Cosmopolitan Jews Vs. Jewish Nomads

Sander L. Gilman Aliens vs. Predators: Cosmopolitan Jews vs. Jewish Nomads The history of cosmopolitanism from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century focused on the double strand of a positive or a negative image of mobility.¹ The Jews were the litmus test for this in German-speaking Central Europe: were they “aliens,” a beneficent or at least malleable population because they were mobile, or were they “predators,” a threat to established or evolving national identity because of their mobility. This discourse, with all the ambiguities on both sides of the issue, finds expression in the idea of a cosmopolitan versus a nomadic people. The Jews, from the Old Testament to the present, figure as the exemplary cases for each position. From the Baroque concept of the Jew as the original Gypsy to the Enlight- enment discourse about the movement of peoples, and throughout the debates within Zionism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about the rootedness of the Jew, the antithetical idea of the movement of the Jews as an indicator of potential integration or isolation from the national state remains a factor in defin- ing the cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism and its sister concept nomadism repeatedly acquire differ- ent meanings when their referent is the Jews. Applying this litmus test reveals that both cosmopolitanism and nomadism are symbolic manifestations of the antisemitic stereotype that associates Jews with capital. This history of the term “cosmopolitan” points to the ambivalence of these concepts when applied in the present to specific categories of social and geographic mobility, whether in reference to the Jew, the asylum seeker, the migrant, or the undocumented immigrant. The marginal and excluded people of Enlightenment Germany may have trans- muted into the global citizens of the twenty-first century in some instances, but the aura of the corrupt and corrupting, of the rootless and the transitory, of the foreign and the unhoused always remains beneath the surface and shapes what it means to be cosmopolitan and global. As such, it influences the self-image of those so defined. The term “globalization” and its surrogate cosmopolitanism imply a universalist claim that all human beings share certain innate human rights, including the free movement of peoples across what are seen as the superficial boundaries of nation, class, race, caste, and, perhaps, even gender and sexuality (Brennan 1 See, for example, Beck and Sznaider (2006a and 2006b). Recently, David Nirenberg (2013) has raised the question of the projection of such spectral qualities onto the stereotype of the Jew. DOI 10.1515/9783110367195-005, © 2018 Sander L. Gilman, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. 60 Sander L. Gilman 1997). The tension between the universal and local meanings of cosmopolitanism, however, originally arose in the Enlightenment, as did the common use of the term itself. Standard etymologies in various European languages note that it is a Greek term, its modern use having been borrowed from the French into English as early as the sixteenth century by the necromancer John Dee to denote a person who is “A Citizen […] of the […] one Mysticall City Vniuersall” (Dee 1577, 54). It became common usage in English, however, only in the early nineteenth century. The German language introduced the term Weltbürger (world citizen) in the early sixteenth century to provide an alternative to the French cosmopolitisme and cosmopolite. The French Academy documents cosmopolitisme in its dic- tionary of 1762, but that is the first “official” recognition of a much older usage. The earlier German usages, similar to those in English, are sporadic. Erasmus, it seems, was the first to use it in the early sixteenth century in a letter to Zwingli, referring to Socrates who, when asked of what city he was a citizen, replied that he was a “Weltbürger (κοσμοπολίτην sive mundanum)” (“Mitteilungen: Welt- bürger” 1926, 13). The term came into wider use in German during the Enlighten- ment, thus earlier than in English. Apparently, Jakob Friedrich Lamprecht popu- larized the term in German with his periodical entitled Der Weltbürger (1741–42). G. E. Lessing used the term cosmopolitan (rather than Weltbürger) in 1747, and a wide range of Enlightenment figures quickly followed suit. In all of these cases, the status of the Jews functioned as the litmus test for the cosmopolitan in the German Enlightenment. Addressing the National Assembly during the French Revolution, one of the major Enlightenment thinkers, the Abbé Grégoire, attacked the facile use of a universal claim of cosmopolitanism: A writer of the last century (Fénelon) said: “I love my family better than myself: I love my country better than my family but I love mankind better than my country.” Reason has criti- cized both those extravagant people who talked about a universal republic and those false people who made a profession out of loving people who lived at a distance of two thousand years or two