OXFORD WORKSHOP ON JEWISH DISCOURSES OF ‘DEMOCRACY’
Somerville College
Present: Joanna Innes, Mark Philp (co-organisers), Francois Guesnet, Adam Sutcliffe (presenters).
Also in person: Erik Bengtsson, Michael Drolet, Abigail Green, Jean-Michel Johnston, Avi Lifschitz, Eduardo Posada-Carbo, David Rechter, Sietske van der Veen.
On-line: Maurizio Isabella, Maciej Janowski, Till van Rahden, Andriy Zayarnyuk
Apologies: Jaclyn Granick, Andrew Kahn, Pauline Kewes,
Introduction to the project
Mark Philp said he would talk about why the project focused on the word as an approach to writing the history of democracy.
A key reason was to avoid teleology: to make sure we look at the world through the eyes of actors of the time, not imposing our views on them, or treating them as preparing the way for us. And actually there’s no consensus about what democracy is today – as is perhaps more evident now than it was when we began the project twenty years ago, so there is no clear end point to the story. An advantage of proceeding in this way was that it yielded a rich picture of possible ways of thinking about democracy.
The geographical reach of the project was determined by the history of the word. The project focused on those places where people initially accessed the word as part of a classical inheritance, and then rethought it in the light of modern circumstances. It didn’t consider places – in Asia or Africa – where people initially encountered the word in a modern form.
The project did not pursue this word to the exclusion of all other words .Democracy needs to be positioned in relation to a larger semantic field. And the project didn’t just look at occurrences of the term and its changing meanings, in the sense that dictionary-makers understand that, but also at what the word was used to do, which meant that attention to the word led into attention to institutional settings, political circumstances and projects.
Adam asked how far religion had been identified as a setting for democracy talk.
Joanna said Maurizio Isabella had written a chapter on religion in the Mediterranean book. But certainly much more could be said about it than they had said, or would say in the present book. A chapter on religion was one of those on a longish iist of chapters one would like to include in an ideal word.
Maurizio suggested that Jews might be compared not just to other religious groups but also to other diasporic peoples.
Joanna explained that the hope was to include a chapter on Jewish discourses of democracy among other ‘language’ chapters in the book underway on re-imagining democracy in central and northern Europe. They had conceived of it as one of several chapters that would explore languages of democracy in ‘stateless nations’ – as opposed to republics and monarchies, which, still in the nineteenth century, they thought were associated with somewhat different discourses of democracy as between themselves. Other stateless nations to be considered were Germany (which for most of the period had only a very minimal state, though it was a powerful idea), possibly one or more Habsburg provinces and Poland. Though there were clearly specificities to the Jewish case (as to the other cases) it might prove useful to think comparatively about democracy talk across stateless nations: places where people had a sense of belonging to a community but where establishing a democratic government attuned especially to the needs of that community wasn’t an easy or perhaps even a plausible project. Options for instantiating ‘democracy’ in that context included: focusing on some limited form of self-government; conceiving of democracy as a spirit or ethos that could be embedded in a variety of institutions, whatever was to hand, and pinning one’s hopes on the beneficent effects of making some poiity that was to hand democratic, even if that wouldn’t solve the problems of more than a part of your community.
She also noted that one of the themes that would characterize the book’s treatment of the region was complex, layered and fragmented systems of rule – further complicated by things like the persistence of seigneurialism and strong corporate institutions. It was often noted that one way of thinking about what happened to Jews over this period was that they had to undergo the transition from a corporate world in which they had one kind of place to a world in which power was centralized in sovereign (sometimes nation-) states, in which they had to find another kind of place. So that was another interpretative framework to bear in mind. The experience of being a ‘stateless nation’ itself changed in that changing context.
Presentations of pre-circulated papers.
Joanna introduced Francois’s paper by noting that she had asked him to think about how to present his arguments without calling things ‘democratic’ in contexts where contemporaries didn’t use the term. She said she thought his three questions could be recharacterized thus: (Qs 1 and 3): What did Jews sometimes support and sometimes not the establishment broadly based representative institutions with an explicit commitment to upholding individual rights and liberties? and (Q2) What values and concepts did they associate with institutions of community self-government?
