The Making of Modern Jewish Identity

Ideological Change and Religious Conversion

Motti Inbari

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429648595
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Políticas de Oriente Medio

This volume explores the processes that led several modern Jewish leaders – rabbis, politicians, and intellectuals – to make radical changes to their ideology regarding Zionism, Socialism, and Orthodoxy. Comparing their ideological change to acts of conversion, the study examines the philosophical, sociological, and psychological path of the leaders' transformation.

The individuals examined are novelist Arthur Koestler, who transformed from a devout Communist to an anti-Communist crusader following the atrocities of the Stalin regime; Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, who moved from the New Left to neoconservative, disillusioned by US liberal politics; Yissachar Shlomo Teichtel, who transformed from an ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist Hungarian rabbi to messianic Religious-Zionist due to the events of the Holocaust; Ruth Ben-David, who converted to Judaism after the Second World War in France because of her sympathy with Zionism, eventually becoming a radical anti-Israeli advocate; Haim Herman Cohn, Israeli Supreme Court justice, who grew up as a non-Zionist Orthodox Jew in Germany, later renouncing his belief in God due to the events of the Holocaust; and Avraham (Avrum) Burg, prominent centrist Israeli politician who served as the Speaker of the Knesset and head of the Jewish Agency, who later became a post-Zionist.

Comparing aspects of modern politics to religion, the book will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of areas including modern Jewish studies, sociology of religion, and political science.

1 Moving away from Communism

The case of Arthur Koestler¹

Arthur Koestler was born in 1905 in Budapest and died in 1983 in London when he committed suicide together with his wife Cynthia. Over the course of his life he lived in Vienna, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Paris, and finally London; the many changes in his national identity caused critics to describe him as a “homeless mind.” This instability also characterized his personality and his ideological identity. Koestler was born a Jew, but he turned his back on Judaism. He was a Zionist, but he became disillusioned, became a Communist, and later underwent yet another change and became an anti-Communist. He was interested in astronomy, evolution, and neuroscience but eventually became a fan of parapsychology (after his death, he bequeathed all his wealth, over one million pounds, to a British university that would establish a chair of parapsychology, but no university was willing to take the money according to the conditions of the will). Koestler published over 20 books, including six novels, four autobiographies, four scientific works, and four collections of essays, as well as hundreds of articles published in the press.

Arthur Koestler is considered one of the most important authors of the twentieth century, and he wrote on political, scientific, philosophical, and historical themes. His early books, which won him world fame, focused on the totalitarian experience. By the end of the century his name appears to have been largely forgotten, partly due to the end of the Cold War, but during the first half of the century he was considered one of the most important critics of the Soviet Union. His book Darkness at Noon (1941) has been called one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century.² Anne Appelbaum said that Darkness at Noon was one of the books that helped turn the tide on the intellectual front line and ensured that the West prevailed during the Cold War.³

During the show trials held in Moscow in the 1930s, many Communist leaders confessed crimes against the Soviet Union by joining and assisting anti- Communist powers. Intellectuals all over the world, some of whom had been attracted to Communism, were astonished by these confessions, and many believed that they were obtained by force. Koestler’s main contribution to the public debate over these trials lay in his ability to explain the inner logic behind these confessions, which in reality probably were not taken by force. In Darkness at Noon (1941), Koestler explained the confessions as an act of loyalty to the party and its will. These Communist leaders, headed by Nikolay Bukharin, were requested to confess for crimes they had not committed, and they agreed to do so as their last act of service to the party. In the novel, Koestler described the detention of Robashov, one of the party’s main leaders, who decided to confess in order to protect the revolutionary idea and to offer service to party with his execution.

The book was published during a period in which the Soviet Union was a closed state, and much of the information about the country came through the propaganda mechanisms of Communist parties all over the world that maintained contacts with the Comintern. During his Communist period, Koestler was one of the party’s main propaganda agents in Europe. He visited the Soviet Union during the 1930s and he was in contact with Soviet intellectuals. In 1938, however, he resigned from his membership of the party. When he published his book, he was able to bring another level of understanding to the totalitarian mechanisms that were labeled as “progressive.” His genius lay in his ability to present in a creative way the power of the party to maneuver its most committed supporters to confess treason and to volunteer to be executed as a service to a goal – a type of modern martyrdom. The head of the party wished the death of his political rivals, and they – out of commitment to obey the party’s orders – agreed to offer their head to the executioner, just as any believer might offer his head to the executioner if he received a direct order from God. Koestler described loyalty to the party as a religious commitment, and indeed during the Cold War several Western intellectuals identified Communism as a secular religion (as mentioned in the introduction).

Koestler wrote on politics for two decades after he left the Communist Party before later moving on to other subjects. Ben Redman described his political writing as a continuing dialogue with his biography, a description of his conscience on different historical moments, and a description of how the revolutionary utopia had turned into a totalitarian tyranny. In his books, Koestler expressed nostalgia for a faith that was lost, deep pride in his revolutionary past, and an expectation of a new political path.⁴

Koestler analyzed the psychology of the totalitarian ideology in further books such as The Yogi and the Commissar (1945), The God That Failed (1949), and The Trail of the Dinosaur (1955). All these books were described by Michael Scammell as major contributions to an understanding of the political thought of our times.⁵ His two books on Zionism, Thieves at Night (1946) and Promise and Fulfillment (1949), were considered major works for understanding the success of the Zionist enterprise. Although these books may seem outdated today, in these books he was able to convey sensitively the complexities of the Zionist activities while looking deeply into the unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict. Near his death, Koestler published The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), in which he developed a thesis regarding the Khazar origins of most European Jews. This book contradicted his previous support for Zionism.

