At the same time, Scholem realized that his own skepticism was based on these same enlightened values. Enlightenment and emancipation were the prerequisites for a critique of the failures of emancipatory ideology. Scholem’s scholarly work, especially his historiographic oeuvre, therefore constructs a “different story, with different protagonists, a different plot, and a different timeline” in order to escape this trap. As a result, his narrative of Jewish irrationalism, esotericism, and antinomism creates a distinct Jewish counter-myth. To be sure, Weidner emphasizes that Scholem’s version of Jewish history is a complex reconceptualization of the Enlightenment rather than a blunt rejection.

Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli from 1958 are at the centre of Thomas Meyer’s article. Strauss interprets the great thinker of political power as the initiator of the Enlightenment in the political sphere. Since Strauss saw himself as a defender of the truth of Greek and Jewish tradition against the alleged relativism of modernity, it is interesting to learn that he suggested the real essence of Enlightenment was “obfuscation.” Meyer asks what this terminological inversion means and where it came from. He shows that the young Strauss had initially approached Machiavelli not through his political writings, but through his reflections on Judaism. Machiavelli played an important role in Strauss’s writings from the 1920s in the context of Strauss’s involvement with revisionist Zionism. In his famous book about Spinoza from 1932, Strauss identifies the Amsterdam heretic as a Jewish version of Machiavelli because both of them tried to explain the downfall of an idea, be it Roman virtues or Jewish statehood. Meyer points out that Strauss’s political theory of power cannot be understood without referring to Machiavelli’s reading of King David.

In the final article, Karin Stögner delineates Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the “eternal recurrence” and Ludwig Klages’s notion of a “dream consciousness.” Benjamin agreed with Nietzsche’s refutation of a history of human progress and compared society to a dreamer. While Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1913)¹⁰ analyzes the dreams of an individual, Benjamin adopts Klages’s terminological transfer in order to use it for a materialistic interpretation of a whole society stuck in a myth-like cycle. In addition to that, Stögner shows that Benjamin’s notion of the “dialectic image” rests upon Klages’s idea of “archaic images (Urbilder), which stand opposed to the domain of the rational concept.” According to her, Benjamin deciphered the “archaic” as an expression of the fetish character of the commodity, as Marx had analyzed it in his book Capital,¹¹ and thereby historicized Klages’s theory of the image. The aim of Benjamin’s dialectical image is to reveal levels of hidden meaning that escape the identifying concept, and Stögner demonstrates this argument with regard to his use of gender images, especially his reinterpretation of Charles Baudelaire’s image of “the prostitute.”

All four contributions share an interest in twentieth-century Jewish intellectual history and its response to the social and political developments after the First World War, especially the rise of antisemitism. Thus, they emphasize the historical context in which Jewish intellectuals contested the norms, values, and realities of the era of Enlightenment rather than rebuking them for their fascination with the “dark thinkers.” The history of these Jewish readings of the Counter-Enlightenment is not a nice and pleasant chapter of intellectual history. It reminds us, however, that philosophy and theory are more than mind games, especially in “dark times” (Hannah Arendt). Quite the opposite: they reflect the hardships and sufferings of an epoch and therefore have to be read as expressions of liberating minds.

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Notes on contributors

Philipp Lenhard

Philipp Lenhard is assistant professor (Wissenschaftlicher Assistent) of Jewish History and Culture at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany. His last publications were Nation or Religion? The Emergence of Modern Jewish Ethnicity in France and Germany, 1782–1848 (2014) and Friedrich Pollock: The Eminence Grise of the Frankfurt School (2019).

Notes

1 Cf. Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment; Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity, 27–38; Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment.

2 Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews.

3 French National Assembly, “Debate on the Eligibility of Jews,” 115.

4 Cf. Ettinger and Bartal, “The First Aliyah”

5 Cf. Stanislawski, “For Whom do I Toil?”

6 Cf. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet.

7 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 92.

8 Ibid.

9 Martin Jay’s contribution to the conference has just been published in his new book Splinters in Your Eye, 151–172. Peter Gordon’s presentation is available online: https://videoonline.edu.lmu.de/en/node/10264.

10 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.

11 Marx, Capital I, 163–76.