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May 13, 2005
Three very influential thinkers
Being Jewish helped Einstein, Marx and Freud to develop their
theories.
EUGENE KAELLIS
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Albert Einstein.
He, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx were the three most influential
thinkers of the past 150 years. All were German/Austrian Jews. Is
this a mere coincidence?
As 19th-century Western Europe permitted greater expression of pent-up
Jewish abilities, the aristocracy, resenting the rising middle class,
particularly newly rich Jews, viewed them with contempt; gentile
businessmen and professionals feared Jewish competitors; and many
workers hated Jewish entrepreneurs. Jews were thus victimized in
three ways: class hatred, traditional Christian anti-Judaism and
increasingly influential "scientific racism," based on
the rise of social Darwinism and the newly discovered science of
genetics, a mix that later achieved its most evil form in Nazism.
One "explanation" of outstanding Jewish accomplishment,
based on the very doubtful supposition that intelligence is inherited,
cites the many offspring of rabbis contrasted with the alleged childlessness
of Catholic priests and monks, who constituted almost the only learned
section of Christendom during most of its history. This questionable
advantage is unlikely to have survived a Reformation that permitted
marriage by Protestant clergy. More plausible is the attraction
for Jews of business and the learned professions that permitted
avoidance of the hostility of employers and fellow workers, and
allowed Sabbath and holiday observance.
Respect for learning was another factor. When most Europeans were
illiterate, Torah study required Hebrew literacy, which facilitated
international correspondence and contracts among Jewish traders.
Freed from ghettoization, Jews readily assimilated new ideas. Non-conformance
to the surrounding cultural-religious environment stimulated their
relatively early, and disproportionate, support for liberal and
revolutionary movements, such as social democracy and communism,
which supposedly offered alternatives to dogmatic religion, political
reaction and bigotry.
Perhaps the most important reason for Jews' developing original
thought and style was their centuries-long dissent. Even assimilated
secular Jews retained an attitude of cultural non-conformity, much
of it expressed in intellectual, literary and artistic innovation
and radical politics. Jews had been nay-saying for so long that,
when they were finally permitted to develop and express their intellectual
and cultural abilities, their originality was impressive –
in the case of German- speaking Jews, overwhelming.
True, political non-conformism among Jews – their prominence
in revolutionary movements and regimes – was based more on
opposition to the traditional association of bigotry with political
reaction, rather than on intrinsic cultural factors. Although the
Enlightenment saw Judaism as primitive and peculiar, it sometimes
permitted Jews who placed patriotic allegiance above religion to
enter society freely, as in Napoleon's arrangement with France's
Sanhedrin (court of Jewish law).
Perhaps the most important and obscure factor in explaining Einstein,
Freud and Marx lies in the 19th-century obsession of both Germans
and Jews with defining their identity.
The German language was used by the cultured and academic in eastern
and southeastern Europe. But even ordinary people, ranging from
Transylvania in the east to beyond the Rhine in the west, from Schleswig-Holstein
in the north to the Tyrols in the south, spoke German as their first
or second language. Moreover, Germany's development as a nation-state
was significantly delayed. Even after German unification in 1871,
the distribution of the German language and culture did not correspond
to Germany's boundaries. Nourished by a strong university system,
all this created an identity problem and a political culture based
on the dangerous mystical concept of volk (peoplehood) and an accompanying
preoccupation with who Germans were not (conveniently and traditionally,
Jews), forming the intellectual basis for highly dogmatic and wide-ranging
philosophical systems. For Jews, defining their identity (also in
terms of others) was and remains a challenge and a near obsession.
Marx, Freud and Einstein therefore received a "double dose"
of theorizing potential.
Theorizing often leads to dogmatism. In the case of Germany, this
became evident, catastrophically, during the Nazi period. Jews,
however, influenced by the talmudic method of questioning, their
own bitter experience with dogmatic Christianity and, most important,
their relative powerlessness, as a rule avoided absolutist thinking.
A tendency to theorizing is not the only basis for Jewish intellectual
creativity. Jews who try to imagine God may, like Moses, be baffled
since "He" is unknowable. Christians, on the other hand,
can "see" Jesus as he is depicted in art. The frustration
that arises from the unknowability of the Jewish God may be psychologically
disturbing, but it inclines thought to more abstract terms.
Even assimilated Jews usually remain more anxious about their surroundings
than members of the majority culture. They have been conditioned
to the "fight or flight" reaction, increasing their awareness
of what is going on, often keeping them better informed and more
reactive.
What may be a significant part of Jewish creative thinking is the
tradition of challenging even the Ultimate Authority: the chutzpah
of Abraham arguing with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah;
Jacob's wrestling with an angel of God, insisting that he be blessed;
and, more recently, the shtetl trials of God described by Elie Wiesel.
Other religions have nothing comparable.
One could conclude that sometimes a stiff neck is needed to support
a good head.
Dr. Eugene Kaellis is a retired academic living in New
Westminster.
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