Aliens vs. predators: cosmopolitan Jews vs. Jewish nomads

Abstract

Certainly the question of Jewish rootlessness or rootedness has been a major topic of German-Jewish historiography from the Wissenschaft des Judentums to the present day. That this concept as articulated in the paired notions of cosmopolitanism and nomadism is actually shaped by the Jews of Central Europe as the litmus test for that which is considered (positively or negatively) cosmopolitan and/or nomadic has not been examined in any detail. The present article is the beginning of a conversation on the contested meanings and conflicted perceptions attached to the vagaries of the image of the ‘rooted’ or ‘rootless’ Jew in German culture as the touchstone for any understanding of cosmopolitanism since the Enlightenment.

Keywords:

• Cosmopolitanism
• nomadism
• Enlightenment
• diaspora
• German

Notes

1. See, for example, Beck and Sznaider, “Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences,” 1–23, as well as their “A Literature on Cosmopolitanism: An Overview,” 153–64. Recently Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, has raised the question of the projection of such spectral qualities into the stereotype of the Jew.

2. The most salient literature remains Sznaider, Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order; Beck and Sznaider, “Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A Research Agenda,” 1–23; Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Issues of Our Time). Peter L. Berger and Charles Taylor have respectively framed and contested this basic debate within cosmopolitanist theory from the mid-twentieth century. See Berger, The Sacred Canopy; Taylor, A Secular Age.

3. Brennan, At Home in the World.

4. Dee, General and Rare Memorials, 54.

5. “Mitteilungen: Weltbürger,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 27 (1926): 13.

6. Lallement, Choix de rapports, opinions et discours prononcés à la tribune nationale depuis 1789 jusqu'à ce jour (1818–1823).

7. Berkovitz, Rites and Passages, 152.

8. Actually he wrote “Die Religionen Müsen alle Tolleriret werden und Mus der fiscal nuhr das auge darauf haben, das keine der andern abruch Tuhe, den hier mus ein jeder nach Seiner Fasson Selich werden!” Cited by Raab, Kirche und Staat, 194.

9. Wieland, Private History of Peregrinus Proteus the Philosopher, 2: 32.

10. Penslar, Shylock’s Children.

11. Gilman, Multiculturalism and the Jews.

12. Vieten, Gender and Cosmopolitanism in Europe, 7.

13. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 658.

14. Wirtz, Patriotismus und Weltbürgertum.

15. Johann Gottlieb Fichtes sämmtliche Werke, Abt. 3: 149.

16. Mack, German Idealism and the Jew, 5.

17. Tentzel, Monatliche Unterredungen Einiger Guten Freunde von Allerhand Büchern und andern annehmlichen Geschichten, 833.

18. Wagenseil, Benachrichtigung wegen einiger die gemeine Jüdischheit betreffenden wichtigen Sachen, 473–88.

19. Schudt, Judische Merckwürdigkeiten, 470–512.

20. All references are from Noyes, “Goethe On Cosmopolitanism and Colonialism: Bildung and the Dialectic of Critical Mobility,” 443–62.

21. Marx, Capital, 182–3.

22. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “Considering the Apocalypse,” 138–9.

23. Simmel, Philosophy of Money.

24. Simmel, Philosophy of Money.

25. Goldziher, Der Mythos bei den Hebraern: Und Seine Geschichtliche Entwickelung.

26. Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, 325.

27. Weber, Ancient Judaism.

28. “The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low. He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.”

29. The Hittite scholar Archibald H. Sayce was indeed philosemitic. In his 1903 Gifford Lectures he wrote that: “It is usually the fashion to ascribe this concentration of religion upon the present world, with its repellent views of Hades and limitation of divine rewards and punishments to this life, to the inherent peculiarities of the Semitic mind. But for this there is no justification. There is nothing in the Semitic mind, which would necessitate such a theological system. It is true that the sun-god was the central object of the Semitic Babylonian faith, and that to the nomads of Arabia the satisfaction of their daily wants was the practical end of existence. But it is not among the nomads of Arabia that we find anything corresponding with the Babylonian idea of Hades and the conceptions associated with it. The idea was, in fact, of Babylonian origin. If the Hebrew Sheol resembles the Hades of Babylonia, or the Hebrew conception of rewards and punishments is like that of the Assyrians and Babylonians, it is because the Hebrew beliefs were derived from the civilisation of the Euphrates.” The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 295.

30. Chamberlain, The Foundations of the 19th Century, 369.

31. Wahrmund, Das Gesetz des Nomadentums und die heutige Judenherrschaft, 91; our translation.

32. Otto Gildemeister, Judas Werdegang, 15.

33. For an example, see the German philosopher Christoph Meiners, “Kurze Geschichte der Hirtenvölker in den verschiedenen Theilen der Erde,” 654–85.

34. Ratzel, The History of Mankind, 83ff., 547ff.

35. Cited by Rossman, Russian Intellectual Antisemitism in the Post-Communist Era, 8. 

36. Delitzsch, Die grosse Täuschung, 1: 105.

37. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 300–11, 324–7.

38. C. G. Jung, Interviews and Encounters, 193.

39. Heidegger, “Über Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte und Staat,” 82.

40. Heidegger: Überlegungen XIV, 121. I am indebted to Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung.

41. Brod, “Der Erfahrung in ostjüdischen Schulwerk,” 1: 35: “Man soll uns nicht eine Zentifugalkraft einimpfen und hintenach wundern, ‘Nomadentum’ und ‘kritische Zersetzung’ an unserm Leichnam konstatiren!”

42. Neusner, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Exile and Return in the History of Judaism.

43. Davies, The Territorial Dimension in Judaism.