History of the Jews (75 page)

The detection and expulsion of heretics was attended by
odium theologicum
. As Sachs said, Freud was ‘hard and sharp as steel, a good hater’. He denounced Albert Moll, author of
The Sexual Life of the Child
, as ‘a brute’ with ‘the intellectual and moral constitution of a pettifogging lawyer’, and (throwing him out of his study) ‘he has stunk up the room like the devil himself’. Adler was ‘trash’, ‘full of venom and meanness’; ‘I have made a pigmy great.’ Wilhelm Stekel, another ‘apostle’, was ‘a louse on the head of an astronomer’—a piece of abuse Freud stole from Heine, another good hater. Jung became ‘the heretic’, ‘the mystic’, and ‘Jungian’ the worst term in the Freudian vocabulary. Ex-followers were cut in the street, references to them excised from new editions of Freud’s works or changed to ‘formerly an analyst’. Jung’s letters to Freud were ‘lost’ for many years.
²³¹
On these searing controversies, Freud quoted Heine again: ‘One must forgive one’s enemies, but not before they have been hanged.’ There is much evidence of hanging, none of forgiveness. When Adler died in 1937 on
a trip to Aberdeen, Freud—then over eighty—wrote to Arnold Zweig: ‘I don’t understand your sympathy for Adler. For a Jew-boy out of a Viennese suburb, a death in Aberdeen is an unheard-of career in itself.’
²³²

If Freud had the intolerance of an Ezra and the characteristic faults of the cathedocracy, he also had some of its heroic virtues: dauntless courage in the defence of what he saw as the truth; passionate industry in pursuit of it, right to the end of a life marked by unremitting labour; a saintly death, after a slow cancer for which he refused morphia: ‘I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly.’
²³³
Arthur Koestler, who saw him at the end, found a ‘small and fragile’ sage, with ‘the indestructible vitality of a Hebrew patriarch’.
²³⁴
Freud was in the irrationalist Jewish tradition, more of a Nahmanides or a Besht than a Maimonides. But, perhaps because of this, he became a central pillar of the twentieth-century intellectual structure, itself a largely irrational edifice. To vary the metaphor, he gave humanity a new mirror, and no man has ever changed so radically and irreversibly the way in which people see themselves; or indeed talk about themselves, for he changed the vocabulary of introspection too.

If Freud transformed the way we see ourselves, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) changed the way we see the universe. That made him a central pillar of the twentieth century and perhaps of the twenty-first too, for history shows that great new reformulations of scientific law, such as Galileo’s, or Newton’s, or Darwin’s, continue to impose their consequences on society for huge spans of time. Einstein was a Jew from Ulm, where his father ran a small electro-chemical firm. He worked in the Swiss patent office in Berne, where he formulated the Special Theory of Relativity (1905) and the General Theory (1915). His essential discoveries, like Freud’s, were made before the First World War; thereafter, he searched persistently but vainly for a general field theory which would accommodate Quantum Physics, in whose formulation he also played a key role.
²³⁵

Einstein never seems to have been a practising Jew in the ordinary sense. In this he resembled Freud. But unlike Freud he did not dismiss belief in God as an illusion; he sought, rather, to redefine it. Intellectually, he was wholly in the Jewish-rationalist tradition of Maimonides and Spinoza. He was an empirical scientist of the most rigorous kind, formulating his theories specifically to make exact verification possible, and insisting it take place before according his views any validity—almost the exact opposite of Freud’s dogmatics. But he was prepared to admit the existence of non-verifiable truth. In this respect too he was more honest than Freud. Freud denied mystic
truth while remaining, essentially, a mystic himself; Einstein remained a rationalist, while admitting a mystic sphere. He thought that ‘the mysterious’, which he saw as emotional rather than factual, ‘stands at the cradle of true art and true science’. Beyond ‘the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty’ there were impenetrable truths ‘which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds’. Awareness of this, he argued, was what constituted true religious feeling and ‘in this sense, and this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man’.
²³⁶