Francois said he wanted to throw a spanner in the works by calling attention to reasons why Jews didn’t necessarily support a politics of the mass. He noted that he would be focusing on eastern, Ashkenazic Jews. He liked the idea of a stateless nation, because he thought that was pretty much how they saw themselves. They didn’t think of themselves as a ‘minority’, which wasn’t a language of the time, but as a group with a constitutionally guaranteed status.
What did they look to for sources of political legitimacy? Above all, Jewish religious law, which determined how communities were run and the forms of accountability that prevailed. Systems of rule were relatively oligarchic, but there was a commitment to reasoned deliberation. It was the responsibility of a small elite to work out what was good for the group.
Religious and civil authority were separated. In relation to civil authority, faith was placed primarily in the efficacy of royal alliances. An important turning point was reached when Jews ceased to think royal alliances represented their best hope for the future. That point was reached by Jacoby Johann Jacoby – Wikipedia, Hollaenderski Léon Hollaenderski – Wikipedia and Cynski.
Jews were seen by others as clinging to an oligarchical, autocratic structure. They would invoke things like their Covenant with God as set out in Exodus.
He said he thought it was important to recognize the simultaneity of practices. Change didn’t sweep all before it. Older kinds of argument continued to be made. Women were long excluded.
One aspect of their thinking of themselves as a kind of polity was that they thought of themselves as entering into contractual relationships with other (stronger) polities. They sought concordats with states.
Discussion
David Rechter said that Poland was very different from other places. He wondered what hold these traditions they had as things modernized. These community ties were seen in the west as holding Jews back. He also wanted to question the idea of a ‘Jewish poitical tradition’ came out of which came out of Bar-Ilan University in Israel (and has been taken up by Michael Walzer) and he wasn’t persuaded of its relevance here.
Francois said that he certainly didn’t mean to essentialise it. He wasn’t talking about dogmatic principles, but at how Jewish communities ran in practice. He thought that the tradition was increasingly challenged from the eighteenth century.
Abigail wondered if the Hasidim didn’t also interrupt the narrative.
As well as thinking about democracy, she thought it would be worth thinking about aristocracy. Jewish elite figures could be more interested in being assimilated into the European aristocratic world than into democracy.
Till said he was intrigued and had been trying to think of large conceptual frameworks that might help. Of course not everyone valued democracy (and there was little consensus on what it is and whether it is to be valued prior to 1919). Some rejected it, preferring liberalism. He thought that in the conflict between aristocratic liberalism and plebeian democracy, and between those demanding individual and group rights, Jewish voices had an important role to play.
Francois thought one should pause on what was meant by equality. What did equality imply for group rights?
He also wanted to raise the issue of the relationship of territory to community. Diasporic communities often lacked a distinctive territory.
Avi wanted to raise the question of the rule of law and its relationship to democracy. Francois seemed to equate the two whereas in his period rule of law was strongly associated with absolutism.
Adam Sutcliffe presented his paper.
He was still trying to work out how the project worked, what its focus on the word meant if it was also possible to talk about contexts in which the word wasn’t used. Didn’t one have to operate with an idea about what democracy was to identify those contexts?
These questions are much on his mind because he is working on empathy and has taken a kind of Begriffsgeschichte approach to that, except that before a certain period they didn’t use the word, but had similar ideas.
In his view, there were two central themes to track: the idea of the demos (as shaped by classical ideas) and process.
He wanted to begin in the eighteenth century, with the issue of rabbinical authority, which became controversial at that time. He didn’t think democracy was invoked in that context. He thought that the role that Katz played in pushing Moses Mendelssohn to confront the issue of his defiance of authority in his own community was interesting. (Jews could solve the problem by moving under the authority of another rabbi, but that didn’t really solve the underlying authority issue). He thought the idea of a Jewish political tradition deeply problematic, because that tradition, insofar as it was one, was blown up from within.