Since Koestler’s main contribution to the intellectual discourse of the twentieth century stemmed from his personal experiences as a disillusioned Communist who stood before the executioner but was able to survive, in this chapter I will try to examine his entrance and exit from Communism as an expression of conversion and prophetic failure. In order to review Koestler’s narrative, as presented in his own very detailed autobiographical work, the research uses psychological theories on what happens when prophecy fails, and the influence of disillusionment on exit.

Arrow in the blue

Koestler was a great admirer of Sigmund Freud, and perhaps because of this he has left us with a detailed narrative of his innermost emotions and intentions.⁶ He explained at length the way he was converted into the Communist faith, employing religious language to describe his attraction to that ideology. Later he became disillusioned, again providing a detailed description of the psychological path that led him to resign from the party.

Koestler began to publish his memoirs in 1949 in an article in the collection The God That Failed. He later published his autobiography during 1952–1953. These materials were written some ten years after the events he described, and it is important to take this gap into account. As psychological research has shown, personal narratives based on memory can be smoothed in order to make sense and to form a logical course of events; accordingly, scholars who study personal narratives must be cautious.⁷ Nevertheless, one cannot write 1,100 pages of autobiography without having a strong memory, quite possibly refreshed on the basis of diaries and notes he kept from the period; accordingly, I am inclined to believe that Koestler’s accounts of his feelings and emotions are reliable. Koestler’s personal history is well-known; it has been the subject of several biographies, and I crosschecked some of the facts he mentions in his autobiographies in several different biographies written by independent authors.

So far, research on prophetic believers has centered mainly on those who are able to survive the failure of prophecy with their faith intact. Much less research attention has been paid to those who decide to exit after confronting disillusionment. It is true that in many cases, faith remains when prophecy fails, and it is interesting to examine the ways in which believers confront failure while remaining loyal to their beliefs. Koestler struggled to remain a loyal Communist, but eventually he could not carry his faith anymore. In this chapter, therefore, I will seek to explore the circumstances in which Arthur Koestler found himself unable to maintain his faith.

Prophetic failure

Political messianism is a term that comes to define totalitarian ideologies in the twentieth century. Arthur Koestler described his attachment to communism in prophetic and messianic language, thus the description of secular religions fits him well. Although Communism is an atheist movement, many of its most fervent followers saw themselves as participants in a utopian social experiment that would lead to messianic times. However, people who are engaged in prophetic beliefs may fall into a crisis of faith when their prophecies fail to materialize. A similar case happened to Koestler.

The subject of prophetic failure is critical to our understanding of the development of any messianic faith. The most quoted study in this field is When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World,⁸ which examined the small UFO cult led by “Marion Keech” (an alias) that believed in an imminent apocalypse and later developed a cognitive mechanism to explain why this event did not occur. Festinger’s team reached two main conclusions. First, beliefs that are clearly falsified will be held even more intensely after falsification; and second, the group will increase its active proselytization efforts after prophetic failure. The team used the term “cognitive dissonance” to refer to the distress caused when two contradictory ideas, or cognitions, are held simultaneously. In the case of a messianic or millennial individual or group, cognitive dissonance is said to occur when a fervently held belief appears to be contradicted by empirical evidence. The cognitive dissonance theory argues that those involved will be strongly motivated to resolve the tension between the contradictory ideas.

According to this theory, the process proceeds as follows. The emerging gap between expectation and experience generates cognitive tension. This dissonance creates discomfort in the believer, thus creating pressure to reduce this discomfort. Individuals must then either change their beliefs, opinions, or behavior, secure new information that mitigates the dissonance, or forget or belittle the importance of the information that produced the internal contradiction. In order to succeed in this, the believer must receive support from either his psychological or his social environment. Without such support, the chances are that the effort to moderate the dissonance will prove unsuccessful.⁹

The cognitive dissonance theory became very dominant; Ralph W. Hood, a specialist in the psychology of religion, suggests that over 1,000 follow-up studies in university laboratories confirmed the theory.¹⁰ However, the study of prophetic movements has developed considerably since Festinger et al. published their book, and today there is a more comprehensive and mu...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Moving away from Communism: the case of Arthur Koestler
• 2 “Is it good for the Jews?” The conversion of Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, from the New Left to neoconservativism
• 3 From anti-Zionist Orthodoxy to messianic Religious Zionist: the case of Yissachar Shlomo Teichtel
• 4 From spiritual conversion to ideological conversion: the quest of Ruth Ben-David
• 5 The “deconversion” of Haim Herman Cohn: a model of secular religion
• 6 Avraham (Avrum) Burg between Religious Zionism and post-Zionism
• Concluding remarks
• Bibliography
• Index