Leon Pinsker, a Russian Jewish doctor from Odessa, published in 1882 an anonymous pamphlet titled Autoemancipation! Mahnruf an seine Stammesgenossen von einem russischen Juden (Auto-Emancipation! An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew), which addressed the crisis of Russian Jewry following the 1881–1882 wave of anti-Jewish pogroms.Footnote 1 Autoemancipation! drew wide attention in the Jewish world, with reviews published by prominent figures across the continent. Even its critics tended to agree that the pamphlet powerfully conveyed the crisis of Russian Jewry and should therefore be addressed in earnest.Footnote 2 It was translated into various languages, including a widely circulated Yiddish version published in 1884 by Sh. Y. Abramovich (Mendele Mocher Sforim).Footnote 3 Within a few years, Autoemancipation! entered the canon of Jewish national thought. Both Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha-Am—a proponent of “cultural Zionism” and an adversary of Herzl—depicted Pinsker as an ideological precursor to their own worldviews.
A key element that distinguished Autoemancipation! from other Jewish nationalist publications of the period was its language. To be sure, Jews in Germany and Austro-Hungary had published previously on the Jewish “national question.” The most notable example was Moses Hess's 1862 Rom und Jerusalem: Die letzte Nationalit ätsfrage (Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question).Footnote 4 This book would attract notice in the late 1890s, when the Zionist movement under Herzl gained a central role in the Jewish political sphere. During these years, German served as a common language for Zionists and Jewish nationalists well beyond German-speaking areas. In 1882, however, this was not the case.
Pinsker's text transgressed the linguistic order of Jewish national debates, which were mostly held in Hebrew, Yiddish, or the respective state languages. More broadly, Autoemancipation! began a new chapter in the history of the German language in Jewish societies. Since the eighteenth century and the German-Jewish Enlightenment, German carried a series of political, religious, and ideological layers of significance in Jewish societies, rendering it a controversial marker of modernization, religious reform, and progressive political ideas. As such, German was also central to Eastern European proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah). Even as tendencies toward integration into Russian society in the 1860s strengthened, German remained a reference point for both proponents and opponents of the Haskalah. In order for Autoemancipation! to serve Pinsker's goal of communicating a call that would unify Jews and stir them to collective action, the text had to embody, as it were, the legitimacy of its language choice. While reflecting the Haskalah proclivity for the German language, Autoemancipation! marked a shift in Jewish political culture with respect to the potential function of the German language.
Before the publication of Autoemancipation!, Pinsker had been involved in Jewish politics as an editor and contributor to Russian-Jewish periodicals. During the 1870s he was a member of the Odessa branch of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia (OPE), which openly encouraged Jews to acquire the Russian language. Pinsker had not published a text on Jewish affairs in the German language before or after Autoemancipation! His choice to publish in German therefore derived directly from the kind of text he wanted to write, the type of readership he envisioned, and the echo that he hoped the publication would create.
In his writings, Pinsker did not share his reasons for writing the text in German, but scholars have identified two plausible ones. First, the main audience that Pinsker targeted was the assimilated and politically influential Jewry living in Germany and Austria.Footnote 5 In 1883, Pinsker wrote in a letter to the German rabbi Isaac Rülf that the only thing that could adequately address the challenges posed by the “Jewish question” would be action coming from Germany.Footnote 6 In a short note attached to the first copies of the pamphlet and sent to prominent Jewish leaders in Western Europe, Pinsker called on “men of influence” to promote a Jewish national revival.Footnote 7 A second explanation, also drawing on Pinsker's correspondence, concerns the fact that Russian censorship would likely have posed obstacles for a publication with a stark nationalist tone and indirect criticism of the Russian government.Footnote 8
Both explanations are convincing, yet this article examines the broader context and implications of Pinsker's language choice. It argues that Autoemancipation! was tightly bound up with the political landscape of nineteenth-century Europe: its terminology and rhetoric tapped into various Jewish and European political discourses of emancipation. Pinsker not only challenged the legal-political conception of emancipation as it had been used in German-Jewish discourse, but also mobilized its social and revolutionary connotations associated with radical European political movements since 1848. By examining the text, its reception, and its correspondence with contemporary political currents, this article looks at how German became a language of Jewish national activism across borders.
A short note about method: Pinsker left no autobiographical records, and only a segment of his correspondence from these years is still available.Footnote 9 Examining the political significance of Pinsker's language choice nonetheless opens up an array of questions that cultural and intellectual historians have addressed in recent decades. Scholars such as Peter Burke and Gabrielle Spiegel have investigated the historiographical challenge of viewing language as part of “the social dimensions of textual production,” drawing attention not only to a text's content, but also to matters of register, linguistic codes, and the medium through which a text is disseminated.Footnote 10
The social and political meaning of an author's language choice requires the historian to pay heed to what Roger Chartier calls the “specific mechanisms that distinguish various communities of readers and traditions of reading.”Footnote 11 This task is clearly relevant in the context of a society as multilingual as nineteenth-century European Jewry. Indeed, the decision on the language of publication often involved a desire to situate the text within that language's textual tradition, but it could also aim to shape or challenge that tradition. As we shall see, Autoemancipation!’s impact on Jewish politics of the early 1880s revolved to a large degree around its intervention in different German-language Jewish and European textual traditions.
Nineteenth-Century Politics and the Jewish Public Sphere
The second half of the nineteenth century evinced a rapid change of the conditions of political action. Evolving technologies of communication and transportation facilitated the movement of knowledge, ideas, and people across borders. Interest groups, both formal and informal, developed political strategies centering on public campaigns and the organization of international events and congresses, as well as clandestine networks of revolutionary activity. In an emerging “European public sphere” composed of public events, pamphlets, books, newspapers, and diplomatic channels, political groups and mass movements raised demands and argued for them, sought allies and attention, and propagated their views on contemporary social and political questions.Footnote 12
These developments had a direct impact on how religious and ethnic minority groups, such as the Jewish minority, promoted their various causes. Indeed, according to recent studies, the nineteenth century witnessed a structural shift in Jewish politics. Traditionally, wealthy and influential Jewish individuals lobbied the monarch or his advisors on behalf of Jewish communities. Aspects of this form of political praxis (Shtadlanut, “intercession”) continued in the nineteenth century. Yet, at the same time, a new form of politics evolved, namely, organized appeal to political authorities and public opinion at the state, European, and global levels.Footnote 13
An important moment in this process was the Damascus Affair of 1840, when Jewish community leaders, notables, and organizations from various parts of Europe appealed to European governments and public opinion in an attempt to protect Jews in Damascus and Rhodes who were being persecuted in a blood libel case.Footnote 14 The affair was reported widely across the continent and helped consolidate channels of information exchange and cooperation, which continued to operate in the following decades. In the 1860s and 1870s, Jewish international organizations such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Anglo-Jewish Association were established, forming networks of activism that operated through diplomatic channels, public meetings, and the publication of reports and articles in the press.Footnote 15 Eastern European proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment (Maskilim) often used the new platforms to advocate social and political reforms in Jewish societies.Footnote 16
Starting in the 1840s, Jewish newspapers had grown in number and circulation, assuming an increasingly key role in Jewish societies and cultures. Jewish newspapers offered their readers reports from Jewish communities across the world.Footnote 17 For instance, the popular Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, a self-proclaimed “nonpartisan publication for all Jewish interests” established by the German rabbi Ludwig Philippson in 1837, appeared three times a week and devoted one of its sections to reports and commentary on Jewish affairs in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States. This practice was common to most major Jewish newspapers of the period. Reflecting religious, ideological, and linguistic divisions, the Jewish press expanded considerably after mid-century and became the chief platform of the Jewish public sphere.