Emancipation was the go-to topic for nineteenth-century Jewish thought. There were certainly radical thinkers who favoured democracy in that context, such as Heine and Borne, though neither can be seen as a representative figure. Jews sometimes came under attack in that tradition, as also from Marx, but this should be set in the context of a desire to overcome religion. A messianic tradition in its own way. Moses Hess developed a sequenced idea about this: a historical function of the Jews had been to develop capitalism, but as Zionists they faced the challenge of building a post-capitalist society.
In terms of historiographical framing, he found David Sorkin’s account of the history of Clermont Tonnerre’s remark — To the Jews as individuals everything, to the Jews as a nation nothing – very suggestive. Sorkin showed that the remark attracted relatively little attention at the time, but was widely cited at the end of the nineteenth century, when the issues it highlighted had become salient with the emergence of Zionism. Zionist thought tended to be anti-liberal, in that it offered a critique of inclusivist, individual-rights-based approaches, and thus of the ideas about democracy that had been linked with those. Liberals came to be criticized as fusionists.
Discussion
Joanna said her main interest in the session was in hearing what others had to say that if we attended to democracy as they used the word that had the potential to refocus our attention away from political structures to other issues – about inclusion and equality – which she thought had more purchase in the present context. In terms of regimes, people at this time tended to see the main choice as being between monarchy and republic: in that sense, they were Montesquieuans rather than Aristotelians. Democracy was more of a conditioning spirit – so you could have a democratic monarchy or a democratic republic, or you could dream of democracy as a kind of inclusive ethos associated with commitment to the wellbeing of all. She thought talk about democracy often wasn’t very institutional and pragmatic, but quite soft-edged.
She also said she agreed that questions about minority rights came more into focus in the final decades of the century. Earlier, although people could acknowledge a potential problem with systems which promoted the ‘tyranny of the majority’, she didn’t think they did a lot of thinking about whether there were mechanisms that could be used to protect groups within the society in democratic political systems. They just tended to say that individual rights were important and must be respected. But if that proved difficult to achieve when the people were in power, what then? Perhaps you needed more experience with something approximating the rule of the people to be spurred to get to grips with that. Those discussions were beginning to emerge in divided societies like Switzerland and Belgium at or just after the end of our period.
Abigail thought that Fischhof Adolf Fischhof – Wikipedia, a Hungarian Jew, might be interesting in that connection. He was certainly very inspired by Switzerland when he visited in 1869. In 1849 he said Just imagine if we give the vote to Jews and not to peasants, what a mess that would be!
Her people- liberal and radical Jews — thought that what they wanted to do was to remove the final remains of the ancien regime.
It was remarkable that at the start of the twentieth century, most Jews involved in international organisations were family members of the 1848 activists. She guessed that it showed if a family found a certain kind of niche for itself in public life, it was easy for their children to inherit it.
Adam noted current German fascination with such liberal Jewish ‘forebears’. But he thought that those people were broadly secularist, integrationist and anti-Zionist
General discussion.
Maciej said he had things to say about both papers.
To Adam: he thought the individual/collective distinction was crucial. Hungarians were happy to give individual rights but not collective rights: they didn’t want to have to recognise stateless nations as such.
He though Fischhof was a wonderful author. He recognised that centralisation had a key role in destroying feudalism, but thought that once that task was accomplished (mostly under Maria Theresa and Joseph II) you didn’t need it any more.
He thought the messianic tradition sketched sounded quite close to the ideas of Mickiewicz Adam Mickiewicz – Wikipedia who supported both emancipation and the retention of separate political traditions. He noted that both Jews and Poles saw themselves as messianic nations. (There was a bit debate among Polish historians about whether he was Jewish, but in any case his wife (?) was, so he had access to the tradition through her.
In relation to Francois’ paper, he was surprised to hear that Jews were sceptical about democracy if that gave them a chance of emancipation. Democracy tended to be attractive to people who wanted to change the status quo, like Poles.
He agreed that Cynski was a radical democrat. He thought that the Jews could play a role in modernising Poland. However, in tension with that was the fact that he was in Czartoryski’s camp. He thought that gentry democrats were stupid nationalists.
Till thought that the question of cultural/ethnic national sovereignty was crucial to the conversation. Gerald Stourzh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Stourzh) wrote eloquently about thatHe thought that the phrase ‘minority rights’ was not around at the time but came in only with the Paris Peace Treaty.
