Another zionism: Hugo Bergmann's circumscription of spiritual territory

Journal of Contemporary History

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 87-108

  Spector, Scott ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

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EID: 33748626143     PISSN: 00220094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/002200949903400105     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. The now less common term 'spiritual Zionism' was (significantly) used virtually interchangeably with 'cultural Zionism'. Several important references have been made to the Bar Kochba association as exemplary of a certain spiritualist tendency among Central European Zionist youth at the turn of the century, focusing especially on the influence of Martin Buber. Most important is G. Mosse, 'The Influence of the Volkish Idea on German Jewry', Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a 'Third Force' in Pre-Nazi Germany (New York 1970), 77-115
2. Cf. idem, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Cincinnati 1985), 37-41. In this later volume Mosse mentions in passing the unique Zionism of Prague Jews Hugo Bergmann, Hans Kohn and others as 'a part of Zionist history which demands to be written', see 77
3. See also Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit 1991), 83-5
4. Quoted in Pavel Eisner, Franz Kafka and Prague (New York 1950), 92
5. Hans Tramer, 'Prague - City of Three Peoples', Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 9 (1964), 305
6. Compare more detailed material in Gary B. Cohen, 'Jews in German Society: Prague, 1860-1914', Central European History, 10 (March 1977), 28-54
7. Emancipation had begun in the 1840s, and by 1852 the ghetto (Judenstadt) was dismantled and the Jews were equal under law. See Ruth Kestenberg-Gladstein, Neuere Gescbicbte der Juden in den böbmiscben Ländern, vol. 2 (Tubingen 1969)
8. I use the term which was used in contemporary texts, although the policies of the Habsburg 'German liberalism' are clearly distinct from other varieties. For the purposes of this article, we may summarize the ideology at the turn of the century as a cluster of 'democratic' principles aimed at dismantling privilege by birth and encouraging free enterprise, all under the banner of an extreme German chauvinist paternalism. The painful contradiction was glossed over by an almost religious devotion to the idea of 'culture', a discourse designed to exclude national 'minorities' which naturally outnumbered German speakers in their own provinces and in the Empire at large. The best treatment of Austro-German liberalism, providing an antidote to the misconception that its political impact was marginal or even brief, is Pieter M. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848-1914 (Ann Arbor, MI 1996)
9. The most thorough discussion of the social and political dimensions of this situation is found in the pathbreaking work of Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914 (Princeton 1981)
10. Max Brod, Der Prager Kreis (Stuttgart 1966)
11. 'Ahmat Ha-Babushka' ['The Guilt of the Babushka'], Politika, 5-6 (February-March 1986), 44-5
12. and 'Al Galut V-Sifrut' ['On Exile and Literature'], Igra, 2 (1989), 67-70
13. Quoted in Hannan Hever, 'Hebrew in an Israeli Arab Hand: Six Miniatures on Anton Shammas's Arabesques', Cultural Critique, 7 (Fall 1987), 49
14. Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902-1924 (New York 1958), 337. All translations where an English edition is not cited are mine
15. Franz Kafka, diary entry, 8 January 1914, Tagebücber in der Fassung der Handscbrift, eds Hans-Gerd Koch et al. (New York 1990), 622
16. Founded in 1893 with the name Maccabäa, the organization went through several changes of name and charter before adopting the name Bar Kochba and an openly Zionist line in 1899. For more detail on the origins and development of the association, see Stuart Borman, The Prague Student Zionist Movement, 1896-1914, doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago 1972
17. The date of the founding of Maccabäa corresponds to the year that German volkish-minded students broke off from the Halle to form the anti-liberal and antisemitic competitor Germania. It is interesting to note that at the turn of the century, both Germania and Bar Kochba memberships consisted by and large of students from outside Prague. This supports the thesis that the Prague 'island' was out of step with ideology in the Bohemian and Moravian periphery. The Jewishnational association was founded by Russians studying in Prague, and the students responsible for the adoption of a Zionist line were Czech-speaking Prague 'transplants'. See Hillel Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewisb Society in Bobemia, 1870-1918 (New York and Oxford 1988), 93-8
18. Felix Weltsch speaks significantly of their 'distinctive - though perhaps not a leading - role in the Zionist movement'. 'Realism and Romanticism: Observations on the Jewish Intelligentsia of Bohemia and Moravia, in: The jews of Czechoslovakia. Historical Studies and Surveys, vol. 2 (Philadelphia 1971), 440. George Mosse calls the Prague Bar Kochba 'a germinal group in the intellectual history of modern Judaism', implicitly recognizing that their somewhat idiosyncratic position was in another way paradigmatic. See G. Mosse, 'The Influence of the Volkish Idea', op. cit., 82