In the 1860 and 1870s, the Jewish question gained a steady place in the European and Jewish public spheres, with different international organizations and campaigns advocating the legal rights of Jews and their protection from violence.Footnote 18 In June 1878, in the aftermath of the Russo-Ottoman War, the Congress of Berlin convened to resolve border disputes and address the claims of Balkan national movements. Following intensive diplomatic work between the head of the congress, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, German-Jewish banker Gerson von Bleichröder, and several Jewish organizations, the Congress agreed on a series of decisions and clauses asserting that the independence of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania would depend inter alia upon the granting of civic rights to their respective Jewish populations.Footnote 19
Jews in Europe received the results of the Congress with satisfaction and hope. The subsequent implementation of these agreements was partial at best, though their consequences were far-reaching. They gave a boost to Jewish nationalists, who argued openly for Jewish national self-determination and minority rights in line with the principles declared at the diplomatic gathering in Berlin.Footnote 20 Moreover, the Congress was a tour-de-force of German-Jewish diplomacy and a successful example of how Western European models of Jewish emancipation could—with the active involvement of German and German-Jewish figures—be introduced to Eastern European countries.Footnote 21
Beyond the Jewish perspective, the Congress consolidated Germany's role as a key European power and stabilizing force in international affairs. As A. J. P. Taylor put it, “The Congress of Berlin marked an epoch in where it met, not in what it did.… [It] demonstrated that a new Balance of Power, centered on Germany, had come into existence.”Footnote 22 The Congress also marked a disruption in the supremacy of French as the language of diplomacy, as Benjamin Disraeli chose to give his speech in English. By the end of the 1870s, Germany seemed to be the chief global power that could serve the Jewish cause and curb the policies of the Russian tsar. At the same time, it was also clear, in light of the continuously difficult situation of Eastern European Jews, that the work of statesmen could not alone guarantee Jewish minorities equality and security. The pogroms in Russia's southwestern provinces during 1881–1882 rendered the Jewish question even more acute.
Pinsker and Autoemancipation!
A son of Simcha Pinsker, a prominent Hebrew Maskil and writer, Leon Pinsker belonged to a limited group of Russian Jews who were not a product of traditional Jewish schooling. He spoke neither Hebrew nor Yiddish and was one of the first Jews to study at a Russian university. Pinsker was five years old in 1826, when his family moved from Galicia to Odessa. Pinsker received advanced medical training in Germany in 1848–1849; he subsequently practiced as a doctor in Odessa and volunteered to serve in the Russian army as a doctor during the Crimean War. He wrote occasionally (and often anonymously) on Jewish affairs for the Russian–Jewish press, arguing for the acculturation of Jews into Russian society. As Dimitry Shumsky has argued, however, Pinsker's position before 1881 was by no means “assimilationist.” Pinsker championed the equality of civil rights for Russian Jews as subjects of the Russian Empire and as members of a distinct national and ethnic group.Footnote 23
During the wave of pogroms in Russia, Pinsker traveled to France, England, Austro-Hungary, and Germany, where he discussed the crisis of Russian Jewry with several major figures. The British member of Parliament Arthur Cohen urged Pinsker to write down and publish his thoughts, which he did during his stay in Berlin in the fall of 1882.Footnote 24 The pamphlet was meant to provide a sweeping analysis of the Jewish question, and—given the recent wave of violence and Jewish political weakness more generally—to formulate paths of action that would secure a territorial asylum for Jews living in danger and deprivation. The pamphlet confronted Jews with what Pinsker perceived to be an undeniable truth: Jews were a foreign element in non-Jewish society. They were looked at with fear, repulsion, and mistrust and therefore could not be genuinely integrated into society. Legislation gave Jews various degrees of legal emancipation, but “nowhere … did they succeed in obtaining from their fellow citizens recognition as native-born citizens of equal rank.”Footnote 25 He saw legal emancipation as “the crowning achievement of our century,” yet one that had little bearing on social emancipation. The attitude toward Jews was a “psychic aberration” (Psychose), a culturally hereditary contempt for Jews that Pinsker called “Judeophobia.” Jews were perceived as a ghost-like entity in society, a “dead walking among the living.”Footnote 26 They aroused this fear and hatred despite—indeed because of—their ability to acquire the cultural and social habits of their surroundings.
The main difficulty, however, was Jews' own “lack of desire for national independence.”Footnote 27 They lacked national cohesion, self-determination, and a territorial center to which they could look and through which they could make a claim to their existence as a nation equal to other nations. Emancipation could take place in the political sphere, but not necessarily in the social sphere. The European discourse on emancipation, which had been centered on legal rights, was therefore limited by definition because it did not address the core of the Jewish question. As a diasporic people, Jews had reached a level of passivity and helplessness that created a disgraceful existence and inability to respond to this painful reality or even recognize it. When laws protecting Jewish rights were passed, Jews perceived them as an act of charity, not as a natural right.
According to Pinsker, true emancipation could not result from the granting of civil rights by states, but “only by the auto-emancipation of the Jewish people as a nation.”Footnote 28 They therefore needed to arrive at a national resolution to take action and find a realistic solution that would be recognized by other governments. The solution must consist of the acquisition of a suitable territory, an asylum in which impoverished Jews could work independently, defend themselves, and regain their self-dignity. Jewish national self-consciousness, as Pinsker perceived it, did not draw its legitimacy from religion and tradition per se. He relied on the language of national self-determination (Selbstbestimmung) as it had emerged in the preceding decades across Europe, and invoked the recent examples of Serbia and Romania—whose independence was guaranteed at the Congress of Berlin—to substantiate his point.Footnote 29 In this sense, the demand for Jewish national rights was commensurate with a dominant current in international politics, not a romantic or religious longing for collective harmony. In operative terms, Pinsker called for the establishment of a national congress that would be composed of Jewish leaders who would create a committee to examine possible territorial solutions worldwide. (At that time, Pinsker considered Palestine a distracting and unrealistic option.Footnote 30 ) The congress would promote the initiative in cooperation with other governments, and a national fund would raise a budget necessary for the implementation of the plan.