The last assertion was a restatement of Maimonides’ belief that there are two complementary ways of perceiving truth, reason and Revelation. However, Einstein was much closer to Spinoza, whom he greatly admired, in dismissing Revelation as such. What he did say was that intuitive thinking was essential to the formulation of a great scientific concept, a sort of blind leap into a huge theoretical generalization.
²³⁷
Here he had a great deal in common with the French Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), who shared Einstein’s stress on the mystical and intuitive element in science (and the interaction of time and matter).
²³⁸
But in Einstein’s view and work, once intuition created the elements of an idea, science and reason took over. ‘I want to know how God created this world,’ he said—almost a mystical aim. But the knowledge had to be acquired by mathematical formulation, verified by astronomy. In a sense, Einstein was doing what the kabbalists had attempted, to describe creation by numbers. But whereas their numbers were intuitive, magic and unverifiable, his were rationally conceived and validated by telescope. There was magic, in the sense that it amazed him to be able to discover that the universe, instead of being chaotic, as one might
a priori
have supposed, was in fact orderly, governed by laws of space-time, which might have to be modified occasionally, as he had modified Newton’s, but which were fundamentally accessible to the human intellect. Herein, he said, ‘lies the “miracle”, which is becoming increasingly deep with the development of our knowledge’.
²³⁹

Einstein believed that the macrocosmic and the microcosmic must be governed by the same laws and that his General Theory of Relativity would ultimately become merely part of a unified theory governing all electromagnetic fields. Every physical relationship of the material world could then be accurately described in a few pages of equations. He felt a deep kinship with Spinoza, who was likewise ‘utterly convinced of the causal dependence of all phenomena, at a time when the success accompanying the efforts to achieve a knowledge of the causal relationship with natural phenomena was still
quite modest’. He, coming 300 years after Spinoza, might succeed. The quest was peculiarly Jewish, in that it was impelled by an overwhelming need for an enveloping truth-law about the universe, a scientific Torah. The alternative to a general theory was indeterminacy, a concept especially abhorrent to the Jewish mind, since it seems to make impossible all ethics, or certainty in history, politics and law.
²⁴⁰
Hence Einstein’s forty-year search, ultimately inconclusive. Like Maimonides, who in his code, his commentary and his
Guide
was trying to reduce his vast Judaic inheritance into a modest-sized, clear and rational body of knowledge—a Judaic
summa
—Einstein was seeking a stark and monumental simplicity, a scientific
summa
which would make plain sense of the universe.
²⁴¹

In fact, his achievement stopped with the establishment of relativity theory. The truth of that has been demonstrated many times and it has been for the past sixty years or more a central part of the scientific corpus of knowledge. In the general mind, however, it introduced not a great new simplicity but a great new complexity, for relativity was confused with relativism, and especially with moral relativism. The conjunction of Einstein and Freud, at least in the popular perception, struck a devastating blow at the absolute certainties of Judaeo-Christian ethics, in which Einstein, at any rate, profoundly believed.
²⁴²
That was another heavy debt added to the Jewish account in many dark minds. The arrival of relativity theory was the point at which a great many educated and intelligent men gave up trying to keep abreast of scientific discovery. The Jewish literary philosopher Lionel Trilling (1905-75) noted the consequences:

 

This exclusion of most of us from the mode of thought which is habitually said to be the characteristic achievement of the modern age is bound to be experienced as a wound given to our intellectual self-esteem. About this humiliation we all agree to be silent; but can we doubt that it…introduced into the life of mind a significant element of dubiety and alienation which must be taken into account in any estimate that is made of the present fortunes of mind?
²⁴³

 

Hence the net result of this furious intellectual activity and cultural innovation at the turn of the century, an activity in which Jews were perceived to be taking a leading part, was to produce not merely an arms race between progressives and conservatives but a widespread feeling of bewilderment and anxiety. The new Jewish secular intellectuals felt this as strongly as anyone, even while they contributed to it with their work. The yearning for remembered certitudes is one of the great engines of Proust’s masterpiece,
À la Recherche du temps perdu
.
In the work of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) the entire governing principle appears to be incomprehensible displacement. ‘I am here,’ one of his stories ends, ‘more than that I do not know, further than that I cannot go. My ship has no rudder, and it is driven by the wind that blows in the uttermost regions of death.’
²⁴⁴
Schönberg felt the same, summing up his life in one weird metaphor: ‘I had the feeling as if I had fallen into an ocean of boiling water, and not knowing how to swim…. I tried with my legs and arms as best I could…. I never gave up. But how could I give up in the middle of an ocean?’
²⁴⁵
The expressionist poet Jacob von Hoddis, formerly Hans Davidsohn, epitomized and aggravated the bewilderment by producing in 1910 a short set of verses, ‘Weltende’ (‘The World’s End’) which briefly became the most famous and notorious poem in Germany. He read it at the poetry-cabaret organized by the expressionist leader, Kurt Hiller, who claimed to be a descendant of the Rabbi Hillel. It began, ‘The hat flies off the bourgeois’s pointed head’, and for reasons now obscure it immediately seemed to sum up modernism both for its proponents and for its enemies, reducing the latter to incoherent rage.
²⁴⁶
In 1914 the young poet went insane, followed immediately after by virtually the whole of Europe, in a vast dance of destruction from which both the prospects and the predicament of the Jews emerged dramatically transformed.

