“Look at yourself in the mirror! Shed your tribal attributes that are known to be odious to our countrymen.” — Walter Rathenau
Four points about this odious and effective urging of German-speaking Jews to assimilate, written in Austria in 1897:
First, the message was published one week before a pogrom on Leopoldsgasse, in the Leopoldstadt neighborhood of Vienna, the city that thought of itself strictly as the city of theater, music and art. Rioters physically attacked Jewish civilians and demolished storefronts by throwing bricks and large stones. Theater, music and art — but not for Jews.
Second, the message was published in an article o so ironically titled, “Hear, O Israel!” Not, Hear, O Israel, the L-rd our G-d the L-rd is One — but, “Hear, O Israel! Stop being Jewish.”
Third, the message was understood. One year after the pogrom, the Austrian JewArnold Schoenberg entered a church on the Dorotheergasse and converted to Christianity, emerging as Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg.
Fourth, directly opposite Schoenberg’s own family’s living quarters, the pogromists smashed the windows of a grocery and looted it. Schoenberg lived on the very street where the pogromists ran wild. He knew exactly what was happening.
Apparently, this brutal evidence of Jew-hatred in Vienna spurred not an urge to defend the Jewish people, not a surge of Jewish pride, not a denunciation of the hatred and violence, but an urge to abandon Judaism and the Jewish people. One year after the pogrom, Arnold Schoenberg, the composer of atonal music, the “emancipator of dissonance,” no longer existed as a Jew.
This was assimilation in Western Europe, particularly in Austria and Germany: convert out.
This is the story of countless biographies, histories and studies of a certain dominant slice of West European Jewry, which welcomed political emancipation, often to the extent that Jews emancipated themselves from their own faith, quite literally and formally. One such study is the early chapters in Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance, from which we have quoted above.
Contrast the Leopoldstadt neighborhood of Vienna in 1897 with Amsterdam in 2024.
Both cities witnessed anti-Jewish violence. In both cities, the Jew haters let loose. But how the Jewish response in each city differed! The pogrom in Amsterdam sent the message to some of its Jewish population that the city is no longer safe for Jews, and that it would prudent to emigrate. Or, the pogrom sent a different message to other parts of Amsterdam’s Jewish population: Speak up. Stand up. Fight back. Assert Jewish rights! Neither response in Amsterdam in 2024 was the message received in Vienna in 1897. That message was: duck, hide, shed your Jewishness, convert out; stay in the city, but eradicate your identity.
There are two critical factors in the radically different responses, separated by 127 years, by Jews in Amsterdam and Vienna.
The first factor is Israel. Israel has given world Jewry a backbone. Persecution is met with brushback, resentment, principled opposition, not cowardice. In 1897, Jews had no political power anywhere. Even in the United States, the Jewish community had not emerged as a powerful political or economic force. The existence of Jewish political power in Israel has given Jews in trouble around the world, such as Jews in Amsterdam on Nov. 7, the will and the confidence to say to its government: No! This will not be tolerated.
The second critical factor is the Holocaust. This watershed event in Jewish history has given the world an anti-standard against which violence and hate, especially anti-Jewish violence and hate, is credibly denounced and rejected. In 1897, anti-Semities, one of whose spokesman, Vienna’s mayor Kurt Lueger (a model for Hitler), could still spew their hatred without anyone knowing the ultimate consequence thereof. The Holocaust changed that. The possible implications of the pogrom in Amsterdam this year are perfectly clear, not only for the Jewish people but for civilization.
So no, no Jew in Amsterdam or elsewhere is figuring out how to spare himself this disease of anti-Semitism by entering the nearest church to renounce his faith.
And Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg? Oh yes, after his conversion, his career as a composer took off. Consult Eichler’s Time’s Echo (and many other works) for the details. Schoenberg’s conversion, he said, promised him redemption “from thousands of years of humiliation, shame and disgrace.”
This self-abasement, he was sadly to learn, took him only so far, his professional achievements notwithstanding. Convert or no, for the Nazis he was still a Jew. His music was “degenerate.” His fate was clear: On vacation in France in 1933, he was warned not to return to his beloved Vienna, as Hitler came to power. Schoenberg’s home, his culture, his language, his plans, and even his new religious identity, all came to an end. It turned out that Mayor Kurt Lueger and the pogromists on his own Leopoldsgasse understood Vienna better than he did. It turned out that his “shedding of the tribal attributes known to be odious to his countrymen” did not help. It turned out that the real odiousness was just the opposite: the assimilation itself.
Schoenberg got the message. Like many, the Nazis disabused him of the notion that the renunciation of his Jewish faith could spare him the fate of the Jewish people. He “rejoined” the Jewish religion in a synagogue in Paris in 1933 and ended up an exile in the US. His post-pogrom trajectory is a cautionary tale, an example of the futility of assimilation as a response to anti-Semitism.
© IJN 2024