German as a Prestige Language
By the time Pinsker wrote his pamphlet, the German language had already reached the status of a world language and a respectable means of communication for the educated classes—a result not only of Germany's rise as a major European power, but also of the achievements and reputation of German literature, academia, and science.Footnote 31 Largely owing to the gradual decline of French, it was German that, in the second half of the century, connoted progressive ideas of science, enlightenment, and modernity. As a “prestige language,” it served non-Germans as a pathway to the realms of knowledge and politics.Footnote 32 Viewed in this way, Pinsker's choice of the German language reflected an attempt to mobilize German's prestige in order to give greater resonance to the national cause of Eastern European Jews. Yet, beyond the mere use of German, Pinsker's text drew heavily on ideas and concepts from discursive domains—nationalism, philosophy, and science—in which German's prestige loomed large. As discussed later, the pamphlet's rhetoric and terminology would be central to its reception.
The most important of these domains was the idiom of nationalism. Pinsker's action-oriented rhetoric and his attempt to speak with the authority of an objective examiner of reality corresponded with the political culture of Bismarck's Germany and the tradition of liberal nationalism since 1848. Pinsker's pamphlet internalized the imperative for “the irresistible ‘power of facts’ and ‘historical deeds,’” which, according to Willibald Steinmetz, was a major legacy of 1848 in German political language.Footnote 33 Pinsker believed that in the struggle against anti-Jewish superstitions, “polemics are useless bickering”; it was therefore preferable “to abstain from them as a waste of time and energy.”Footnote 34 He also compared the condition of Jews to that of Cinderella (Aschenbrödel), drawing on Ludwig Bechstein's popular 1845 compilation of Volksmärchen and, in so doing, employing a common feature in German national rhetoric, namely, a gendered image of the nation as pure, gentle, and passive.Footnote 35 Pinsker also demonstrated his familiarity with the nuances of German nationalist terms by differentiating among Vaterland, Mutterland, and Heimat.Footnote 36 He argued that Jews have “many motherlands” but “no fatherland,” and noted that what Jews needed to fight for at present was a Heimat, because a fatherland was far from sight. By using the term Heimat, Pinsker pointed to a sense of rootedness, even if that feeling was not based on historical attachment to a given territory.
Pinsker's national rhetoric also fed on the imagery of German national romanticism, associated chiefly with Johann Gottfried Herder and Johan Gottlieb Fichte. He adopted the postulate that nations were “living organisms,” among which Jews felt like aliens. By the same token, Pinsker saw the creation of a living organic whole as the chief goal of Jews, who were currently living like “an organism dangerously ill.”Footnote 37 Similar to a dominant romantic narrative of German history, Pinsker asserted that Jews had ceased to exist as a political unity, yet continued to exist “spiritually” (geistig) as a nation. He further asserted that Jews had not yet reached the condition of a living nation since “they lack a certain distinctive national character [Volkstümlichkeit] possessed by every other nation,” which derives from living together. Herder's and Fichte's thought is also discernible in Pinsker's call for the “free, active development of our national force [nationale Kraft] and native [urwüchsig] genius,” which drew connections between the legitimacy of a nation and the latent, primordial qualities of a people suppressed over centuries by history. Pinsker criticized Jewish “fanatic patriots” who, for the purpose of proving their loyalty to their country, “deny their ancient national character [ureigenes Wesen].”Footnote 38 Here, too, Pinsker endorsed Herder's idea of a division between different peoples and nations, with each carrying its own peculiar and indivisible essence. Last—and similar to Herder and to a predominant feature of nineteenth-century thought—Pinsker attached national meaning to the supposedly stark division between “Aryans” and “Semites.”Footnote 39 In this sense, Pinsker saw the primordial origin and character of Jews as a major source of legitimacy for Jewish national claims.Footnote 40
Pinsker's debt to romanticist nationalism is striking given the fact that he tried to present himself as a pragmatic and realistic writer responding to a state of crisis and to the rise of the principle of territorial nationalism. By utilizing both forms of national reasoning, Pinsker captured what Friedrich Meinecke later identified as the tension between the ideas of Staatsnation and Kulturnation in German nationalism.Footnote 41 In this way, he implicitly strengthened the parallel between the growth of a Jewish and a German national consciousness.
A second discursive domain that Pinsker mobilized was German philosophy. He was a product of Enlightenment thought to the extent that he believed that the responsibility for the Jewish condition could not be ascribed entirely to the state or to society, and that Jews had to emancipate themselves following their own autonomous will and understanding. He acknowledged the moral supremacy of what Immanuel Kant and Herder called Humanitätsidee (the idea of humanity), while asserting that it was far from being realized—hence the need to focus on practical solutions at a national level. Elsewhere he noted that the goal of “eternal peace” (ewiger Friede) still awaited realization, echoing Kant's idea as formulated in his 1795 tract Zum ewigen Frieden. As Dimitry Shumsky has argued, it is from the same text that Pinsker drew the idea of “hospitality” (Gastfreundschaft). By establishing Jewish self-government, Jews in different parts of the world would enjoy civic equality based on the principle of reciprocity among independent nations.Footnote 42 Moreover, Pinsker's pamphlet echoed Hegelian philosophy, particularly when depicting the Jewish national cause as a struggle for “recognition” (Anerkennung) and when decrying the Jews' loss of “national self-consciousness” (nationales Selbstbewußtsein).Footnote 43
Last, Pinsker's text took advantage of German's prestige by embracing scientific, empirical, and medical jargon. As a writer of the nineteenth century, Pinsker's positions echoed scientific positivism in many ways. He postulated that the human race's hatred toward Jews “rests upon anthropological and social principles, innate and ineradicable,” hence the need to carve out a territorial path. The condition of Russian Jews, according to Pinsker, owed “purely and simply to the operation of those general forces, the consequence of the nature of humanity.”Footnote 44 Pinsker used medical jargon to draw a parallel between the condition of Jews to that of a sick person who was not aware of his lack of hunger and thirst—a reference to the absent determination of Jews to liberate themselves from their malady, their “anorexia” (Anorexie).Footnote 45 Pinsker's second and more extensive use of medical jargon appeared in his famous diagnosis of antisemitism as pathology, a disease transmitted from one generation to the other that involved fear and alienation from the Jew—Judeophobia, an utter rejection and distancing that impeded any genuine possibility for respectful coexistence. Whereas the first invocation was metaphorical, the second—a direct application of the scientific and medical language of pathologies, symptoms, and cures to social matters—drew on an understanding of society as the interaction among distinct organisms.Footnote 46
Pinsker, whose only book publication before 1882 was a German-language overview of balneotherapy sites in Odessa, was not blind to German's international and esteemed status in scholarly and scientific domains.Footnote 47 German-Jewish responses to the text indeed took notice of Pinsker's scientific and analytical rhetoric. The German rabbi Ludwig Philippson accused the anonymous writer of suffering from a disease himself—namely, “Russian nihilism”—given his alleged obsession with sickness and death.Footnote 48 Philippson was also critical of Pinsker's nationalist tone and its connotations. He asserted that “some of the author's statements have appeared thus far only in texts written by antisemites.” Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider, commenting about the pamphlet after it had been endorsed by members of the Hibbat Zion movement, went even further, arguing that “this kind of propaganda for colonization in Palestine is more dangerous than antisemitism.”Footnote 49 Indeed, a genre of anonymous pamphlets discussing the foreignness of Jews was associated with German antisemitic publications, such as the 1877 pamphlet Die Fremdlinge in unsrem Heim! Ein Mahnwort an das deutsche Volk, von einem Berliner Bürger (The Strangers in Our House! A Warning Call to the German People, by a Citizen of Berlin).Footnote 50
Perhaps as a defensive response to Pinsker's eloquence and proficiency in German, Philippson asserted that the gist of Pinsker's perception was wrapped in “eloquent yet mostly hollow phrases,” thus questioning the genuine ability of the Russian-Jewish author to comprehend the essence and implications of the poignant German words he was using. By contrast, supportive comments by Jewish Maskilim from Russia referred to Pinsker's use of “a tongue for teaching,” or his “noble words” (divre negidim), as one of the text's main virtues.Footnote 51 In the United States, Emma Lazarus wrote of “a very remarkable pamphlet just printed in Germany, written by a Russian Jew.” She praised the anonymous writer's “fiery eloquence and his depth and fervor of conviction,” whose “appeal for nationality is a pregnant indication of the spirit of the times.”Footnote 52
It is difficult to determine whether and to what extent Pinsker consciously adopted the terms, concepts, and rhetorical features of German national, philosophical, and scientific languages. Indeed, some of these features were part and parcel of contemporary German, and were used regularly in the press.Footnote 53 In any event, Pinsker made a manifold, eclectic, at times contradictory use of different arguments, concepts, and metaphors that were rooted in the German language, especially in its strongest intellectual fields of influence. This augmented the effect of his message and helped situate the Jewish national question in the political, ideological, and scholarly discourses of the period.
