Jewish Humanists Remembered: Isaac Deutscher (1907-1967)
(January
/ February 2001)
In this series we are featuring profiles of leading secular and humanistic Jews from various countries and eras. These profiles are written by Bennett Muraskin, a regular contributor to Outlook, Humanistic Judaism, and Jewish Currents.
T he term "non-Jewish Jew" denotes a type of Jew who adopts a universal outlook in response to the condition of Jewish marginality, and feels compelled to discard Jewish identity in order to achieve revolutionary goals. Isaac Deutscher originated the term and epitomizes the archetype. Deutscher was born in Chrzanow, Poland into a traditional religious family, and grew up in the city of Cracow. He studied with a famous Hasidic rebbe and was acclaimed as a child prodigy in Torah and Talmud. However, by the time of his bar mitzvah, he had rejected Jewish law. He went through the motions at the ceremony and then showed his true feelings by eating unkosher food at the grave of a tsaddik (righteous person, typically a rabbi) on Yom Kippur. When nothing happened, he became an atheist. He identified with Elisha ben Abuyah, the famous Jewish heretic who lived in the 2nd century C.E.
Deutscher moved to Warsaw in 1925. It was home to 300,000 Jews and was a great center of Yiddish culture, but Deutscher took little part in this movement. Eschewing the Jewish Labour Bund, with its socialist Yiddishist orientation, Deutscher joined the outlawed Communist Party in 1927 and became an editor for its underground press.
As the Nazis gained strength in Germany, the Polish Communist Party followed Stalin's position that equated moderate socialism with fascism, and urged Communists to fight against both movements. Deutscher saw the folly of this strategy. In a prophetic article entitled, "The Danger of Barbarism over Europe", he urged the formation of a united socialist-Communist front against Nazism. In 1932, Deutscher was expelled from the Communist Party for "exaggerating the threat of Nazism and spreading panic in Communist ranks". Within a year Hitler came to power and proceeded to destroy the entire left.
Deutscher joined the Trotskyist movement that criticized the Soviet Union for betraying socialist principles at home and abroad, but parted company with it in 1938 over Trotsky's decision to form a new International. Yet he remained sympathetic to Trotsky and considered himself an "unreconstructed Marxist" for the rest of his life.
In 1939, Deutscher became the London correspondent for a Polish Jewish newspaper and with the outbreak of World War Two, he moved permanently to Great Britain. He joined the Polish Army in British exile, but was unwelcome there because he protested its antisemitic practices. He mastered English and became a regular contributor to the British press as an expert on Soviet affairs and an incisive critic of Stalinism.
Deutscher's reputation as a scholar rests on his biographies of Stalin and Trotsky. His three volumes on Trotsky, The Prophet Armed (1954), The Prophet Unarmed (1959) and The Prophet Outcast (1963) are literary and historical masterpieces. He also wrote extensively on the future of the Soviet Union, arguing that despite Soviet brutality, its economic development was creating a modern working class that would eventually rise up to fulfill the promise of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Deutscher opposed all forms of nationalism, including Zionism, as economically retrograde and harmful to the cause of international socialism. Yet, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, he regretted that he had argued against Zionism in the prewar years rather than urge Jews to escape to Palestine. When Israel was created in 1948, he recognized it as an historic necessity to provide a home to the unwanted Jews of Eastern and Central Europe. He compared Jewish immigrants to Israel to people jumping out of a burning building, and the native Arab population to innocent passersby who were crushed by the fall. In his view, Israel had a right to exist, but also had an obligation to make amends to the Arabs.
Deutscher maintained his critical stance toward Zionism, and after the Six Day War demanded that Israel withdraw from the occupied territories. "This 'six day wonder'", he commented, "this latest, all-too-easy triumph of Israeli arms will be seen one day ... to have been a disaster ... for Israel itself." He called on the Arab world to give up its fanatic attempts to destroy Israel, and for Israel to transform itself from a Jewish state to a state of all its citizens, as preconditions to his ultimate vision: a socialist federation throughout the Middle East.
Despite his radical internationalism, Deutscher maintained some contact with Jewish circles. In 1958, in honour of Jewish Book Week, he delivered a lecture to the World Jewish Congress in which he expounded on his thesis of "the non-Jewish Jew". Asked to define his Jewishness he remarked, "Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In neither sense am I therefore a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated. I am a Jew because I feel the pulse of Jewish history; because I should like to do all I can to assure the real, not spurious, security and self-respect of the Jews."
In 1968, one year after his untimely death, a book of his essays appeared, entitled The Non-Jewish Jew. Using as examples such historic figures as Spinoza, Marx, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Freud, he argued that their Jewish backgrounds were critical to their emergence as revolutionaries and iconoclasts, but at the same time, they could not achieve their dream of "universal human emancipation" within the confines of Jewish tradition. Deutscher failed to understand that there is no virtue in repudiating one's own people and culture. Spinoza may have had no choice but to live among Christians, but he also argued that Jews should assimilate. Marx, the son of a convert, went further. He overtly expressed ugly antisemitic prejudices. Trotsky, when he was in power, turned his back on Jewish victims of the Russian civil war, and only toward the end of his life did he disavow his assimilationist views. Luxemburg was totally alienated from her Jewish past, and bristled at the idea that she should concern herself with Jewish suffering. Freud was the exception in that he maintained a sense of Jewish identity, but it appears that for Deutscher, Judaism and humanism were incompatible.
Deutscher nevertheless remains a fascinating figure for secular Jews. He may not have arrived at the correct answers, but he thought long and hard about the Jewish condition and asked the right questions. Can we reconcile our ethnic loyalties with our commitment to "universal human emancipation", or must we choose sides and, as a result, become either narrow-minded nationalists or "non-Jewish Jews", devoted to just cause, but lost to our own people?