Globalizing the Dialectics of Inclusion
Some have identified the figure of the Jew navigating the perils and contradictions of modernity with the character of Odysseus in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adornoâs Dialectics of Enlightenment.1 Writing as the Holocaust was reaching its abyss on the old continent, these two Ă©migrĂ© philosophers of Jewish or partly Jewish descent described what they saw as the dialectical process inherent to the Enlightenment: a process that produced not just progress and human advancement, but also â as an originary contradiction â the instrumental use of reason, violence, hatred and antisemitism then reaching its pinnacle in mass extermination. Forty years later, Amos Funkenstein described both Jewish assimilation and self-assertion as âtruly dialectical processes.â His influential article attacked the concept of assimilation as an ideological construct deployed in Jewish historiography to demonize the experience of social, cultural and political integration.2 Taken together, these two very different attempts to bring a Hegelian and Marxist âdialecticâ into conversation with the âJewish question,â underscore the complex relationship between inclusion and exclusion in modern Jewish history.3 It is a leitmotif developed in more recent work on antisemitism, which highlights the complexity of its relationship with progressive ideologies like liberalism and socialism.4
Explaining how the devastation that was the Holocaust could have emerged from the heart of modern European civilization remains a central problem in Jewish history. And yet, for the historical profession writ-large the frame of reference has shifted. This book represents both a response to this development and an attempt to move beyond it. We seek to reimagine a field shaped by European experiences and paradigms in the light of a relatively recent historiographical moment that has âprovincialized Europeâ and begun to explore issues of race, discrimination and hybrid identities in colonial and postcolonial settings, without taking much account of either Jews or the Holocaust.5 In so doing, we aim to integrate some of the established preoccupations of Jewish historiography, which have traditionally been studied in national, local and primarily European contexts, with the new perspectives opened up by transnational history and the global and imperial turn.
The time is ripe for such a project. The relationship between Jews, liberalism and antisemitism is a staple of modern Jewish history. Peter Pulzer first attempted to sketch the contours of this field in a properly historical manner when he argued in 1964 that â[t]he dominant ideology of this period, as we have seen, was Liberalism: a study of the theoretical content of anti-Semitism will show us that it represented, in the first place, a reaction against this ideology.â6 Werner E. Mosse took a similar line, arguing that the place of Jews in modern German history was shaped above all by the conflict between liberalism and nationalism as fundamentally opposing forces.7 As products of the âGerman-Jewish symbiosisâ who fled their respective hometowns when the Nazis came to power, Pulzer and Mosse believed that liberalism (with which they identified) and nationalism (which had persecuted them) were fundamentally incompatible. This view reflected an understanding that nationalism was itself an ideology, not just a flexible political language that could sit within different ideological currents. Most powerfully articulated in Hannah Arendtâs famous study of âtotalitarianismâ, it was both a response to the Holocaust and a product of the Cold War moment.
Thirty years after Pulzerâs pioneering study, two landmark volumes redefined modern Jewish history for a generation.8 The contributions to Assimilation and Community and Paths of Emancipation represent the collective achievement of a new wave of revisionist historians. These volumes have stood the test of time, but they do not speak to the historical sensibilities of the twenty-first century. Our task is to reconnect the concerns of that historiographical generation â and the pioneers that preceded it â with those of our globalized and fragmented world.
Together with Lisa Moses Leff, we take inspiration from the new, critical historiography of liberalism that emphasizes especially its symbiotic relationship with European imperialism.9 If, as Carole Pateman, Uday Mehta, Jennifer Pitts and Domenico Losurdo have argued, the liberal political tradition was founded not only on universalizing, democratic ideals, but also on a series of important exclusions, subjugations and deferrals related to gender, race and class, then thinking about Jews reminds us that religion (Christianity) was part of this exclusionary matrix.10 Antisemitism, in this perspective, was not simply a âreactionaryâ phenomenon; nor were liberalism and nationalism necessarily as antithetical as they seemed in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. Rather, as Pieter Judson argued with respect to the Habsburg Empire, liberalism itself was one of the sources of antisemitic ideology and politics.11 That insight informs the opening section of this volume, which we have called âThe Limits of Liberalism.â
Understanding antisemitism not just in terms of right-wing nationalism or socialist anti-capitalism but rather as one of liberalismâs formative exclusions helps us to bring discussions of antisemitism into conversation with the new, globally oriented history of liberalism. Yet it is clear from this volume that we cannot understand the complexity of liberalism as a political tradition unless we appreciate the extent to which it was also constructed from the margins, both in Europe and beyond. For Jews â like women, colonial subjects and others originally excluded from full membership of the liberal polity â were not just objects of the liberal political imagination.12 As liberal actors in their own right, who fought to overcome prejudice, oppression and discrimination, they too found ways to influence what liberalism became.
Second, we draw attention to the way in which global, imperial and transnational history reshapes our understanding of the Jewish past. Modern Jewish history was invented as a field by maskilic Jews who were products of the Jewish Enlightenment, conceived of themselves as Europeans and thereby helped to shape what that meant. More recently, however, historians of the Jewish experience have highlighted the role of Jews as agents of European colonialism and cultural imperialism, and the existence of transnational networks of Jewish solidarity that cut across political and cultural divides in the Jewish world even as they reified differences within it.13
Thinking globally allows us to move beyond the idea that Jews were a quintessentially âEuropeanâ people and to understand Jewish history also as that of a global minority. Indeed, it is no longer possible to write the history of Jews, liberalism and antisemitism without looking across the Atlantic or taking account of colonialism. Consequently, this volume illuminates a diasporic geography which, we argue, better reflects the nature of Jewish history than the distinction between Europe and non-Europe, that only really acquired relevance for Jews with the Great Divergence. Rather than privileging European Jewish history (originally construed as Germanocentric), or adopting a structure that reflects the conventional oppositions between East and West, âSepharadâ and âAshkenaz,â metropole and colony, we have divide...