Discursive Attention and (Trans)National Agitation
Autoemancipation! was a radical text, but considering the turbulence in the Jewish world during the pogroms of 1881–1882, it was not a voice in the desert. Indeed, it was only first published in September 1882, following a flood of other publications and debates over the Jewish question and the immigration crisis.Footnote 54 The genre of pamphlets and manifestos had already emerged as a new venue for molding the “new politics” of the Jewish world, as Israel Bartal has put it. Such publications conveyed disenchantment with the prospect of gradual civil emancipation by the Russian state.Footnote 55 In May 1881, Moses Schrenzel, a Jewish publicist from Lemberg (Lviv), published a pamphlet in German, The Solution of the Jewish Question, that voiced disillusion with the prospect of emancipation and called instead for the establishment of a Jewish state in America.Footnote 56 Y. L. Gordon wrote in his (favorable) review of Autoemancipation! that “another pamphlet was recently published in the German language, discussing the weighty question: what should we do today to be saved with an everlasting salvation?” Gordon coupled Pinsker's pamphlet with a text published in March of the same year by Joseph von Wertheimer, a Jewish-Austrian writer, philanthropist, and activist for Jewish emancipation.Footnote 57
Pinsker, residing in Vienna and Berlin during these months, might indeed have encountered Wertheimer's pamphlet. Although Wertheimer was a proponent of the Western idea of emancipation, he made a similar distinction between social and political emancipation, thus recognizing the limits of the latter.Footnote 58 Wertheimer saw “mass emigration” (Exodus in Masse) as an unpractical solution given the poor conditions in which Jews often found themselves in their new countries. Yet, similarly to what Pinsker would suggest five months later, Wertheimer called for the establishment of a supranational alliance of Jewish leaders from around the world—an “alliance of alliances,” as Wertheimer put it—that would represent Jews and promote their cause.Footnote 59
Pinsker thus did not bring forth a new approach to the crisis of Eastern European Jewry. Still, juxtaposed with the eruption of political texts on the Jewish question in various languages, his pamphlet seems to have stood out because its language was not associated with Jewish nationalist agitation in Russia. In a preface to his Yiddish rendition of Autoemancipation!, Sh. Y. Abramovich pointed to the pamphlet's linguistic significance by noting that it had been written in German, “the language of the people whose renowned intellectuals' wisdom and humaneness is as great as the madness and evilness of its truculent fools.”Footnote 60 Pinsker, for his part, disclosed only the fact that the author was “a Russian Jew”—an elusively simple label that concealed the extent of the author's immersion in German language and culture, as well as his remoteness from the social conditions of the majority of Russian Jews. Indeed, a French commentator expressed doubts about whether the author was really a Russian Jew.Footnote 61
Pinsker's hometown, Odessa, was a likely setting to nourish multilingual modes of political action. The modern port city differed from the rest of Russia in the more westernized forms of culture and everyday life that prevailed there, befitting its mercantile, multinational population. Odessa Jews were more prone to undergo a process of acculturation that, according to Steven Zipperstein, “resulted from a recognition of the usefulness of the other culture's skills (linguistic, technical, or otherwise), quite independent of larger cultural benefits.”Footnote 62 Processes of reform, acculturation, and secularization were accordingly motivated less by the intellectual and political work of Maskilim and more by social, economic, and other practical needs.Footnote 63 At the same time, Odessa was a center of exchange of goods and ideas with Galicia (especially with Brody). This state of affairs nourished the necessity and significance of knowing German. Modern Jewish schools established in Odessa in the 1830s adopted German as a language of instruction.Footnote 64 In 1860, the city's Jewish community appointed the German rabbi Simon Leon Schwabacher as its municipal rabbi, a position he held until 1888.Footnote 65
Pinsker was a product of the cultural atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century Odessa, though some biographical details might further explain his linguistic preferences. In keeping with a common practice among Galician Maskilim, Pinsker's family taught him German from an early age. He studied at a Jewish school—coestablished by his father—in which the languages of instruction were Russian and German. But he also belonged to a generation of young, educated Jews who were drawn to the allure of Russian as a vehicle of integration into Russian society. According to Alter Druyanow, Pinsker “was torn between the German and Russian languages.”Footnote 66
Another significant detail in this regard was Pinsker's personal interest in Central European politics following the events of 1848. During his stay in Germany and Austria in 1848–1849, Pinsker met with Jewish figures such as Adolf Jellinek, Ludwig Philippson, and Abraham Geiger.Footnote 67 He returned to Austria and Germany in later years and closely followed the national politics of the Habsburg Empire, which he wrote about in the early 1860s for the Russian-Jewish journals Razsvet and Sion. In several of these articles, Pinsker examined the discrepancy between the official policies toward Jews in Hungary following the 1848 events, and the failure to recognize Jews as a national minority. In one article, Pinsker asserted that the leaders of the Hungarian national movement were “expecting Jews to be reborn as Magyars, and thereby forget that one can adopt from a different people—and this, too, not all at once—[only] the external forms: clothes, a way of life, customs, language, but by no means the spirit or the character of the foreign nationality.” By raising the question of national rights in Central Europe, Pinsker offered an insight into what he saw as the false premises of assimilation and into the nature of Jewish collectivity.Footnote 68 Apart from such commentaries, Pinsker also published historical pieces in which he presented and praised earlier Jewish civil-emancipatory efforts—for instance, in articles he published in 1880 about French-Jewish statesman Adolphe Crémieux and his diplomatic efforts during the Damascus Affair, and about the chief advocate of German-Jewish legal emancipation, Gabriel Riesser. According to Dimitry Shumsky, Pinsker's preoccupation with the legal and cultural status of Jews in Western Europe and the Habsburg Empire enabled him to criticize, by way of insinuation, the Russian government's policies toward its own Jewish population.Footnote 69
