The Nobel’s Forgotten Jews

Jews around the world (but not very many others) have condemned the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s selection of Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, who has denounced Israel as a perpetrator of genocide, as this year’s winner of the Peace Prize. The American Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations has declared that the Nobel Committee has “diminished the legacy of the prize and betrayed the principles it was established to honor.” The European Jewish Congress has said much the same, and the World Jewish Congress’s president Ronald S. Lauder has weighed in with the judgement that this “decision discredits the Peace Prize itself.”

Lauder, I suspect, is overstating his case. It’s hard to do much to discredit a prize whose recipients are a mixed lot and which, in any case, gets so little attention beyond the day it is awarded and the day its winner gives a speech in Oslo. Maybe I’m wrong, but test yourself: How many of the winners over the past half century can you name? How many of them, for that matter, were Jewish? I’ve done some testing and gotten the sense that not many people remember that Henry Kissinger, Menahem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres (along with Yasser Arafat) all received the Peace Prize between 1973 and 1994. What even fewer people know is who were the first Jews to win it.

It happened in 1911. Tobias Michael Carel Asser, a legal scholar and a Sephardi from the Netherlands, and Alfred Hermann Fried, a proponent of pacifism and an Ashkenazi from Austria, shared the prize. Both men were very marginal Jews, and there is no compelling reason to try to carve out a place for either of them in Jewish history, but Fried, at least, related to his Jewishness in a manner worthy of note.

Coined by a French peace activist in 1901 and quickly popularized, the term “pacifism” is only a few years older than the Nobel Prize. Alfred Fried was a pacifist avant la lettre, a follower of the leading German peace activist, Bertha von Suttner (who won the Peace Prize six years before him). He published her internationally best-selling novel Die Waffen Nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!) in 1892, founded the German Peace Society together with her, and remained loyal to her throughout the years, despite some disagreement. Fried wasn’t a Marxist, but he developed, under Marx’s influence, a deterministic theory that made him confident that the victory of pacifism was near, even if small wars still lay ahead, and he expounded it in many large tomes.

He clearly didn’t anticipate anything like the Great War that began only three years after he won his Nobel Peace Prize. I’ve been reading his wartime diaries lately and have rarely come across a more painful account of what it’s like to live in a world radically unlike the one you imagined you lived in until just yesterday. Quoting the very cursory but still unsettling reports emanating from the western and the eastern fronts in August of 1914, he recalls how much he had relished his recent visits with fellow pacifists in Belgium and France, and mourns what is happening to them now. On September 13, he dourly notes that “according to our schedule, peace sermons were to be delivered in all churches today to mark the World Peace Congress. Instead, however, services of supplication for victory are being held in all churches today by order of the Archbishop of Vienna.”

On September 21, he writes that “the battle in the West appears to be yielding no result at all. I infer from this the following: yesterday I read that the German fortifications were said to be impregnable; today I read that the French and British have gone on the defensive. . . . In other words, they have buried themselves, and are now waiting for favorable opportunities . . . This can no longer be called a battle. Such a battle had begun, but now, precisely according to Bloch, it has fizzled out.” This is obviously a first stab at describing the trench warfare that was soon to become infamous. But who is this Bloch?

Just about every history of World War I makes reference near its outset to the Warsaw-based banker and “King of the Railways” Jan Bloch, as one of the two authors who most accurately imagined, in the decades before it took place, what a twentieth-century world war would be like. Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion is perhaps a little better remembered today, but Bloch’s 6-volume The Future of War in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations and its Economic Consequences (1898) was more prophetic. It’s no wonder that he was on Fried’s mind.

Bloch would probably be a better-known figure in Jewish history, too, were it not for his conversion to Christianity at the age of 15. But this didn’t prevent him from arguing strongly against the extension of the Russian May Laws of 1882 to Polish territory and against Czarist anti-Jewish policy in general. According to Antony Polonsky, he “in some sense regarded himself as a Jew until his death,” even though he gave up all “links to the organized Jewish community” and his children married into the Polish aristocracy.

Compared to Bloch, Fried was a faithful Jew. He was a dues-paying member of Vienna’s Jewish community organization, generally lived in Jewish neighborhoods and socialized with other Jews (though he didn’t marry one). When an Evangelical pacifist ally suggested that he become a Christian in order to counteract any perceptions that pacifism was a Jewish movement. Fried was indignant:

It is not the religious community that ties me to Jewry, because I have experienced almost nothing of Jewish belief in my education and Jewish belief is alien to my worldview. What causes me to hold out is the current social situation of the Jews. In this time of repression and persecution, I would see freeing myself from a community to which I belong through birth and heritage as desertion during wartime. As an intellectual, I believe I have the duty to persevere with the oppressed minority… I could certainly benefit personally from conversion, because my Jewishness has always been a hindrance in my career and always will be… But I would never have become a pacifist if I had not found it greatly gratifying to fight and swim against the current, if I had not felt a personal calling to combat the [medieval] mentality that is still hegemonic in our time.”.

Still, Fried didn’t combat this mentality as actively as Bloch, who had converted. Early on, Katherine Sorrels tells us in her book Cosmopolitan Outsiders, Bertha von Suttner had encouraged him “to defend himself publicly against attacks in the antisemitic press, which he never did.” Why not? “His reluctance to engage,” Sorrels argues, “was a standard liberal stance rooted in the belief that antisemitism represented a resurgence of a medieval prejudice that would subside if it were ignored and if its root causes were addressed through progressive social reforms.”

Fried spent most of the war in exile, in Switzerland, and died back in Vienna in 1921 at the age of 57. Had he lived longer, he would no doubt have been surprised, to see how quickly antisemitism attained dimensions that neither Jan Bloch nor anyone else had anticipated.