He had been doing reading around Jewish participation in 1848 and thought we were only just beginning to understand the richness of conversations that took place at that time. In Breslau, which he had studied, many leading radical democrats such as Sigismund Asch or David Honigmann were Jewish. They constantly debated the meaning of democracy in their newspapers. Ludwig Bamberger’s Mainzer Zeitung was also likely to be an interesting source.
He wondered to what extent the debates of this era found an echo in debates about social democracy in the later nineteenth century.
Francois responded to some of the comments made.
To Abigail, he said that he agreed that there was a Hasidic moment, but he thought it complicated things rather than disrupted them, because they were competing for the loyalty of the observant; they accepted the idea that there should be a separate community.
To Till, he agreed that the tension between individual and group rights was central. In 1848, most Poles backed Prussian powers, because they thought them more likely to do good things for Poland.
To Avi, he said he didn’t mean to equate the rule of law with democracy. By rule of law he meant something very practical: people believing it mattered to obey the law.
On Jan Cynski, he said that he wrote a play in 1836, Le roi et les paysans, which is 600 pages long in the published version so he’s not sure that it can ever have been performed. It was a historical fantasy in which the Jews of Poland rose up and crushed the aristocracy and the Church and re-established the royal alliance.
Eduardo said he had a small comment on the timing of the flourishing of terms. It sounded as if patterns in Germany were much in line with elsewhere, reviving from the 1830s-40s. Joanna said she thought in Germany the shift came more abruptly in 1848. Not the kind of build up through the 1830s you found in England and France. (In Poland it was earlier).
Mark noted that Jonathan Sperber in Rhineland Radicals that there were big variations from place to place in terms of how many Jews joined democratic societies: 14% in Mainz as compared to 1-4%everywhere else.
Avi in relation to fear of numbers and Tocqueville’s reflections on the issue, he wondered if there was a Jewish reception of Tocqueville. Abigail. Heinrich Jaques[was quite interested – wrote a life of Tocqueville in the early 1870s, in fact. Shesaid she thought it odd that Jews seemed to be completely invisible to Tocqueville. Michael said his analysis of Catholicism might present fruitful parallels.
Michael said he had a question for Francois, who had mentioned something about Jews and utopian socialism. He said he thought that could be true only of Saint Simon -Casimir Perrier eg was a Saint-Simonian, liking his ideas about credit.
Andriy wanted to comment on Francois’ paper. He quite liked the idea of the Jews as a stateless nation within the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. But the things he had said about that could apply just as much to any estate. So why not think of the Poles as an estate, rather than as a nation?
He thought anti-semitism was sometimes directed again the Jews because they were seen as like a pre-modern corporation. But East European socialists also disliked them, seeing them as culturally German.
In relation to words, he wondered about the implications of thinking about the specific form ‘democracy’ or close variants on that, when Slavophiles generated many vernacular equivalents.
He said that from the 1870s there were attempts to promote the idea of an eastern European Jewish nation as an ethnic group. That approach was foreign to German Jews.
Till said that when Gabriel Riesser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Riesser) went to the US after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, he wrote a travelogue that has many Tocquevillian themes. He was particularly struck to find the ideology of equality co-existing with slavery.
Adam responded to various comments.
To Maciej, on his suggestion that the language of minority rights came out of the First World War (David Rechter interjected that he thought it was in earlier use in Austria; that was where the peacemakers got it from). Adam said in his view the Jews were a non-state nation often within a stateless nation (Poland). They didn’t seek autonomy because God had taken away their state; God could change that state of affairs if he chose.
On messianism: he noted that the Jews had a role in many messianic visions – he continued to be interested in the question to which he had devoted a book, What are Jews for? And he thought Jews liked the idea of themselves as leaders of the future. Many reformist leaders had a messianic streak. Spinoza provided a kind of model that others tried to emuate.
