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Elias on Anti-Semitism: Zionism or Sociology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2017
Abstract
This paper proposes to revisit the intellectual trajectory of Norbert Elias on the basis of an article published by the sociologist in a local Jewish newspaper in 1929 and entitled “On the Sociology of German Anti-Semitism.” It argues that in this seemingly circumstantial text, Elias asserts his decision to favor sociology, which had come to replace and envelop his engagement in the Zionist youth movement Blau-Weiss. This is evident in the article's somewhat ambiguous final sentence, where Elias presents German Jews with an alternative: collective emigration to Palestine or a lucid vision drawn from a sociological diagnosis of the situation. The paper begins by situating Elias's text within the range of analyses of anti-Semitism in 1920s Germany, comparing its approach to Zionism with that of Franz Oppenheimer. It then contextualizes its relationship to the sociology of Karl Mannheim: Elias was Mannheim's assistant in Frankfurt and his approach contrasted with the perspective developed in the same time and place by the Frankfurt school. Finally, the paper shows that Elias's sociological distantiation would imperceptibly take the place of the political distantiation that had centered on Zionism—a scientific movement that implied erasing from his memory the political Zionism he had long supported. A new French translation of Elias's 1929 text, also by Danny Trom, is included as an appendix.
- Type
- Sociology and History
- Information
- Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 71 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 249 - 289
- Copyright
- Copyright © Éditions EHESS 2017
References
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50. For the rest of his life, Mannheim would remain nostalgic about his experience during the immediate postwar years as part of Budapest's “Sunday Circle,” a group of young Hungarian Jews that included György Lukács, Béla Balázs, and Michael and Karl Polanyi. It was there that he first developed his notion of culture as a produced totality, which, in that period of crisis and alienation, needed to be subjectively reappropriated. See Perivolaropoulou, Nia, “Karl Mannheim et sa generation,” Mil neuf cent 10, no. 1 (1992): 165–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This youthful experience is in some ways similar to Elias's participation in the Breslau Blau-Weiss.
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62. Fromm introduced his friends Löwenthal and Simon to the rabbi Nehemias Anton Nobel. Simon, who enlisted as a military volunteer during the First World War, also defended a philosophy thesis at Heidelberg. He subsequently became close to Buber, with whom he founded Brith Shalom, an association intended to promote a binational political solution in Palestine. In 1928, Simon emigrated to Palestine and taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Another figure who frequented the circle that grew up around Rabbi Nobel at this time was Siegfried Kracauer.
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72. The preparatory notes for the lectures Mannheim delivered during this period were found in his archives in England: “Introduction to the Social Forms of the Present and Their History,” dated April 20, 1931, and reproduced in David Kettler and Colin Loader, eds., Sociology as Political Education: Karl Mannheim (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 159–63.
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76. Alongside his contributions in the domain of Jewish social philosophy and a mystical and anarchistic version of Zionism, Buber was known among contemporary sociologists for having founded and directed Die Gesellschaft, a very influential series of monographs in various domains of the social sciences. The volumes included Oppenheimer's Der Staat, which went through several re-editions, as well as works by Werner Sombart on the proletariat (1906), Georg Simmel on religion (1906), Gustav Landauer on revolution (1907), Ferdinand Tönnies on morals (1909), and Eduard Bernstein on the labor movement (1910).
77. Cited in Kettler, Meja, and Loader, Karl Mannheim and the Legacy of Max Weber, 71.
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92. Cited in Neubauer, Sebastian, “Elements of a Critical Theory of Zionism: The Jewish State, the Disastrous History and the Changing Functionality of Antisemitism in the Late Thought of Max Horkheimer,” Constelaciones. Revista de teoría critica 4 (2012): 119–32Google Scholar. See also Rabinbach, Anson, “The Frankfurt School and the ‘Jewish Question,’ 1940–1970,” in Against the Grain: Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times, ed. Mendelsohn, Ezra, Hoffman, Stefani, and Cohen, Richard I. (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 225–76Google Scholar.
93. Jacobs, Jack, The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 138 Google Scholar. See in particular chap. 3, “Critical Theorists and the State of Israel.”
94. Kilminster, Richard, “Norbert Elias’ Post-Philosophical Sociology: From ‘Critique’ to Relative Detachment,” Sociological Review 51 (2011): 91–105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
95. Elias, Reflections on a Life, 37–40.
96. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale, 1982), 455 Google Scholar.
97. Bernd Weiler, “E Pluribus Unum? The Kakanian Intellectual and the Question of Cultural Pluralism” (paper given at the symposium “The Contours of Legitimacy in Central Europe: New Approaches in Graduate Studies,” European Studies Centre, St. Antony's College, Oxford, 2002), http://users.ox.ac.uk/~oaces/conference/papers/Bernd_Weiler.pdf, p. 6.
98. Since ideology and utopia share a noncongruence with reality, Mannheim posited that this “functional correlation” could serve as a starting point. This is emphasized by Ricœur, Paul, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 2–3 Google Scholar.
99. Katz's thesis on the emergence of a Jewish Bildungselite in the eighteenth century and its assimilationist ideology, entitled “Die Entstehung der Judenassimilation in Deutschland und deren Ideologie,” was published in English under the title Emancipation and Assimilation: Studies in Modern Jewish History (Farnborough: Westmount, 1972).
100. Kettler, David and Meja, Volker, “Karl Mannheim's Jewish Question,” Religions 3, no. 2 (2012), 228–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
101. Katz, Jacob, With My Own Eyes: The Autobiography of an Historian (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1995)Google Scholar, 104–5: “This was nothing more than a momentary flash, an idea that faded just as rapidly as it had come.” In their article “Karl Mannheim's Jewish Question,” Kettler and Meja doubt Katz's interpretation that his doctoral supervisor, isolated and delivering sparsely attended lectures, was prepared to contemplate absolutely any solution, remarking that this encounter occurred at a moment when Mannheim was considering an offer to join the University in Exile in New York and that on his death he bequeathed his library to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJ). It should also be noted that the HUJ was a desirable destination for German sociologists who had been removed from their universities in 1933, as demonstrated by the letter Oppenheimer addressed to Albert Einstein, a member of the HUJ board of directors. Warmly recommending his son, Ludwig Oppenheimer, who had been driven out of the Hochschule für Politik, the recently retired sociologist also disqualifies in passing his own student Adolphe Löwe—who at that time was close to the Institut für Sozialforschung—for being “too economistic,” as well as Mannheim, his successor in Frankfurt, whom he judges “too philosophical”: http://www.fb03.uni–frankfurt.de/54043985/Oppenheimer_Chronik_06_02_2015.pdf, p. 137 (July 12, 1933).
102. Elias, Reflections on a Life, 28.
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This is a translation of: Elias sur l’antisémitisme: le sionisme ou la sociologie