One of the questions that stood at the heart of debates over Jews' political status, both in Eastern and Central Europe, was the language question. Indeed, in the Habsburg Empire, language divisions played a central role in broader debates over the “national question.” In 1784, Emperor Joseph II instituted German as the official language of imperial administration, a step that sparked opposition in different parts of the empire, leading gradually to the empire's recognition of other languages. Hungarian patriotic texts in the early nineteenth century were often written in German by the bilingual middle class of Budapest.Footnote 70 Jews in particular were portrayed as harbingers of the German language throughout the empire.Footnote 71 After 1867, national groups in the Habsburg Empire promoted with growing vehemence their national languages at the expense of German, the language of the empire, though multilingualism persisted in various degrees into the twentieth century.Footnote 72
One of the functions of German in the Habsburg Empire was that of a mediating language between minorities and the empire, and among different national minorities. The pan-Slav congress of 1848 was held in Prague, and its language of communication—and of its official written statements—was German.Footnote 73 Mikhail Bakunin, a leading figure in socialist and anarchist circles since the mid-century, was one of the two Russian participants at the congress. His revolutionary activity forced him to flee Prague after being denounced to the police: he found refuge in Berlin, where he wrote a pamphlet in which he laid out his worldview, as well as his main accusations against German and Austrian imperial politics.Footnote 74 The text was entitled Aufruf an die Slaven von einem russischen Patrioten (A Call to the Slavs by a Russian Patriot), which tellingly resembled Pinsker's future title.Footnote 75 The pamphlets differed in the type of action they envisioned (Pinsker focused on organized political activity, whereas Bakunin called for revolutionary uprising), but they both emphasized the indispensability of popular national sentiment to stir action and saw the current moment as a unique window of opportunity for putting an end to a history of passivity.Footnote 76
The two pamphlets also stressed cross-national unity as a key to shaking off the yoke of subjugation. Pinsker decried the fact that the dispersal of Jews had become the main feature of their existence: “the Jewish people have no fatherland of their own, though many motherlands; they have no rallying point, no center of gravity, no government.”Footnote 77 He therefore saw an initial remedy in the formation of a unified bond that would promote the recuperation of Jewish national dignity. Bakunin likewise saw the division of the Slavic peoples as the major obstacle preventing them from taking effective political action.Footnote 78 In this sense, then, there was a certain resemblance between the conditions of the Slavic and the Jewish peoples as depicted in the two pamphlets. In both cases, a full realization of their historical condition and their potential power had yet to be achieved. In both cases as well, their powerless existence could not be addressed in conventional diplomatic ways. In Bakunin's view, a diplomatic effort would not shatter the position of European ruling elites; in Pinsker's, it would not solve the Jewish question. Bakunin thus turned to revolution as a first step, followed by the establishment of a confederation of Slavic nations. Pinsker, merging the drive of the 1848 national movements with lessons taken from their failures, called for a national movement that would operate autonomously while seeking international legitimacy and cooperation as part of the nation-building process. Bakunin asserted that “your foreign politics cannot transform before you reconfigure your inner politics,” a similar message to that of Pinsker, who saw emancipation as an insufficient form of political struggle—hence the call for “autoemancipation” and for the establishment of a national congress.Footnote 79 In both cases, self-reliance and decisive collective action were considered the chief vehicles for freedom.
This comparison sheds light on two latent aspects of Autoemancipation! First, in order to understand the impact on and the unprecedented aspects of the publication, it is fruitful to place it within the context of the corpus of national revival and popular agitation published in German. Ideas of self-emancipation and “national rebirth” (nationale Wiedergeburt) were commonplace during the 1848 upheavals, and Pinsker's language choice made the communication of these ideas more effective. Having followed the development of national movements in Central Europe since the 1840s and the status of the Jewish question therein, Pinsker was aware of the importance of the continuous struggle for international legitimacy and minority rights. His territorial nationalism was thus located in two seemingly separate discourses: national self-reliance, on the one hand, and minority politics within an international multi-empire order, on the other.
The German language served as more than a means of communication in these writings by Bakunin and Pinsker. Both authors dealt with national groups that did not have a common language and territory. In their similar titles, the authors presented themselves as Russians—Pinsker as a Russian Jew, Bakunin as a Russian patriot. This fact seems to have been a message in itself. Pinsker wrote to his fellow Jews and Bakunin to his fellow Slavs. Both used German, which, beyond its communicative purpose, also embodied, to a large degree, the ideological worldview that their message challenged. This is the sense in which the language choice also served as a means of remonstration. Bakunin ruthlessly wrote against the empires and called for the dissolution of the Austrian monarchy, whereas Pinsker criticized the tenets of German and German-Jewish discourse on legal-political emancipation and emphasized Jews' historically and psychologically rooted foreignness in society. German Jews rarely brought up this latter claim. Indeed, German-Jewish intellectuals and activists polemicized during these years against antisemitic authors who questioned the ability of Jews to assimilate into German society.Footnote 80 In this respect, Pinsker's language choice amplified his critique and its provocative features.
Pinsker's language choice gave his message a layer of urgency not only for his potential supporters, but also, and at least as important, for his potential antagonists. To be sure, choosing German allowed Pinsker to reach wide and influential audiences in the Jewish world and beyond. Yet, in order to grasp the kind of impact and the reasons for the strong reactions the pamphlet provoked, it needs to be understood as a bold intervention by an outsider—indeed, a “Russian Jew”—in the German-speaking discourse, which, until then, hardly ever produced irredentist voices of Jewish national self-determination or claims for territorial autonomy. Autoemancipation!’s effect on the Jewish political discourse was thus closely entwined with Pinsker's language choice, and with the implications that that had on the way the Jewish question was handled in German and German-Jewish discourse.