Joanna said she’d like to throw in another theme on the back of that: history. Spinoza gave democracy as such a place in the history of the Jews. He thought they had a post-Mosaic phase that was both theocratic and democratic. At that time, perhaps a rather particular moment, there was much wider interest in the Hebrew Republic and its form: perhaps Spinoza’s use needed to be set in that particular context. She had looked at digital versions of nineteenth-century histories of the Jews by Jost and Graetz, and hadn’t found it there. Maybe this was about the declining appeal of Aristotelian categories…or something else.
Francois
To Michael, said in eastern Europe socialist ideas often didn’t come straight from France but rather from Germany via Russia, which complicates things.
There were exchanges between Francois, Andriy and David about the appropriateness of the terminology of ‘nation’.
Zionist theorists harked back to the early modern period, but in that context tended to overstate the autonomy of Jewish communities.
WHAT NEXT? Each person attending was invited to share their thoughts in turn.
Jean-Michel said he had three points.
He wondered what the overall trajectory was. Did democracy at some point become a numbers game – as manifest eg in the wave of plebiscites in the 1860s. And did worries about majoritarianism then kick in. Was Zionism a response to worries about the tyranny of the majority.
He wondered about entangled authority within Jewish communities. How long-lasting was corporatism? Did corporatism make rights look less important?
Maybe comparisons should be developed further east, with the Ottoman empire. Was that a comparator that contemporaries had in mind? Was the millet system seen as offering a possible model? When the Armenians got a constitution, westerners sometimes saw that as a democratising move. But, paradoxically, they thought the Ottomans needed to exert more central control to be an effective modern state. In Romania, Jews and Ottomans made common cause in developing a constitution, but in the end the constitution tied citizen rights to Christianity; the alliance broke down. When the issue of minority rights was aired at Lausanne, the Turks said they had invented the diagnosis.
Avi said he didn’t have much of a point of departure. He thought it would be good for the terminology to be clarified. He thought that the issue of how to make self-government work within larger states was an interesting theme.
Joanna said there was a question of how much space the chapter should cover. It made sense for it to have a comparison between Germany and ‘Poland’ at its heart (complicated though it might be to specify each side of the comparison), because they represented different kinds of Jewish milieu, and were also places in which patterns of talk about democracy differed. It wouldn’t be possible to cover the whole region in any meaningful way. But there might be a point in looking at some other places where there was quite a lot of talk about democracy: eg Denmark where apparently many of the most vocal proponents of democracy in 1848 were Jews, or Belgium, where there was more talk about democracy than in the Netherlands, it seemed – and a vibrant exile culture. (Switzerland would be another possibility, though we don’t yet have much of a handle on who said what about democracy there, esp. how much and what Swiss liberals said about it. But some Swiss cities were still excluding Jews down to the 1860s. That was a place where corporatist traditions were long-enduring – but not in ways that were helpful to Jews].
Adam thought it would be interesting to look at Jewish illiberalism, though he didn’t think that was where this project should go. He wondered how much it was allowable to talk about France. Joanna said France had to be a presence in every volume, because everyone looked to France. But the focus had to be chiefly on the impact of France, not France in its own right.
Francois said he was very interested in the impact of place and moment. He didn’t think the chapter could properly include discussion of the Jewish national movement, because that fell outside the timespan. He thought there was less democratic liberalism in the east, but what there was was interesting.
Abigail thought Jews shouldn’t be corralled into just one chapter: they should have a place in other chapters too. Every chapter could have a Jewish element! Jewish women hadn’t really been mentioned, but could be given a place, eg Fanny Lewald. She wondered if Polish emigres in Paris still counted as culturally Polish.
Maciej said that Polish historians generally took it as read that after the failure of the 1831 rising Poland moved to Paris. It would be good to develop a comparison between those who left and those who stayed.
Till thanked Abigail for mentioning Fanny Lewald. Her account of 1848 was one of the most perceptive –and it was also widely read! It was worth looking at things directed to wider readerships and not just Jewish publics. He noted for example that the Offenbach reform Rabbi Salomon Formstecher published a series of articles during 1848 in the city’s general newspaper.