On 9 November 1914, in a speech at London’s Guildhall, the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, announced dramatically: ‘The Turkish empire has committed suicide.’ Germany’s wooing of Turkey, which had led the Kaiser to abandon his active support of Zionism, had finally succeeded. The sultan had committed himself to a German victory and was about to launch a
jihad
against Britain. Asquith wished to prevent the 100 million Moslem subjects of Britain’s own empire from joining it. Hence his speech, committing Britain to breaking up the Ottoman empire at last, and giving freedom to its peoples.
¹
But, in making it, he was unconsciously adding another crucial piece to the jigsaw of the Zionist state. For if Turkish rule were removed from Palestine, among other places, there might be nothing to prevent a Jewish national home from moving into the vacuum.

The notion that Jews would benefit from a German defeat in the fearful conflict now beginning would have struck most of them, at the time, as absurd. The mortal enemy of the Jews was Tsarist Russia, which the German army was now trying to tear to pieces. In London’s East End, Jews were reluctant to volunteer to fight the Germans for this very reason. Everyone associated Jewish cultural leadership with Germany. Except for the pacifists of the far left, all the leading German-speaking Jewish intellectuals, led by Max Liebermann, signed a petition supporting Germany’s war aims—Einstein was almost the only one who refused.

When the German troops, having defeated the Russian army at Tannenberg, pushed into Russian Poland, the Jews hailed them as saviours. One who did so was Ze’ev Dov Begin, father of a future Prime Minister of Israel. In addition to Hebrew and Yiddish he spoke German, in preference to Polish which he called ‘the language of anti-Semitism’. He told the young Begin and his sister (later Mrs Halperin): ‘You see, the Germans will come, it is a different culture, it is not
Russia.’ The Russian army, withdrawing, rounded up entire Jewish communities and drove them, under the lash, to Siberia—a sinister adumbration of Stalin’s minorities policy. The Begins watched the Cossacks burn down Jewish villages. When the Germans arrived, Mrs Halperin later recalled, they ‘treated the Jews marvellously…. They gave each child sweets and biscuits. They were different Germans, a different period.’
²

Even in the Jewish settlements in Palestine, German tended to be the lingua franca. Many of the settlers wanted German, rather than Hebrew, to be the language of instruction in Jewish schools. It was accepted, without debate, as the official language of Zionist congresses. The Zionist office in Berlin saw itself as the headquarters of the world movement, and its members were calling for a German protectorate over the Jews, as well as over Islam. Many believed it was the big Jewish community of Salonika which had helped to push Turkey into the war on Germany’s side.
³

Nevertheless, the more perceptive realized the immense significance of the British decision to carve up the Ottoman rump. One was Chaim Weizmann, who since Herzl’s death had become the most effective proponent of Zionism in the West. ‘The time has now come’, he wrote with satisfaction after Asquith’s speech, ‘to speak openly—to point out to the world the attitude of the Jews to Palestine.’ Weizmann was one of the noblest and most important figures in Jewish history. As a Zionist leader he was just as skilful as Herzl in handling world statesmen but in addition he could speak for the
Ostjuden
rank and file—he was one. The atmosphere of his home, in the Pripet Marsh town of Motol, was entirely traditional. His father, who cut timber and floated it down to the Baltic, knew Caro’s Code by heart and his favourite book was the
Guide of the Perplexed
. It is true that, on the walls of their home, next to Maimonides, was the portrait of Baron Hirsch, but ‘the Return’ was seen as religious: the local rabbi told Weizmann: ‘One has to do much, learn much, know much and suffer much before one is worthy of that.’
⁴