Liberalism, Socialism, and the Problem with Emancipation
Pinsker's criticism was directed not only at Western European Jews, but also at Eastern European Jews who put their trust in the Russian state. Among Russian Jews, the concept of emancipation played a somewhat different role than it did in Central and Western Europe. The term emancipation was not part of the tsarist state's administrative vocabulary. Rather, the transformation of Jews' legal status depended first and foremost on “reorganization” and “transformation” of Jewish life.Footnote 81 Against this background, Russian-Jewish liberals and Maskilim used the term in two main ways: either when referring to the process of civic-political emancipation taking place in Western Europe, or as the social, religious, and educational reforms that ought to take place gradually within Jewish communities in Russia. The latter meaning was occasionally designated as samo-emantsipatsiia (self-emancipation).Footnote 82 As Eli Lederhendler has argued, already before the 1881–1882 pogroms, parts of the Haskalah movement had grown disillusioned with state-oriented politics, promoting instead a “politics of self-liberation.”Footnote 83
For Russian liberal Jews, the pogroms posed a significant political challenge amid what appeared to be the state's failure to protect Jews from mass violence. There is a telling example of a response to this challenge in an 1883 essay, “What Kind of Self-Emancipation Do Jews Need?,” written by Simon Dubnow, then a rising Jewish intellectual who would later turn to Jewish nationalist autonomism and become its leading thinker and activist.Footnote 84 In his memoirs, Dubnow noted that he had decided to write the essay as a response to the “prevailing agitation following the publication of Doctor Pinsker's pamphlet, which wrecked all our hopes for civic emancipation and a cultural renewal in a European spirit.”Footnote 85 Dubnow believed that the outburst of violence should be seen as having impeded the gradual progress made in recent decades, but should not lead Jews to renounce their efforts altogether: “The preachers of self-emancipation and especially their most influential wing, the Palestinists [sic] …, have argued that there has been a triumph of the national principle, that Jews should adapt themselves to the new cultural conditions and separate themselves off as a living nation. [But this is] a superficial attitude toward history.”Footnote 86 Jews should instead continue to strive toward a moderate form of fusion with society, advocating gradual religious reform and cultural work comparable to that which had fruitfully taken place in Germany. The proper understanding and goal of Jewish self-emancipation should be, according to Dubnow, the integration of Jews into Russian society.Footnote 87
In a review from 1884, Dubnow further argued that it was necessary to form a united effort promoting “equality before the law, on the one hand, and internal self-emancipation, on the other,” thus banishing the barrier between the two.Footnote 88 Dubnow did not merely polemicize against Pinsker's position, then: he saw Autoemancipation! and its followers as engaging in a struggle over the meaning of (self-)emancipation, whereby they imbued it with nationalist and radical meanings. As noted earlier, Pinsker did not reject efforts toward civic emancipation, and he believed that an organized national rebirth would indeed bolster such efforts. Still, Dubnow's reaction reveals the ways in which the question of the nature of Jewish emancipation operated after the publication of Pinsker's pamphlet.
This ambiguity derived not only from Jewish internal divisions, but also from the multiple meanings of emancipation in national and international discourses since the mid-century. The term was associated with the liberation of nations, slaves, peasants, women, Jews, Catholics, workers, or humanity as a whole. Indeed, Karl Martin Grass and Reinhart Koselleck, who investigated the appearance of the term in European politics and thought, have showed that the revolutionary and propagandistic value attached to it starting in the late 1840s had made it a buzzword denoting the transformation of the social order—and not merely the protection of legal rights. By the mid-1870s, the term was used by political commentators representing different, indeed opposing, political worldviews.Footnote 89 Socialists, for example, though not yet a major political power, had an important part in the dissemination of the idea of emancipation in Germany and beyond. Germany's two socialist parties enjoyed growing popularity in the early 1870s, eventually merging in 1875, and Bismarck's 1878 Anti-Socialist Laws only contributed to the appeal of socialist ideas to the working classes and other activist circles.Footnote 90 In tsarist Russia, socialist ideas circulated widely among Russian intellectuals during the 1870s, and had a direct impact on Russian populists searching for effective ideas and practices to disrupt the political order.Footnote 91 During that decade, activists and intellectuals rediscovered the Communist Manifesto, which was published in nine editions and six languages between 1871 and 1873.Footnote 92 Socialism was thus one of the vectors through which emancipation turned into “a concept of historical movement, without disavowing its juridical implications,” as Koselleck put it.Footnote 93
Autoemancipation! exemplified this development. Pinsker did not identify with socialist movements, and his text was remote from the socialist agenda. It nonetheless included conspicuous elements of socialist logic and vocabulary. Scholars have already compared Autoemancipation!’s role in Zionist history to that of the Communist Manifesto in socialist history, referring chiefly to its retrospective status as a “founding text,” as well as to common genre features—a bold, unequivocal attitude to the posed problem, terse and sweeping statements, and an aggressive tone.Footnote 94 The similarity between the texts goes even further, in fact, as the Communist Manifesto and Autoemancipation! shared certain structural and rhetorical features. For instance, both texts depicted a history of a collective that had been suffering from persistent discrimination and injustice. In Autoemancipation!, as noted earlier, Pinsker described society's perception of Jews as that of a “ghost-like entity” (Judengespenst) that spread fear and anxiety. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used a similar image to describe the “specter” (Gespenst) of communism.Footnote 95 Both texts depicted the present moment as the peak in a history of injustice that ought to be disrupted through collective action.
The emancipatory messages of Autoemancipation! and the Communist Manifesto contained a certain degree of criticism toward those members of the oppressed masses who had accepted their condition with passivity and listlessness. While putting the blame on the oppressor, the authors nevertheless perceived inadequate “self-consciousness” on the part of the oppressed as a major impediment to historical change. The historical condition that characterized the cases of both the Jews and the proletariat was their homelessness in the era of the state. Both were an integral part of society, but were nonetheless alienated from it and from their own historical fate. Marx and Engels wrote that “workers have no fatherland,” as did Pinsker with respect to the Jews: “the Jewish people have no fatherland, even if many motherlands.” The Communist Manifesto questioned the myth of national unity amid the pauperization and alienation of the proletariat—a condition that required a national and ultimately international response by the working classes of the world. Pinsker invoked the attachment of Jews to their respective motherlands, though his discussion tackled the limitedness of the national principle in addressing the “Jewish problem” because of its unique historical-psychological traits. He consequently called for a national rejuvenation that would not deny the national attachment of Jews to their lands of residence.Footnote 96 Both texts reckoned that appealing to governments would be a futile action given the objective social conditions that promoted exploitation (in Marx and Engels) or antisemitism (in Pinsker). The call for action was a transnational one in both cases, reinforcing and undermining the national principle, and both texts proclaimed that the oppressed had nothing left to lose.Footnote 97
A more subtle parallel between the texts lay in their concurring adoption and subversion of the idea of emancipation. Marx had already addressed the problem of Jewish emancipation in an 1844 essay (which became famous only posthumously).Footnote 98 In it, he argued that the problem lay not in Jewish separatism but more generally in capitalism and its profound imprint on the “Jewish spirit.” In opposition to Bruno Bauer, who saw Jews and Judaism as a religious entity, Marx saw “the Jew” in his economic and social traits—“the everyday Jew.”Footnote 99 He therefore challenged the goal of emancipation by replacing the categories through which it was normally handled, and by shifting the emphasis from religious to economic and quotidian considerations.