Andriy said he had a limited amount to contribute given that the book wouldn’t include a Ukrainian chapter. He thought that it was going to be important to register complexity within the ‘Jewish community’, which for example included peasants. Francois noted in that connection that Jan Cynski wrote two books about Cossacks and was proud to have done this.
David thought it would be taxing to design a layout for the chapter. The question of which Jews were to be covered clearly had to be clarified. In Austria, in a context of federated nationalism, the royal alliance held for longer. In response to a question about how Jews could fit into a federation, he said that it was possible to imagine non-territorial national elements.
Mark, responding in part to Abigail, said it was likely that Jews and also women and indeed exiles would figure in a ‘thematic’ chapter on the everyday lives of democrats. That chapter would also provide an opportunity to think about intersections between people, places and times.
Erik said he had come to listen and learn and had nothing special to contribute.
Eduardo said that was really true of him too, but he was interested in how time-patterns compared from place to place. He was also interested in the idea of discourse communities that might form among people who didn’t have a state to call their own, and in the relationship between ‘democrats’ and the hierarchical organization of the (religious) communities they belonged to – as could be the case of liberals in Catholic Spanish America in the 19th century who, while considered themselves Catholics, were opposed to the interference of the Church’s hierarchy in politics. He also noted that one Latin American writer from Venezuela, Juan Germán Roscio, in his Triunfo de la libertad sobre el despotismo (1817) developed ideas about democracy on the strength of his reading of the Bible: in one of his chapters, ‘Democracy and anarchy among the Hewbrews’, he praised the direct democratic forms conducted in the assemblies of the ancient world, which he presented as evidence that ‘rigurous democracies’ were not monsters against the social order, as suggested by tyrants.
Michael noted that one Saint-Simonian dream was of a union between west and east. He thought that the east in this context could be figured as Jewish. He wondered if the chapter could be structured around a variety of individuals: that might be one way of solving some of the design problems. He wondered what people thought they might be emancipated into: civil rights? Of some new form of human life?
Sietske said she had also come really to listen and learn. She noted that not much had been said about the substance of integration policies: did community leaders think they should proceed by encouraging language acquisition, providing education, new community governance structures or what? She also said that a good person to consult for more insight into Jews in the Netherlands might be Irene Zwiep Irene E. Zwiep | Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (upenn.edu).
Final discussion
Abigail suggested that another person of interest would be Armand Lévy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armand_L%C3%A9vy_(activist). Relevant because of the Polish dimension (Mickiewicz’s secretary) and the fact that he was a proper radical democrat.
There was some discussion of issues of vocabulary.
Joanna said she thought the project would have to wrestle with the question of how to bring vernacularisations of democracy – Volksregierung, Volksherrschaft etc into the picture. The issue wasn’t peculiar to this region, but was perhaps esp acute in this place, because it was a non-romance region, in which the Latinate ‘democracy’ might sound esp foreign. (In German writings circa 1800 it’s sometimes written in Latin script, marking it as a loan word). Her impression was that in the Netherlands in the 1790s vernacularisations of democracy were common (though historians writing in English tended to render them ‘democracy’, whereas by the mid nineteenth century, one was more likely to find a Latinate form. There was good reason to include vernacularisations – on the other hand, they couldn’t be treated as exact equivalents, because even if sometimes proferred as straight translations, they could acquire their own baggage. In England in the nineteenth century ‘popular government’ could be presented as a translation of ‘democracy’, but nonetheless the two terms had different baggage and were used in different ways. The issue had to be acknowledged, and the shape and meaning of vernacularising practices considered, but there was therefore reason not just to broaden the search field to include all such terms indiscriminately. An appropriate place had to be found to consider them.
Francois emphasised that we needed to attend to the mobility of jews and their communication networks.
Maciej said in Polish the term democracy was often vernacularised. He had to hand a book on the phraseology of Polish romanticism, which dated the earliest use of the term to the sixteenth century.
Till said there was lots of talk about Volksherrschaft in the 1840s. It connoted universal suffrage and majority rule.
He thought there would also be merit in considering counter-concepts, such as aristocracy and reaction. The meaning of the term was revealed, or defined, by its counter-concepts.
Speakers, attendees and organisers were all thanked.
Re-imagining Democracy 