Abstract
Reviewed by Joan Braune , Mount Mary University, USA
Jack Jacobs’s The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism will be a major resource for many of us working in Critical Theory. Even-handed, clearly presented, and extensively researched, with seventy-eight pages of footnotes, the book’s overarching thesis is both simple and urgent: Jacobs contests the popular view among some Critical Theory scholars that Horkheimer’s generation of the Frankfurt School was Jewish in “blood” only. Those who dismiss Marcuse’s or Adorno’s connection with Judaism as practically insignificant, for example, are missing a basic attribute of the Frankfurt School tradition. In a rush to excise the Frankfurt School’s Jewishness in the interests of presenting a purely “materialist” grouping of Marxist social scientists, scholars do no credit to the Institute’s rich pool of intellectual interests and the complex debates and circles of intellectual life in which the Institute’s members and periphery were engaged. Fortunately, Jacobs is one of a growing number of scholars willing to engage in a serious study of the Frankfurt School theorists’ Jewishness.
Although the Frankfurt School was heavily influenced by Judaism, Jacobs does not discount other influences and acknowledges the greater role played by Marxism. Jacobs also offers the caveats that his book is a work in intellectual history, not philosophy, and that by exploring the Jewishness of the Frankfurt School, he is not arguing that Critical Theory is an inherently Jewish theory but only exploring an under-studied intellectual influence on the Frankfurt School’s development.
The book has three chapters. The first provides a history of the Jewish background of five figures of the early Frankfurt School during the Weimar era: Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, Erich Fromm, Henryk Grossmann, and Friedrich Pollock. The second chapter examines the Institute’s research on antisemitism during and shortly after the Institute’s exile from Nazi Germany. The third chapter focuses on four Frankfurt School members’ postwar relationship to the state of Israel: Horkheimer, Lowenthal, Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse.
In the first chapter, Jacobs explores the Jewish backgrounds and identities of the five thinkers who were official, active members of the Institute in residence in Frankfurt before the Institute’s exile. Each interacted differently with his Jewishness, but the Jewish background of each shaped the “live options” (in William James’s terms) available to him.
The first of the five, Max Horkheimer, grew up in a practicing Jewish family, somewhere between Orthodox and Liberal. Horkheimer experienced some antisemitism growing up and significantly more antisemitism later while serving in the military in First World War. In 1917, he wrote two short stories that revealed his concerns about antisemitism, and a critique of bourgeois Jews. While Martin Jay sees the latter as a dismissal of antisemitism, Jacobs argues it should be taken as a critique of hypocrisy instead. As a leader of the early Institute, Horkheimer’s theoretical work did not directly draw from Jewish sources or ideas, but he was very much aware of his Jewish heritage.
Leo Lowenthal, Jacobs continues, had significantly more interaction than Horkheimer with Jewish religious thought in the Weimar era. Lowenthal rebelled against his secular Jewish father by embracing Jewish religious practice and by advocating for East European Jewish emigres, from whom successful German Jewish businessmen like Lowenthal’s father tended to distance themselves. In his childhood, Lowenthal’s social circle was mostly Jewish, and he later, like Horkheimer, experienced antisemitism as a soldier. After the war, Lowenthal was part of the lively left-wing Jewish intellectual circles around the charismatic Rabbi Nobel, Frieda Reichmann’s psychoanalytic Sanatorium, the Zionist youth group the KJV (Kartell jüdischer Verbingungen), and the Frankfurt Freies Jüdishes Lehrhaus, among whom such prominent Jewish scholars as Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Abraham Heschel participated. Lowenthal also studied with Neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen, by whom he was profoundly influenced. Lowenthal’s early essay “Die Lehren von China,” questioned the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine given Arab resistance (28).