Marx's depiction of Jews was rooted in the Christian imagery of Judaism, though it simultaneously secularized the Jewish problem by combining it with the “capitalist problem.”Footnote 100 His text was not disseminated broadly at the time of its publication, but it pointedly reflected the socialist challenge to the state-centered, legal-political idea of emancipation emerging in the 1840s. The correspondence of Pinsker's pamphlet to socialist motifs and ideas enhanced its ability to appear as a timely text that echoed the European political language and discourse of the time.
Secularizing Jewish Nationalism
Pinsker's arguments were not rooted in religion. His call for a united effort to transform the Jewish condition was not based on Jews' self-understanding as a chosen people but rather on their status as a nation bereft of sovereignty. Pinsker remarked acerbically that the Jews' chosenness consisted in their being “chosen for universal hatred.” The idea of a “holy land” was foreign to Pinsker and went against the order of the day. He also held that the belief in the Messiah had been an obstacle to the realization of national emancipation.Footnote 101 The only place where Pinsker mentioned God positively (“Help yourselves, and God will help you”) still saw human action as the catalyst of historical change. Jacob Talmon argues that it was precisely Pinsker's lack of religious reasoning that made his call for human action more effective, because it underscored its relevance to the national debates of the period.Footnote 102 In this respect, Autoemancipation! stood in opposition to a dominant feature of Jewish national language in the early 1880s, which centered on religious sentiments and theological justifications.Footnote 103 Even Jewish nationalists who were inspired by secular European nationalism employed Jewish religious terminology and often invoked the Bible as the foundational text of the Jewish nation and as its primary source of legitimacy. From a linguistic point of view, modern European languages influenced the Hebrew style of writers associated with the Haskalah, but the latter drew extensively on Biblical Hebrew because they believed that it was the foundation of a “pure” Hebrew.Footnote 104
Autoemancipation! thus did not fit easily into the rhetoric and style of Eastern European Jewish nationalism. In his 1882 review, Y. L. Gordon noted that “this word [Autoemancipation] cannot be easily rendered into the Holy Tongue.”Footnote 105 The first attempt to translate the pamphlet into Hebrew was made by Hebrew writer Shmuel Leib Zitron. This translation was published in several installments in the Hebrew periodical Ha-Magid, which was based in East Prussia but was disseminated widely in Russia. Zitron recalled how hard he had tried “to find a proper and accurate Hebrew equivalent for ‘Autoemancipation,’” calling it “Self-Liberty” (Herut Atzmit). The difficulty stemmed from the fact that during these years, Zitron noted, Hebrew writers “would retreat as if encountering a lion when faced with any word that did not have its root and source in the Bible….”Footnote 106
Russian censorship, which found the text and particularly its title to be too provocative, posed another challenge. Ha-Magid’s editor, David Gordon, instructed Zitron to curb the language of the pamphlet and to find a different title, adding half-humorously that, for the censor, “liberty can only be granted graciously by Cossacks.”Footnote 107 Zitron decided then to call the essay “The Redemption of Israel” (Teshuat Israel). A year later, he published Autoemancipation! as a booklet under the title “If I Am Not for Myself, Then Who Will Be for Me?,” Hillel's proverb from the Mishna, quoted in the pamphlet's motto. Amid the tension between the radical European understanding of emancipation-as-liberty and a messianic call for redemption, the new title advocated independent political action while remaining anchored in Jewish linguistic and religious resources.
Pinsker's choice to write in German thus allowed him to mobilize the emancipatory discourses of the nineteenth century, which entailed elements of redemption and historical promise. All the while, Pinsker kept a distance from Jewish-Christian lore and presented his call as an attempt to break away from religious constraints. David Gordon wrote in a letter to the German rabbi Isaac Rülf that Autoemancipation! “is rooted in the mundane but has been consecrated by its holy belief in the vocation of our prophets.”Footnote 108 Pinsker thus contributed to the transformation of Jewish political language while maintaining a mutually enriching tension between a secular message and a religious undertone.
The religious entanglement could be further explored by looking at a review written by Peretz Smolenskin, a leading writer of the Russian Haskalah and an early proponent of Jewish nationalism who resided in Vienna, where he edited the Hebrew journal Ha-Shachar (The Dawn). Smolenskin maintained that there was not much novelty in Pinsker's pamphlet: “no great news has been revealed to us here, not for anyone who knows Hebrew and knows what has been written in it in the last years, nor for anyone who knows the spirit of Jews in Russia.”Footnote 109 Smolenskin was also likely alluding here to his own work, which he had dedicated to the lifting of the national spirit among Jews.
Smolenskin did praise Pinsker for one thing in particular, however: “But such words had not been heard in German ever since Jews started speaking and writing, since the rise of their spirit until our days. German has been the holy of holies for the fathers of the Haskalah, and their history is that of the attempt to silence Israel among the gentiles, and to have its memories sunk in oblivion, its temples of glory destroyed.”Footnote 110 Smolenskin thus saw Pinsker's text as a linguistic novelty because it defied the manner in which the German language had operated in Jewish history since the earliest days of the Haskalah in Germany. In this sense, Autoemancipation! paved an alternative path for the German language in Jewish public life. For Smolenskin, the German language had been tightly bound up with the work of destruction because of the way it served the ideology of assimilation and the decay of the Hebrew language and Jewish spirit. According to Smolenskin, those trying to speak to German Jews with a request to save Israel and its spirit had been ignored (“hoping to avoid them by closing their eyes”; “they would say: don't look, and peace will come”). Now, however, Pinsker used German in a new way. Autoemancipation! was no less than “a powerful key to open sealed gates,” for the writer expressed his ideas in a language that was clear to those “obtuse and merciless and deaf people” in a tongue they comprehend, and, what is more, “in a truly beautiful and wonderful language.”Footnote 111 Smolenskin asserted that “the main thing” was that Pinsker had “proclaimed in the German language the idea that we are a people and that we must pay heed to our existence by guaranteeing ourselves an asylum. And for this we praise the writer and express our gratitude.”Footnote 112
On the face of it, then, Pinsker's achievement lay, according to Smolenskin, in his ability to write a text that had brought the national call to the “deaf” German Jews. Smolenskin was nevertheless also appreciative of Pinsker's more ingenious achievement, namely, the defilement of German Jews' “holy of holies,” the language of assimilation. Smolenskin thus brought to the surface the ideological divide in the Jewish world around the German-Jewish Enlightenment and its historical legacy. Throughout the 1870s, Smolenskin had been involved in a series of debates about the German-Jewish Enlightenment; he claimed that its achievements were detrimental to Jews' sense of collectivity.Footnote 113 In 1874, for instance, he argued that Moses Mendelssohn had made the Holy Scriptures—“the object of spiritual rejoice for the House of Israel, the treasure of its faith”—into “a servant for the German language!”Footnote 114 Two years later, he claimed that German-Jewish scholars' and rabbis' devotion to German had led them to become “full of contempt for the Hebrew language.”Footnote 115 In his 1883 review, Smolenskin saw Autoemancipation! as a publication that, for proponents of Jewish self-determination, served historical justice. In short, he recognized in Autoemancipation! a sign of a potential transition in the Jewish history of the German language.
