Antisemitism and the Left

5 The Jewish question after the Holocaust: Jürgen Habermas and the European left I have, of course, long since abandoned my anti-Zionism, which was based on a confidence in the European labour movement, or, more broadly, in European society and civilisation, which that society and civilisation have not justified. If, instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine, I might have helped to save some of the lives that were later extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers. For the remnants of European Jewry – is it only for them? – the Jewish State has become an historic necessity. (Isaac Deutscher, The Reporter 1954)1 The Holocaust becomes a sort of university, an educational experience – a great learning experience, you might say – from which Jews were ethically obliged to have graduated with First Class Honours. But Israel, and those Jews who support Israel, are the overwhelming proof that they flunked their studies. … Thus are Jews doubly damned: to the Holocaust itself and to the moral wasteland of having found no humanising redemption in its horrors. (Howard Jacobson, When will Jews be Forgiven for the Holocaust?)2 After the Holocaust, European antisemitism did not simply vanish like a puff of smoke. On her return to Germany in 1950 Hannah Arendt wrote of the resentment some ‘ordinary Germans’ felt for being blamed for Auschwitz. It was as if the real culprits were Jews who exploited the Holocaust for their own benefit, made money out of their suffering, denied the right of Germans to express their own suffering, and accused the Germans of being uniquely evil in their treatment of others.3 In 1959 Theodor Adorno deployed the term ‘secondary antisemitism’ to conceptualise the opinion he found not uncommon within Germany that the Jewish people were culpable of exploiting German guilt over the Holocaust.4 It was not only in Germany that Jewish survivors met with indifference and hostility. Some survivors spoke of the reluctance of their fellow human beings to hear the story of their experiences; some told of the hostility they faced when they Robert Fine and Philip Spencer - 9781526104960 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 03:54:21AM via free access 94 Antisemitism and the left tried to return to their old homes; some told of the official restrictions imposed on them by Western governments.5 On the other side of the Iron Curtain, new regimes in Eastern Europe presented the nations they ruled as victims of National Socialism, not as perpetrators against Jews, and official antisemitic campaigns were planned and conducted in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries in the name of extirpating Zionism and cosmopolitanism.6 The historian Tony Judt summarised the issue very well when he commented that ‘what is truly awful about the destruction of the Jews is not that it mattered so much but that it mattered so little’.7 There were exceptions to this norm.8 The enactment of ‘crimes against humanity’ and two further founding documents of the postwar epoch, the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed in1948 within 24 hours of each other, were all informed by the common sense that human beings need protection from the violence of which the modern state has shown itself capable. These were very important innovations in International Criminal Law. They represented, as Karl Jaspers put it, the hint of a cosmopolitanism to come – ‘a feeble, ambiguous harbinger of a world order the need of which mankind is beginning to feel’.9 However, they were considerably margin- alised with the onset of the Cold War. In 1960–1961 consciousness of the destruction of the Jews took an arguably more national form in the trial of Adolf Eichmann and then with the re-conceptualisation of the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’ (the Nazi formulation) as the ‘Holocaust’ (a Greek word for a burnt sacrificial offering) or ‘Shoah’ (a Hebrew word for destruction or catastro- phe). In the 1980s, consciousness of the enormity of the event itself – and of German and European culpability – found public expression in narratives told in books, films and television series and in the spread of official apologies, commemoration sites, Holocaust museums and laws criminalising Holocaust denial.10 The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 drew some former satellite countries of the Soviet bloc into the orbit of Holocaust commemoration. The Holocaust, Shoah, Auschwitz – these names became universal references for radical evil and the barbarism of our age.11 The difficulties of understanding the wilful destruction of a whole people, addressed by the old generation of critical theorists under the immediate shadow of the Holocaust, also shaped the political thought of critical theory’s leading postwar representative, Jürgen Habermas. Habermas sought to face up to the legacy of genocidal antisemitism by addressing its connections with the rise of emphatically nationalistic forms of political community and by crafting a vision of postnational political community as the normative potential of our age. One of the markers of critical theory, as Habermas understood it, was to recognise that overcoming antisemitism lies at the centre of any worthwhile project of European reconstruction.12 Robert Fine and Philip Spencer - 9781526104960 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 03:54:21AM via free access The Jewish question after the Holocaust 95 Jürgen Habermas: antisemitism and the postnational project Habermas conceived the postnational constellation as a multi-layered global order, consisting of a reformed basis of solidarity within the nation state, the development of new transnational forms of political community such as the European Union beyond the nation state, and the enhancement of international laws and institutions regulating relations between states and guaranteeing human rights at the global level. The idea of the postnational constellation entailed a differentiated and multi-layered architectonic of legal and political forms, as well as a complex re-invigoration of cosmo-political ways of thinking and acting in the world. Habermas presented the postnational constellation both as a desirable idea for the future and as a contested but tangible social reality in the present. We see it as a response both to the top-down forms of state socialism advanced within orthodox Marxism, and to the populist principle that all political life must derive exclusively from below. The struggle to work through the experience of antisemitism was a vital element in this overall project. Habermas’ guiding intuition was that antisemitism was the product of emphatically nationalist forms of political community and that postnationalism could introduce a new political order in which the condi- tions that once gave rise to antisemitism would no longer exist. He emphasised the modernity of antisemitism, rooting it in the perverted forms of nationalism the modern age is prone to generate. The key issue, as Habermas saw it, is that the Volksnation, the nation of the people, was a modern democratic invention which crystallised into ‘an efficient mechanism for repudiating everything regarded as foreign, for devaluing other nations, and for excluding national, ethnic, and religious minorities, especially the Jews. In Europe, nationalism became allied with antisemitism, with disastrous consequences’.13 Habermas maintained that the historical strength of nationalism was due to its capacity to act as a binding power enabling individuals to coalesce around commonly shared symbols, and that the formation of the modern state was dependent on the development of a national consciousness to provide it with the cultural substrate for civil solidarity: ‘only a national consciousness crystallised around the notion of a common ancestry, language and history, only the consciousness of belonging to “the same” people, makes subjects into citizens of a single political community – into members who can feel responsible for one another’.14 For Habermas, the nation state is a Janus-faced phenomenon characterised above all by normative ambiguity: it did become the bearer of a regressive credo that unreflectively celebrates the history, destiny, culture or blood of a nation, but it could also be the bearer of a progressive and inclusive form of political consciousness, which Habermas called ‘constitutional patriotism’ and understood Robert Fine and Philip Spencer - 9781526104960 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 03:54:21AM via free access 96 Antisemitism and the left as a consciousness capable of inspiring rational loyalty on the part of citizens.15 Habermas maintained that some kind of national consciousness is needed to inculcate willingness on the part of citizens to do what is required of them for the common good, such as maintaining public services through taxation and accepting democratic decisions as legitimate, and that the virtue of constitutional patriotism is to perform these integrative functions in ways that do not exclude people deemed not worthy of belonging to the nation in question. Constitutional patriotism seemed to bridge the gap between shared attachment towards univer- salistic principles and the actualisation of these principles through particular national institutions. Habermas did not reject the national aspect but sought to render it benign through the harmonisation of the universal and the particular. Habermas’ concession to nationalism suggested by his conceptual approach

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