The third figure, Erich Fromm, had the most religious upbringing of the five thinkers addressed in the chapter and was brought up in an observant Orthodox family with a lineage of rabbis on both sides, though his father was a businessman. Fromm moved in many of the circles as his friend Lowenthal, including the Rabbi Nobel circle, Reichmann’s Sanatorium (with Fromm eventually marrying Reichmann), some Zionist youth circles, and the Lehrhaus. Perhaps Jacobs could go a bit further in examining Fromm’s role in founding and shaping some of these circles, especially the Lehrhaus, but the section on Fromm is informative and rich.
The fourth figure, Henryk Grossman, was brought into the Institute under Carl Grünberg before Horkheimer’s directorship. Grossman was an East European Jew who had been involved in a group in Poland akin to the Russian Bund (Jewish, socialist, non-Zionist), but Grossman later shifted to a more mainline Communist allegiance. As Jacobs points out, this was a common path (or live option) as well: “A large number of those Marxists of Jewish origin that had earlier been in the Bund were radicalized by the Bolshevik revolution” (40).
Friedrich Pollock, fifth in Jacobs’s list, did not even see himself as Jewish. However, as Jacobs points out, Pollock’s path to being “non-Jewish” was distinctly Jewish, an insistent assimilation and secular Marxism. Jacobs classifies Pollock as a “non-Jewish Jew,” a term coined by Isaac Deutscher to describe a generation of Marxists and others who, like Spinoza before them, perceived themselves as transcending Judaism from within in the name of universalism, while remaining committed to Jewish ethical and messianic (transforming and repairing the world) principles.
In the second chapter, Jacobs explores the antisemitism research of the Institute. Unlike Thomas Wheatland (2009) and Neil McLaughlin (1999), who place more emphasis on economic factors in the Institute’s decision to study antisemitism, Jacobs argues that Horkheimer also had deep theoretical reasons for interest in the problem of antisemitism. Although Jacobs admits that the Institute’s grant proposal and findings were tailored to meet the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) views to obtain funding, Horkheimer and the AJC fundamentally agreed that antisemitism (or what the Institute called “a new antisemitism”) was linked to “totalitarianism” and a hatred of democracy. Some in the Institute, however, such as Paul Massing, preferred a more traditional Marxist analysis about the role of antisemitism in dividing the working class (70).
Jacobs analyzes a number of the Institute’s texts on antisemitism during this period, including the “Elements of Antisemitism” chapter in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Institute’s three book contributions to the AJC’s Studies in Prejudice series: The Authoritarian Personality by Adorno et al., Prophets of Deceit by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, and Rehearsal for Destruction by Paul Massing. For each of the three books for the Studies in Prejudice series, Jacobs points out that the Horkheimer circle used its knowledge of the “culture industry” and its growing awareness of public relations to gain publicity for the series, for example by getting Thomas Mann to publish a review that was likely ghostwritten by Horkheimer. Jacobs is particularly attuned to the reception of each book and the reviews it received. He closes the second chapter with a look at how Adorno rediscovered a sense of Jewishness as a result of the Holocaust.
In the third and final chapter, Jacobs outlines the views on Israel of Marcuse, Fromm, Horkheimer, and Lowenthal. Although none of the thinkers could be classified as Zionists after the foundation of the state of Israel, their responses to Israel differed in the postwar years. Interestingly, Jacobs finds that of the four thinkers, the greater his encounter with Jewish thought, the more critical each was of Israel.
Of the four, Fromm was the most influenced by Jewish religious thought and tradition as well as being the most radical on Israel: ardently anti-Zionist, polemically socialist and an activist for peace, and speaking out in favor of a binational (one-state) solution. Fromm’s opposition to the Jewish state was rooted in his understanding of Judaism as an exiled, diasporic people committed to bringing about the messianic age of justice and peace for all peoples. He made clear that he viewed the Israeli state as a false Messiah and an abandonment of Jewish principles.