After Autoemancipation!
In early 1883, the German rabbi Isaac Rülf published a text in German (with a German and Hebrew title) dedicated to the author of Autoemancipation!, reiterating its message while stressing the importance of Palestine to Jewish nationhood.Footnote 116 At the request of Russian Maskil Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Pinsker was appointed as president of Hibbat Zion, an umbrella organization for the different movements promoting Jewish emigration to Palestine.Footnote 117 His appointment contributed to the strengthening tie between Eastern and Western European Jewish nationalist circles. One of the outcomes of this process was the growing presence of German in the correspondence and writings of Jewish nationalists. This brought to the surface, however, the question of how to articulate the national message in a manner that would appeal to Western and Eastern audiences alike. Groups within the Russian Empire usually advocated ethno-national forms of self-determination and emigration to Palestine. Voices from the West were more moderate, focusing on the support of Jewish agricultural collectives in Palestine.
In a postscript to a Hebrew letter written in August 1884 by the Warsaw branch of Hibbat Zion and addressed to its Russian members, the authors noted: “We are sending this message to our brethren in the West and in Romania; hence we ask you to pay close attention to it. Obviously, it was written in a different tongue and in German, but without any change of content.”Footnote 118 This clarification suggested that the Russian-Jewish readership might have been suspicious about a possible change of message accompanying the recent introduction of German into Jewish affairs in Eastern Europe. It turned out, within three months, that such suspicions were not unwarranted. Representatives of the movement convened their first major conference in Kattowitz, Germany. The invitations and official protocols were printed in both Hebrew and German, and were sent to Jewish communities around Europe. The Kattowitz conference helped establish the organizational foundations of the Jewish national movement and facilitated coordination between Eastern and Western groups. Shortly after the publication of the conference protocols in early 1885, the Galician Hebrew periodical Ivri Anokhi published two articles pointing out major discrepancies between the Hebrew and the German versions. The former included “most valuable words of which no trace is to be found in the German version,” in addition to “parts from the German version that do not appear at all in the Hebrew version!”Footnote 119 The author of the article did not ascribe these differences to poor translation, but rather suspected that it had been the result of a calculated strategy: the conference was held mostly in German, but the writer of the Hebrew version decided “to conceal from the non-German speaking Jews—who are the majority in Russia and Romania—various things that are remote from the national spirit, and also to insert words of national revival and excitement that the speakers had never uttered.”Footnote 120 The author cited examples chiefly from the opening speech of Pinsker, who, for instance, according to the German version, had said: “we have come here from many lands”—whereas, in the Hebrew version, he had supposedly declared: “we have come here in the name of God, who loves the gates of Zion.”Footnote 121 In the German version, Pinsker was quoted as saying that “we naturally ought to help any Jew earn his living anywhere,” whereas in the Hebrew version his words turned into a commitment to help “any Jew who wants to work in the Holy Land.”Footnote 122
Pinsker learned about the mistranslations (which were also reported in the German-Jewish newspaper Israelitische Wochenschrift) and demanded the publication of a corrected version of his speech. In response to Pinsker's request for an explanation, Hibbat Zion member Isidor Yasinowski insisted that these were honest mistakes committed by one of the attendees who “did not manage to translate several words and even sentences from your speech.”Footnote 123 He further explained that “a large portion of the inaccuracies in the Hebrew version stems from the difficulty of translating from German—a modern European language—into Hebrew, an ancient Oriental language.” In another letter, one of the organizers of the conference insisted that a deliberate manipulation of the version had not taken place because “… we could not have misled the German-speaking Jews who attended the conference. We also could not have possibly deceived the Russian-speaking Jews, for an equal number of German and Hebrew protocols were sent to every town in Russia. German is comprehensible to many Jews, and there is almost no corner of Russia where you would not find a Jew who understands German.”Footnote 124
In a letter to Pinsker in February 1885, Yasinowski raised concerns that the idea might take root that “we wrote two versions for two audiences.”Footnote 125 The debate died down after Hibbat Zion member Shaul Pinchas Rabinovich published a clarification in two leading Hebrew periodicals, asserting that the Hebrew version had been composed before the German one, and that neither was a translation of the other. He added that it was only in Pinsker's speech that certain “stylistic changes” had been made because of “the special style of Hebrew euphuism [Melitzah], which is, as is well known, remote from the German one”; he further guaranteed that corrections would be sent to the members of the organization.Footnote 126 Thus, while German acquired a central place in Jewish political activism, it nevertheless continued to be burdened by earlier ideological tensions regarding its seemingly disintegrative role in Jewish society. According to this view, German transmitted liberal ideas and pragmatic political approaches, whereas Hebrew, the language from the East, transmitted a moral radical message, backed by ethnically and religiously loaded terminology.
The symbolic division between Hebrew and German was never static, however, and was challenged not only in Russia but also in Central European Jewish circles. Pinsker and his pamphlet strongly influenced the Vienna-based Jewish student association Kadimah (the Hebrew word for “Forward,” as well as “Eastwards”), and in 1885 its cofounder, Nathan Birnbaum, established the journal Selbst-Emancipation.Footnote 127 The title alluded to Pinsker's pamphlet, while translating the Greco-Latin auto into the more German Selbst. The journal soon became a major site of discussion between Eastern and Western Jewish activists. The question of Jewish emigration reemerged in the early 1890s, amid further degradation in the economic and political condition of Russian Jews.Footnote 128 This time, however, a far higher number of texts written by Jewish activists were published in German: for example, a Russian Jew published anonymously in 1891 a German-language pamphlet that called on European Jews to help the fleeing masses.Footnote 129 In February 1892, in a bilingual appeal by the editors of Selbst-Emancipation urging Zionists to support the journal, the authors stressed that it was fighting assimilation by using the German language, “which is currently at the forefront with regard to our brethren in Europe.”Footnote 130 By the time Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat appeared in 1896, German had already become a major vehicle of Jewish nationalism.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, then, German was not only the language of the German nation, but also a universal language of science, politics, and philosophy. In the Jewish world, it continued to maintain many of its associations as the language of modernization, secularization, and diplomacy. Jewish national activists searched for ways to create a discourse of social agitation and mobilization that would also reach higher echelons of Jewish and European societies. Pinsker's language choice, while driven by immediate hopes to reach a Western audience, proved to be a critical juncture in Jewish language politics. It challenged the discursive terms and divisions of Jewish politics in Europe, subverted the religious dimension of the national question in Eastern European Jewish societies, and aligned the Jewish national cause with European debates in the age of territorial nationalism and multiethnic empires. It is paradoxical that a “Russian Jew” turned out to be better suited than his Western counterparts to make German the language of transnational Jewish politics.
