Over the course of the 20th century, Jews would increasingly come to believe that ‘there is nothing purely spiritual that stands on its own … Everything spiritual requires a necessary material basis.’ Eventually, there would be those, such as the Englishman Israel Zangwill, who considered themselves adherents to ‘a religion of pots and pans’, and others who identified Judaism as a faith based on ‘bagels and lox’. Only half-jokingly, the German anarchist Gustav Landauer claimed in 1921 that what distinguished ‘the modern “conscious” Jew from a German was that when the latter writes about … the conservation of energy, … he writes about the conservation of energy, but when the conscious Jew writes about the conservation of energy, he writes about the conservation of energy and Judaism’ (emphasis mine). Soon, the Jewish materialism of the Russians could be found among western European Jews residing in England and Germany.
Therefore, only a radical reclaiming of the physical world on the part of Jews could ensure that they would be protected and given a fair and equal share of resources. Over no amount of time would Jews living in Russia ever be granted greater rights and opportunities. And finally, they no longer believed that history was headed in a positive direction. The materialists had also given up hope that the state could protect them and ensure their economic wellbeing. Instead it was something attached to their bodies and expressed through one’s relationship to land, labour and resources. Judaism was not a religion, like Protestantism. They all rejected the notion that Judaism was based on abstract metaphysical theories (Scholasticism), rituals (Hasidism), study (Mitnagdim), and ethics and reason (Enlighteners). The Jewish revolutionaries in 1870s Russia who embraced the idea of materialism shared a number of critical assumptions.
What made Jews different was a certain socioeconomic dynamic that distinguished them from their neighbours. Jewish particularity was based on specific historical economic differences between Jews and others. The materialists claimed that a theory of Judaism, defined by the way people related to land, labour and bodies, had been lying dormant within Jewish literature – in Hasidic texts, the Bible, Spinoza’s philosophy – and could now be clearly recognised and fully articulated. For many Jews living in this period, ‘materialism’ was a worldview that brought into focus latent Jewish ideas and beliefs about the physical world. Around then, a group of young Russian Jewish radicals began to identify Judaism with materialism, and to theorise about what they called – whether in Russian, German, Yiddish or Hebrew – the ‘material’ (material’nii, materiell, gashmi, ?omri) aspects of the Universe. In the 1870s European Judaism underwent an intellectual revolution. Though compelling in theory, the deal became more fraught as rampant anti-Semitic violence in eastern Europe continued to remind Jews that, no matter how much they tried to look like ‘everyone else’, their bodies were marked as Jewish. If only Jews could fit into the spiritual boxes established by the European Protestant elite, they would be accepted, or at least tolerated in the public sphere as Frenchmen, Germans or Englishmen. There was plenty of Christian bias to combat, encapsulated by images of Jewish avarice and materialism such as Shylock’s greedy hands and Rothschild’s beard in the form of snake-like tentacles.
If Jewishness was kept invisible and private, they wagered, then Jews could become citizens and professionals, and be granted equal access to the material resources made available to any other member of society. Be ‘a man in the street and a Jew in the home’: a common piece of advice that liberal Jews often gave their co-religionists in the 19th century.
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