Herbert Marcuse was the most supportive of Israel, and again ironically, the least rooted in Jewish thought of the four thinkers. Marcuse supported Israel in the Suez Canal dispute and expressed solidarity with Israel while in Germany during the Six Day War. Although he critiqued some Israeli military operations against the Palestinians, Marcuse saw Israel as a necessary haven for a persecuted people threatened on all sides. In fact, even Marcuse’s criticism of Israeli military power was framed as a concern for the security of the Jewish state (potentially leading to increased antisemitism), more than a human rights argument on behalf of Palestinians. However, Marcuse was conflicted because of his sympathies with national liberation struggles, like that of the Palestinians, a point Jacobs touches upon briefly but could address further. On the other hand, Marcuse did not view Israel as a potential tool of U.S. imperialism and suggested that U.S. imperialism would be more likely to ally with Arab nationalism.
The last two thinkers, Lowenthal and Horkheimer, Jacobs locates between Fromm and Marcuse on the spectrum. Lowenthal and Horkheimer did not go as far as Fromm by calling for a one-state solution; each supported Israel’s existence as an independent state but was critical of certain policies. Lowenthal and Horkheimer also lay between Fromm and Marcuse in their use of Jewish ideas to engage the question of Israel, using more than Marcuse but less than Fromm. Lowenthal and Horkheimer saw Israel as a disappointment, if a necessary one. For Lowenthal, it suffered (in the words of Ernst Simon) an “intoxication with normality” (145), and for Horkheimer, Israel had “adapted to the state of the world,” becoming “a nation structured fundamentally like every other nation” (140–141). Lowenthal, like Fromm, was concerned that the Israeli state might represent an abandonment of the ideals of Jewish messianism, and Horkheimer felt that the Israeli state might violate the key Jewish prohibition on graven images (Bildverbot), worrying that Israel might constitute a kind of idolatry.
Upon his return to Frankfurt after Second World War, Horkheimer reconnected with the local Jewish community and Jewish organizations but retired early and left Germany in the 1950s, concluding that University of Frankfurt and Germany were still deeply antisemitic. (to what extent his views on this matter may have been influenced by U.S.-funded projects is not discussed by Jacobs.)
In conclusion, The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism is a very clearly written and highly researched text that will be of use to many in Critical Theory. Jacobs’s careful use of letters and other documents to discern the underlying concerns of the Institute about the antisemitism project and his background research on the views of the four thinkers on Israel is particularly noteworthy. While much of the biographical data in the first chapter can be found elsewhere, it is employed effectively for Jacobs’s argument and should give pause to those who wish to discount the influence of Jewish thought and culture on the Frankfurt School.
There are two more particular merits of the book. First, Jacobs makes use of the work of Michael Lowy (1992) and Richard Wolin (1994, 2001, 2006), whose work is too often neglected in this area. Although Jacobs does not cite Neil McLaughlin, he avoids the “origin myths” of the Frankfurt School that McLaughlin critiques; Jacobs’s book is neither a hagiography nor an exposé. Second, Jacobs offers an appreciative but critical reading of Gershom Scholem, whose accounts of Jewish mysticism and the Frankfurt School are often accepted unquestioningly. And for those of us, like Stephen Eric Bronner (2002), who hold a pro-Enlightenment vision of Critical Theory, it is worth noting that Jacobs does not slip into viewing Judaism as irrationalism or even romanticism. As my recent book points out, when Fromm explores Marx’s “fully developed humanism,” he finds Jewish messianism nested in it (Braune, 2014).
Two questions not addressed in Jacobs’s book will need to be addressed in the future by scholars in this area. How does the Frankfurt School’s Jewishness conflict or coincide with its interest in Freud’s thought? (Fromm, the one most concerned with the issue over decades, will be of great help here, and Marcuse is likewise important.) Secondly, more work should be done by intellectual historians on differing strands of Jewish thought influencing the Frankfurt School and Weimar Judaism, particularly by exploring Fromm’s argument that there are competing “messianisms,” a prophetic (pro-Enlightenment) variant and a more romantic or mythic, “catastrophic” messianism. Jacobs’s book offers scholars an enduring resource in future work on the Jewishness of the Frankfurt School as these and other questions can continue to be examined.