The Litterateur and the Cultural Zionist: a WWI Footnote

I first brushed up against Georg Brandes because Ahad Ha’am briefly mentioned him in his great 1902 essay on “The Spiritual Revival.” Denouncing the idea that anything written by any Jew in any language was a part of “our national literature,” Ahad Ha’am dismissed such things as “Brandes’ critical essays on all the literatures in the world except the Hebrew.”

Georg Morris Cohen Brandes (1842-1927) was a widely admired Danish literary scholar who, among many other things, played a very large role in propelling the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche to the center of Europe’s intellectual life. So when he took on Brandes, Ahad Ha’am was punching up, and probably not delivering much of a blow. I doubt that Brandes had any idea what an obscure Hebrew essayist in Russia was saying about him, and if he did, he certainly wouldn’t have cared, since being in the Jewish canon (or anything else Jewish) meant little or nothing to him. Which is why I was recently surprised to find his name in a volume entitled The Jews in the Eastern War Zone, produced in 1916 by the American Jewish Committee to highlight the wartime travails of Eastern European Jewry. On page 43 of this short book, its unnamed authors tell a grim story of how false accusations of spying for the Austrian invaders Jews in the border town of Zamosti led the Russian army to hang five Jews, and to the near execution of seven more in the fall of 1914. A footnote tells us that the source for this information was “Georg Brandes in ‘Politiken,’ Nov., 1914.”

Politken was (and still is) a leading Danish newspaper, but Brandes’ article is available in English translation, in his now forgotten 1917 collection of essays, The World at War. In “Conditions in Russian Poland: Incitement to Pogroms,” he put things in context. After professing his longstanding admiration for the Polish people and its longing for liberty, he described and decried their pre-war antisemitism as well as (with limited accuracy) that of the Russians. Then he related how the Poles were turning against their Jewish neighbors in the war zone. “The Judas legend,” Brandes wrote, “may without exaggeration be called the most imbecile that ever sprung out of the Dark Ages.” But it lay behind all the spurious allegations and actions against Jews that he reviewed, including the one cited in The Jews in the Eastern War Zone.

Brandes followed up his reportage with a plea to the Russian Poles (but not to the Russian authorities):

How could they, who are fighting for liberty, after years of oppression turn and oppress the only race that (for its misfortune) is in their power! The only race that has suffered a dozen times more than they! And the only one that is so strong it cannot be crushed by oppression.

Brandes anticipated the likely response to what he had had to say:

Probably, in reply to my appeal to the Poles, it will be explained it is because of my race I now make this appeal. Personally my descent has influenced me so little that I have been frequently attacked in national Jewish papers and magazines as a renegade of national times and faith.

Even last spring during my stay in America I was perpetually attacked in the Jewish-American papers as “the callous renegade of the Jews.” That was all nonsense, as are most printed assertions, but at least it shows that is not because of my blood but because of my opinions that I now raise my voice. My sympathy is not for the Jews as Jews, but for the oppressed and suffering.

I doubt Ahad Ha’am read Brandes’s article (either when it appeared in Danish in 1914, which I have no reason to believe he understood, or after it was published in English three years later, when he was living in London). If he had, he might have grudgingly admired his attempt to address what Ahad Ha’am himself saw as the insoluble “problem of the Jews.” But I’m sure that even if he did he would also have regarded the way in which Brandes discussed his Jewish identity as clear evidence of the greater, spiritual threat to Jewish survival.