thousand leagues in order to avoid being just and good towards their neigh- bors: systematic, de facto cosmopolitanism is nothing but moral or physical vagabondage (Lallement 1823, [1821] 15: 231). Applying the idea locally, the Abbé was a powerful advocate for the universal emancipation of French Jewry as French citizens, a status that trumped their specifically Jewish identity (Berkovitz 2004, 152). For the Enlightenment, and it is with the Enlightenment that this tale begins, the Jews in Paris, not in the distant past nor in faraway Palestine, are the litmus test for true French cosmopolitanism. Anything else is merely “vagabondage,” moral or physical nomadism. Atten- tion to the immediate and the proximate defined true cosmopolitanism, a topic Aliens vs. Predators: Cosmopolitan Jews vs. Jewish Nomads 61 much debated at the time. It is immediately contrasted, however, with the merely nomadic. The first major German literary advocate of cosmopolitanism was Christoph Martin Wieland, who devoted several essays to cosmopolitanism in the 1780s. In his most famous, “The Secret of Cosmopolitan Order,” in 1788, he declared: “Cosmopolitans […] regard all the peoples of the earth as so many branches of a single family, and the universe as a state, of which they, with innumerable other rational beings, are citizens, promoting together under the general laws of nature the perfection of the whole, while each in his own fashion is busy with his own well-being” (Wieland 1853–1858, 30: 422). Wieland, similar to the philosophes, sees this as a transcendental category, trumping the local. He himself was paraphrasing Friedrich II’s oft-cited note of June 1740 concerning Huguenot and Catholic toleration, but not emancipation: “Each should be blessed in their own manner” (“Jeder soll nach seiner Façon selig werden”), a tolerance grudgingly extended in 1750 to Prussian Jewry.² Wieland’s own Enlightenment views on the Jews are clear: he mocks, in his Private History of Pereginus Proteus (1781), the pagan whose grandfather “had a boundless aver- sion for Jews and Judaism; his prejudices against them, were, perhaps, partly unjust, but they were incurable”; yet he equally detested Christians, who “[…] passed for a Jewish sect” (Wieland 1796, 2: 32). Enlightenment thought gener- ally promoted a rooted cosmopolitanism, a universalist sensibility rooted in the nation. It rejected religious affiliation, particularly that of the Jews, because of its particularity. Wieland’s cosmopolitanism thus contests the religious exclusivity of both Christians and Jews over the universal. Jewish cosmopolitanism is negative when it is defined in terms of capital; when it is uncontested, any discussion of capital is avoided. Indeed, any discussion about some type of unitary definition of Jewish cosmopolitanism necessarily hangs on the very meaning associated with capital and its function within the new nation state. The stereotype of the Jews is that of a people or nation or race driven solely by their own economic motivation. It is Shylock’s curse that the his- torian Derek Penslar (2001) so elegantly presents as a core reference for Jewish identity in modernity. The Jews as an abstraction and as a social reality come to be the litmus test in the Enlightenment for analyzing these notions’ potential and difficulties (Gilman 2006). Examining cosmopolitanism under this lens yields a double focus: first, the role that the abstraction “the Jews” played in formulating theories of the accept- 2 In fact, he wrote “Die Religionen Müsen alle Tolleriret werden und Mus der fiscal nuhr das auge darauf haben, das keine der andern abruch Tuhe, den hier mus ein jeder nach Seiner Fas- son Selich werden!” Cited by Raab (1966, 194). 62 Sander L. Gilman ability of, or dangers, in the movement of peoples beyond and across national boundaries and, second, the response of individual self-defined Jews to such atti- tudes and meanings. These contradictions are a forerunner of what the British scholar of geography, Ulrike Vieten (2012, 7), calls the “novel form of regional cosmopolitanism [that] is underway in Europe.” Its historical roots, however, go deeper. As the meanings of these concepts (cosmopolitanism, boundary, Jews, and capital) shift and evolve, so, too, do the responses of those generating them and testing their applicability to the changing circumstances. In order to examine the debates about the Jews as the touchstone of cosmopolitanism in the Enlightenment, and specifically within the German-language Enlightenment, we must distinguish between two conflicting definitions of the Jews. According to the first, the Jews are a people who ascribe to a particular religious belief and practice and who are, at least potentially, able freely to follow their beliefs in the new, enlightened world of the European nation-state. Accord- ing to the second, the Jews are the concrete manifestation of the exploitative force of capital, whose rise parallels the very establishment of such states, at least in the eyes of these commentators.

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