19. Zirkular (Newsletter of the Iggud Vatikei Bar Kochba [Association of Former Members of Bar Kochba], Tel Aviv), April 1967, 4
20. The term is most often associated with Martin Buber. Giuliano Baioni puts this 'cultural Zionism' at the centre of his description of Kafka's context; see Baioni, Kafka: letteratura ed ebraismo, 3-36
21. 'The efforts of the Zionists to achieve here what is already reality in the East - the creation of Jewish cultural circles [Kulturkreise] - are still in their beginnings', Iwri [Hugo Bergmann], 'Das Babel der Kleinvölker. Prager Brief, Jüdische Zeitung (Vienna), 13 December 1907
22. 'Über die Bedeutung des Hebräischen für die jüdischen Studenten', Unsere Hoffnung (Vienna), vol. 1, no. 3 (June 1904), 85
23. Hugo Bergmann, 'Religiöser Zionismus', Europäiscbe Revue, vol. 1, no. 12, 370-3
24. Theodor Herzl, 'Die Jagd in Böhmen', Die Welt, 5 November 1897
25. See Borman, Prague Student Zionist Movement, op. cit., 55-75
26. According to Hugo Brauner, 'Zur Geschichte der Verbindung', Füfzig Semester 'Barissia' (Prague 1928)
27. quoted in Kieval, Making of Czech Jewry, op. cit., chap. 4, note 95
28. Jonathan Frankel identifies Gegenwartsarbeit as 'revolution in the diaspora', J. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jeivs, 1862-1917, 281; also, 319-21
29. Bergmann, 'Grösserer Zionismus', in Jawne und Jerusalem. Gesammelte Aufsätze (Berlin 1919, reprint Koenigstein/Ts. 1981 [hereafter JJ]), 7
30. See Max Brod, Streitbares Leben 1884-1968 (Munich 1960), 67
31. See Grete Schaeder (ed.), Martin Buber: Briefwecbsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten (Heidelberg 1972). The complete Buber correspondence is found in the Martin Buber Archives, Manuscript Department of the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem (MS Var 350)
32. Martin Buber, Drei Reden über das Judentum (Frankfurt/Main 1916), 7
33. The first edition was printed in 1911. In spite of the impact which contemporaries insisted the addresses had on this generation of Central European Jews, Buber scholars and others have given them much less attentive readings than, for instance, his later philosophical work, his retelling of Hasidic narratives, or his bible work. See e.g. Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (Chicago 1955), 31-3
34. cf. idem, Martin Buber and the Eternal (New York 1986)
35. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Steven Kepnes, The Text as Thou: Martin Buber's Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology (Bloomington, IN 1992)
36. Buber, Drei Reden, op. cit., 15
37. Hugo Bergmann, 'Die Heiligung des Namens' in Verein Jüdischer Hochschüler Bar Kochba in Prag (ed.), Vom Judentum: Ein Sammelbuch (Leipzig 1913), 33
38. Letter from Hugo Bergmann to Martin Buber, 2 May 1913. Martin Buber: Briefwechsel aus Sieben Jahrsehnten, op. cit., 329-30
39. This strategy of the Jewish bourgeois is analogous to the segregation strategy which Georg Lukács identified in fin-de-siècle aestheticism: he related the strict, narrow, 'ascetic' life of the bourgeois to the programme 'l'art pour l'art' and the attempt to create an unpolluted aesthetic sphere. See the 1909 essay on Theodor Storm in Die Seele und die Formen. Essays (Berlin 1911), reprint Neuwied and Berlin 1971, 82-116
40. See Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (New York 1981), 112-24
41. The original Hebrew essay which Bergmann used appeared in Ha-Shiloah, 13 (1904). The German translation in the same year appearing in Ost und West suffers unfortunately from abridgement. An unabridged translation into English appears in Leon Simon (ed.), Ahad Ha-am, Essays - Letters - Memoirs (Oxford 1946), in the East and West Library's Philosophica Judaica series edited by Hugo Bergmann. Another complete translation was published in Leon Simon (ed.), Selected Essays by Ahad Ha-am (Philadelphia 1936)
42. Hugo Bergmann, Worte Mosis (Minden, Westphalia 1913)
43. Bergmann was more explicit about the contemporary analogy in the essay 'Pessach und die Menschen unserer Zeit', JJ, 75-80. The essay is dated 1913 and probably derives from his lecture 'Moses und die Gegenwart. While it is tempting to compare Martin Buber's study of Moses with those by Ahad Ha'am and Bergmann, Buber's Moses was written much later, completed in 1944, and self-consciously genealogizes itself within a tradition of biblical scholarship rather than these polemic pieces he knew well. See Buber, Moses (Heidelberg 1952). A popular survey of the changing representations of the figure of Moses is offered by Daniel Jeremy Silver, Images of Moses (New York 1982)
44. Joshua Eisenstadt Barzilai quoted in Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley/Los Angeles 1993), 42. Thus the Zionist 'fraternal society' formed with Ahad Ha'am in 1889 was named 'Benei Moshe'
45. Bergmann, Worte Mosis, op. cit., 3
46. Kafka, Tagebücher, op. cit., 17 December 1913, 616
47. Amos Oz, In the Land of Israel, trans. by Maurice Goldberg-Bartura (London 1983), 121-2