Certainly, Weizmann had to suffer much just to acquire a modern education. There were no newspapers in his home. His schoolmaster, a secret
maskil
, had to smuggle in a Hebrew textbook on the natural sciences under cover of teaching the Prophets. Then there was the Tsarist state, whose
numerus clausus
rules allocated a maximum 10 per cent of the grammar-school places to Jews even in towns where they were over 50 per cent of the population. Everything was done to prevent Jews getting to university. Weizmann later wrote: ‘as one read, year after year, the complicated
ukases
which poured from St
Petersburg, one obtained the impression that the whole cumbersome machinery of the vast Russian empire was created for the sole purpose of inventing and amplifying rules and regulations for the hedging in of the existence of its Jewish subjects’. So education involved ‘ceaseless chicanery, deception and humiliation’.
⁵
Weizmann acquired monumental patience and persistence, as well as industry, and managed to get to the Berlin Polytechnic, one of the three best science schools in Europe, and later to Switzerland, where he obtained his doctorate in chemistry at Freiburg (1899).

But it was in England, where he came to teach biochemistry at Manchester University, that Weizmann found his life-task: to exploit the existence of the British empire, and the goodwill of its ruling class, to bring the Jewish national home into existence. Weizmann, who became a British subject in 1910, always accepted the British at their own valuation, as tolerant and fair-minded, loving freedom and justice. He banked all his emotional coin in their hearts and on the whole drew a decent dividend. In the years before 1914 he set about cultivating them. He met C. P. Scott, the powerful editor of the Liberal
Manchester Guardian
, and through him such Lancashire
MPS
as Arthur Balfour, leader of the Conservatives, and Winston Churchill. Scott also introduced him to his closest political friend, Lloyd George. All these men became staunch supporters of Zionism.

Weizmann found an unexpected ally in the Liberal
MP
Herbert Samuel. He was a member of the Jewish establishment at a time when it was overwhelmingly, sometimes venomously, anti-Zionist. His father had founded the immensely successful banking firm of Samuel Montagu, and his first cousin in the firm, Edwin Montagu, was also in politics and a leading anti-Zionist. Samuel had been to Balliol, that nest of atheism, and was forced to confess to his mother that he lost his faith there. But he conformed outwardly, continued to pay his synagogue dues, and proudly called himself a Jew. So when he got into the cabinet in 1909 he was the first Jew to serve there. He had also done political work in Jewish Whitechapel, and the appalling scenes of poverty and degradation he witnessed there made him a Zionist. This was confirmed by his marginal involvement in the 1911 Marconi case, where he experienced for himself the cruelty of anti-Semitism, even in tolerant Britain.

Samuel was chilly, silent, reserved; he kept his views to himself. Not even Weizmann knew he was a Zionist. But he had privately conceived a plan to exploit the Turkish intervention, and on the day Asquith made his speech Samuel called on Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, at the Foreign Office and held a critical conversation there.
What about a national home for the Jews? Grey said ‘the idea had always had a strong sentimental attachment to him…[and he] would be prepared to work for it if the opportunity arose’. They discussed details. Samuel warned that the area of the national home could not include ‘Beirut and Damascus since they contained a large, non-Jewish population which could not be assimilated’. Hence, he added, ‘it would be a great advantage if the remainder of Syria were annexed by France, as it would be far better for the state to have a European power as neighbour than the Turk’. The idea took shape for an Anglo-French carve-up, the British getting Palestine, the French Syria-Lebanon, on the lines later drawn in the Sykes-Picot secret agreement, implemented at Versailles. But that did not yet mean the Jews would get their home. Later the same day Samuel strolled across to the Treasury to enlist the help of Lloyd George, now Chancellor of the Exchequer. He ‘said to me he was very keen to see a Jewish state established there’.
⁶

So Weizmann and Samuel set the campaign in motion. The Fabian
New Statesman
, in a plea for a British protectorate enshrining a Jewish national home, argued: ‘The hopes of the Zionists have suddenly passed from an ideal into a matter of practical politics.’
⁷
In fact there was a long way to go. Asquith, a drawing-room anti-Semite, looked on in disdainful amusement when Samuel put his plan to the cabinet and it was hotly resisted by his anti-Zionist cousin Montagu. The Prime Minister relayed their encounters in his daily letters to his girlfriend Venetia Stanley. ‘[Samuel] thinks’, he wrote (28 January 1915),

 

we might plant in this not very promising territory about 3 or 4 million Jews, and that this would have a good effect on those (including I suppose himself) who were left behind…. It reads almost like a new edition of
Tancred
brought up to date. I confess I am not attracted to this proposed addition to our responsibilities. But it is a curious illustration of Dizzie’s favourite dictum that ‘race is everything’ to find this almost lyrical outburst proceeding from the well-ordered and methodical brain of H.S.
⁸

