Deutscher and the Jews: On the Non-Jewish Jew - An Analysis and Personal Reflection

Abstract

Isaac Deutscher's concept of the “non-Jewish Jew” has been adopted by many secular leftist Jewish intellectuals as a badge of identity. Defined by a universal and humanist outlook that is rooted in Jewish thought, his is a construct that draws inspiration from Jewish thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Sigmund Freud, and Leon Trotsky, whom he sees as revolutionaries of modern thought who transcended their Jewish background. In what perhaps is the most lucid passage of his provocative essay Deutscher attributes their exceptional breadth to the fact that as Jews they lived in the boundaries of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures and were born and grew up on the boundaries of various epochs. Their minds matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other, and they inhabited the nooks and crannies of their respective nations, living in society but not being part of it. This was, Deutscher avers, what enabled them to lift their gaze above their own community and nation, beyond their times and generations, and to strike mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future (27). Although an apt description of the real, historical phenomenon of Jews that revolutionized thought and society, Deutscher includes himself in his depiction of the “non-Jewish Jew” and thus reveals his subtle but clear sense of dissociation, his attempt to put a distance between him and the Jewish world he left behind. For the secular, universalistic Jew that may be understandable in the context of the world in which Spinoza, Heine, Marx, and Luxemburg lived, but it was much less so in 1958, the year when Deutscher wrote this essay, only thirteen years after the end of the Holocaust and the Second World War. This dissociation became all the more conspicuous against the background of a Freud and a Trotsky, who having witnessed the rise and consolidation of the German antisemitic regime (they died in 1939 and 1940, respectively) expressed their unequivocal solidarity with the persecuted Jews.