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Geography of Hope: Exile, The Enlightenment, Disassimilation, by Pierre Birnbaum, trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. 479 pp. $65.00.
Pierre Birnbaum’s Geography of Hope is as much a work of intellectual history as a historical sociology of knowledge centered on the development of Jewish Studies. It focuses on leading Jewish scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and how they related to Judaism in their lives and in their work. Birnbaum’s pantheon alone makes the text enticing, with chapters on Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Raymond Aron, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Michael Waltzer, and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. His line of interrogation is animated by a set of concerns about the Enlightenment, human rights, assimilation, national identity, Jewish self-conceptions, and antisemitism that have featured in his many other volumes. His take on the tangled issues he raises are evident in the subtitles of his Introduction and Conclusion: he aims to write a “Counterhistory” of “Exile, the Enlightenment, Disassimilation.” In doing so, he wants to glean hope for Jews and Judaism in the new millennium, but what his monograph actually conveys is a cautious disquiet.
Birnbaum’s argument is that the movement of assimilation had its corresponding epistemology in the supposedly value-neutral universality, objective rationality, and scientificity of the social sciences that relegated Jewish particularity to the margins. There was, however, a cohort of Eastern European immigrants who articulated a counter-tradition to the enlightenment/maskillim model. “It’s from this part of Eastern Europe,” he maintains, “not yet radically influenced by the Enlightenment, where assimilation often remained an almost inconceivable strategy even if it sometimes took broad strides toward acculturation and urbanization, that a number of the predecessors of contemporary Jewish studies seemed to come” (p. 23). He wants to embrace this counter-viewpoint as a means for the “‘decolonization’ of Jewish history within emancipating and assimilationist European history” (p. 33), and in this manner to support a more radical Enlightenment project that Yerushalmi calls “Lithuanian rationalism” (p. 31). In tracing this counterhistory via a set of carefully chosen intellectual figures, Birnbaum’s “book takes us on a journey through disparate diasporic societies, from the Germany of the nineteenth century to the United States of today, passing through France and Great Britain” (p. 32).
In each of his chapters, thick with his wide reading in many languages and literatures (the minutely annotated notes alone take up nearly 100 pages of the work), he stakes out his place in the debates on these Jewish thinkers. He starts by traversing the well-trudged territory of Marx’s writing on the Jewish Question, which he reinserts into the specific discursive, familial, social, and political framework that shaped Marx’s public and private scribbles on Jews and Judaism. Birnbaum elegantly counterposes Heinrich Graetz’s project to that of the father of scientific socialism and modern sociology. Graetz thus becomes the paradigm of the counter-tradition that Birnbaum seeks to commemorate. His chapter on another founder of sociology, Durkheim, is based less on his context than on closely re-reading his published work for a more careful appreciation of his Judaic references, and juxtaposing them with his personal letters and family contacts. This attentive reading of Durkheim’s biography and corpus reveals that Jewish sociability and his own internal dialogue about his Jewishness was a consistent preoccupation, even when it was not apparently central to his work. Birnbaum’s subtle interpretation based on this subtext reveals that the dichotomies within the historiography on Durkheim ought to collapse. Writing about a third seminal sociologist, the “committed observer” Raymond Aron, Birnbaum’s argument is once more that regardless of his thoroughgoing integration, we find him constantly nurturing in his inner being a sense of connection to both an individual and collective notion of his Jewishness, evinced especially in opposition to the most nefarious forms of antisemitism. Crossing the Rhine again, and then the Atlantic, his fourth treatment of a sociologist is a Rezeptionsgeschichte of Georg Simmel’s influential conception of the stranger in his interactionist sociology and how this impacted the development of sociology in the United States.
Birnbaum’s complex analysis of the always-complex Hannah Arendt considers how she challenges “all at the same time religious orthodoxy, Zionism, assimilation, the definition of oneself through the gaze of the Other, but also semibiological Jewishness” (p. 234). To get at this, he examines the ways in which Rachel Varhagen was a symbolic twin, a specter that haunted Arendt’s own self-questioning, which ultimately had a clear logic: when Jews were collectively in danger (1933–1945 and in 1967), Arendt insisted upon responding as a Jew: “for if they attack you as a Jew, you have to respond as a Jew, you cannot reply, ‘Excuse me, I’m not a Jew; I am a human being’” (p. 213). But free from this overt persecution, Arendt’s Jewishness mattered little. Nonetheless as Steven Aschheim has so aptly put it, while she “knew very little about the body of Judaism itself, [she] was the great explicator of ‘Jewishness’ and its psychological machinations. She highlighted its ambivalences, multiple loyalties, fissures, breakdowns, and partial reconstitutions” (p. 222).
If Arendt’s intellectual point of identification was Rachel Varnhagen, then Isaiah Berlin’s was the philosophical project of Herder, another forerunner of the counter-enlightenment. Many commentators on Berlin have entirely overlooked the Jewish dimension of his work, as is the case with the literature on several of the personalities Birnbaum considers. But “Berlin’s internal ‘suffering,’” as a result of his Jewish legacy, Birnbaum insists, “which never stops gnawing at him,” is at the source of his important body of work (p. 287). His chapter on Berlin—as well as those on Marx, Durkheim, and Arendt—serve as a form of textual exorcism to banish his own demons in his adoption of the counter-tradition he has warily taken as his own. We see this when Birnbaum fears those moments when “Berlin almost becomes the echo of the prejudices of the nationalist extreme Right, actually similar, from this point of view, to . . . Herder” (p. 286).
Walzer and Yerushalmi, the last two giants that Birnbaum considers, provide the way out of these quandaries. Walzer, the “left-wing Burke,” the “connected critic” of systemic egalitarianism, proponent of pluralism like Berlin and Arendt, articulated an exit in his theory of reiteration, whereby “‘each nation can have its own prophecy, just as it has its own history, its own deliverance, its own quarrel with God’” akin to the Jewish trajectory. Walzer’s path, suggests Birnbaum, ultimately gets beyond “the opposition between universalism and particularism” while also avoiding “falling into the trap of relativism” (p. 318). Ultimately Birnbaum’s preoccupations in chapter after chapter culminate in how he steers through Yerushalmi’s oeuvre: “From one book to another, the question remains the same: how to account for the persistence of Jewish identity through the centuries when it comes up against so many constraints, so much violence and hatred, when it experiences the temptations of assimilation, of full-fledged entrance into open societies that offer it the opportunity to disappear?” (p. 332). The virtue of Birnbaum’s book is to navigate the coordinates of some of the most significant responses to that question by leading Jewish scholars with extraordinary erudition and insight.
Jonathan Judaken
University of Memphis
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