 

Again, on 13 March 1915 he referred to Samuel’s ‘almost dithyrambic memorandum’ on Palestine, ‘into which the scattered Jews could in time swarm back from all quarters of the globe and in due course obtain Home Rule (what an attractive community!). Curiously enough the only other partisan of this proposal is Lloyd George, who I need not say does not care a damn for the Jews’—merely wishing to keep the ‘agnostic, atheist French’ out of the ‘Holy Places’. Four days later, the Prime Minister told Miss Stanley that ‘Cousin Montagu’, or ‘the Assyrian’ as he called him, had hit back with a ‘racy memorandum’ in which he accused ‘Cousin Herbert’ of being incapable of
translating into Hebrew a single phrase of his plan, which was ‘a rather presumptuous and almost blasphemous (!) attempt to forestall Divine Agency in the collection of the Jews’. Asquith confessed that the language used by his quarrelling Jewish colleagues ‘rather amazes me’.
⁹
His doubts were confirmed when the War Minister, Lord Kitchener, the only minister who had ever been there, said, ‘Palestine would be of no value to us whatsoever.’

However, events moved steadily in the Zionists’ favour. Kitchener was forced to relinquish the munitions portfolio to Lloyd George, which brought him into direct professional contact with Weizmann, now working on the war effort. Then Kitchener was drowned on a trip to Russia and Lloyd George took over the War Office completely. This marked the beginning of a transfer of resources to the eastern Mediterranean, making a British conquest of Palestine more likely. Weizmann found it easier to get to see senior members of the government. At the Foreign Office on 18 August 1916 he made a conquest of Lord Robert Cecil, who recorded:

 

He said with great truth that even in this country a Jew always had to give an explanation of his existence and he was neither quite an Englishman nor quite a Jew, and that the same thing was equally true with much more serious results in other countries…. Perhaps a phrase he used may convey something of the impression which he made. He said: ‘I am not romantic except that Jews must always be romantic, for to them reality is too terrible.’

 

Cecil declared himself struck by ‘the extraordinary impressiveness of his attitude, which made one forget his rather repellent and even sordid exterior’.
¹⁰
Four months later, Asquith was hounded out of office, Lloyd George became Prime Minister and he made Balfour his Foreign Secretary.

This was decisive. Asquith was quite wrong about Lloyd George. He was both a philosemite and a Zionist. Having denounced the Rothschilds in his wilder days, he was impressed by the 1st Lord Rothschild, whom he summoned, along with other financiers, to the Treasury at the outbreak of the war. ‘Lord Rothschild,’ he began, ‘we have had some political unpleasantness.’ ‘Mr Lloyd George, this is no time to recall those things. What can I do to help?’ Afterwards, Lloyd George said, ‘Only the old Jew made sense.’
¹¹
Weizmann found that he and Lloyd George ‘sympathized on the common ground of the small nationality’. The new premier was a passionate Welsh patriot, and Samuel, when pushing his plan, always made the point that Palestine was ‘a country the size of Wales’. Lloyd George was also a Bible-thumper, another point in the Zionists’ favour. He noted:
‘When Dr Weizmann was talking of Palestine he kept bringing up place-names which were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.’
¹²

Balfour was an equally important ally because behind a diffident manner lurked a steely will, much needed in overcoming the hesitations of Foreign Office officials and colleagues. Once convinced of a case, Balfour was a hard man to deflect, and he was Weizmann’s most important convert. The two men first talked at length during the 1906 election, when Balfour upbraided Weizmann for rejecting Uganda. ‘Mr Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?’ ‘But, Dr Weizmann, we have London.’ ‘That is true, but we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh.’
¹³
They had a further and decisive talk on 12 December 1914, worth recalling because it illustrates Weizmann’s skills as a persuader. After Weizmann had put the Zionist case for action, Balfour told him that, in his view, the Jewish question ‘would remain insoluble until either the Jews here became entirely assimilated or there was a normal Jewish community in Palestine’. He added, as a tease, that he had discussed this with the notorious anti-Semite Cosima Wagner in 1912, and she agreed! ‘Yes,’ replied Weizmann, ‘and let me tell you exactly what she said—that the Jews were taking over German culture, science and industry. But’, he added,