chapter 2 The Jewish Marxist Intelligentsia

The presence of Jewish intellectuals on the left in Eastern and Central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century cannot be explained by the sum of individual trajectories; it should rather be studied as a large-scale tendency affecting a social group and a generation as a whole. Of course, significant differences sep- arated the Jewish intellectuals of the Tsarist Empire from those of Germany or Austria, but their political radicalisation was almost simultaneous. A typolo- gical and sociological analysis of the Jewish Marxist intelligentsia in these cul- tural and geopolitical areas – the Kaiserreich and two multinational empires – must take into consideration the differences as much as the similarities. The relationship between the Jews and Marxism can be interpreted through Yuri Slezkine’s metaphor of the Jews as a minority of Mercurians (foreign and mobile, producers of concepts) in a world of Apollonians (indigenous, sedent- ary, producers of gods).1 The more radical the opposition between them was, the more the Jews transcended ethnic identities towards cosmopolitanism: this was the path followed by the Jewish intellectuals of Central Europe and the assimilated Jews of the Russian Empire, bearers of a post-national, universal- ist Marxism. In the Pale of Settlement, where the latter appeared as a current of thought carried on by a Mercurian elite organically connected to an Apol- lonian society – the shtetl – Marxism took a national form, becoming a sort of Judeo-Marxism.

1 Central Europe

Jewish socialists were especially numerous in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest. They represented about 10 percent of the German socialist movement, accord- ing to Eduard Bernstein’s estimate.2 In his classic 1911 study on the sociology of political parties, Roberto Michels had already underlined the ‘particularly significant presence of Jews among the revolutionary and socialist leaders’, estimating that 20 to 30 percent of Jewish intellectuals were Social Demo- crats.3 Differently from the so-called ‘Austro-Marxists’ of Vienna, who kept a

1 Slezkine 2006, ch. 1. 2 Bernstein 1921. 3 Michels 1957, pp. 250–5.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004384767_004 30 chapter 2 substantial continuity until the end of the 1930s, in Germany and Hungary they experienced a radical break as a consequence of the Great War and the follow- ing revolutionary upheavals – the Berlin insurrection of January 1919, and the Bavarian and Hungarian socialist republics of 1919–20 – in which they played a leading role. After the First World War, the Jews joined in large numbers the communist parties of Central Europe. In pre-war German social democracy, the Jews belonged to all political cur- rents: they were representatives of the Kautskyan centre, which in 1917 cre- ated the USPD (Oskar Cohn, Hugo Haase, Josef Herzfeld, Kurt Rosenfeld, and Emmanuel Wurm) and the principal spokespersons of the revisionist current (Eduard Bernstein, Josef Bloch). In Vienna, they formed the leadership of the socialist party and nearly all the theoreticians of Austro-Marxism (with the remarkable exception of Karl Renner): Victor Adler, the founder of the party; his son, Friedrich Adler, future secretary of the Second International; Friedrich Austerlitz, the director of Arbeiterzeitung; Robert Danneberg, one of the cre- ators of the urban project of ‘Red Vienna;’ and finally, Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hil- ferding, and Max Adler, three towering figures of Marxist thought of their time. Among the principal leaders of the Bavarian revolution were Kurt Eisner, head of the first government after the fall of the Kaiser, and the founders of the Soviet Republic of April–May 1919: Eugene Leviné, Eric Mühsam, Ernst Toller (head of the army), and Gustav Landauer (people’s commissar for culture). In the gov- ernment of the contemporaneous Hungarian Soviet Republic, eighteen out of twenty-nine people’s commissars were Jewish. Intellectuals formed the lead- ership of the revolution, and the Jews were the great majority amongst them (between 70 and 95 percent, according to several scholars):4 Béla Kun, the cha- rismatic leader of the revolution, Josef Revai, and Matias Rakosi, without for- getting the philosopher and literary critic György Lukács, people’s commissar for culture. The leaders of the German Spartakist movement were also Jewish (Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, Karl Radek, Paul Frölich, Rosi Wolfstein), as were the leaders of the communist party (KPD) that emerged from the 1920 Halle congress, in which the Spartakus group merged with the USPD (Paul Levi, August Thalheimer), and the two intellectuals who took the head of the party after the defeat of the insurrectionary attempt of 1923 (Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow). It could be added that toward the end of the 1920s, Jewish Communists were very numerous inside the anti-Stalinist opposition, which, in Germany, rejected the suicidal concept of ‘social fascism’ and fought for a

4 Cf. Deak 1968, p. 138. Ezra Mendelsohn has pointed out that throughout Central Europe ‘the most Jewish’ Marxism was found in Hungary; see Mendelsohn 1983, p. 96.