.
Nock and
the Jewish Problem |
[Reprinted from Fragments,
April-June, 1982] |
In 1941. Albert Jay Nock published, in the Atlantic, a two-part
essay entitled "The Jewish Problem in America." It stirred
such controversy that some critics began to hunt through his writings
for evidence that he was an anti-Semite. Nock stated that Jews were
basically exiles sojourning in America. Because of Nock's romantic
attachment to pluralism, he meant that remark to be a compliment, not a
slur.
It is with repugnance that I revive the specter of anti-Semitism which
haunts the reputation of Albert Jay Nock. This ghost, however, can be
exorcised in the clear light of understanding. Nock was no anti-Semite.
His detractors could not bear what he actually was, and, therefore, had
to create a smoke screen of fabrication to obscure him.
In order to understand Twentieth Century anti-Semitism, one must go
back to its European origins. In 1439, the Council of Florence was
organized by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. From this Council emerged the
Filioque doctrine which, as Cusa understood it, asserted the primacy of
the individual creative soul. This doctrine was rejected by the Eastern
Church, which fell back upon a corps of pagan beliefs that it derived
from the Byzantine Empire. From the Magna Mater cult, the Orthodox
Church substituted for the individual creative soul the idea of a
collective soul mystically united to its Great Mother, in this case the
Russian land and its sacred soil.
The social ideology of the ethnically pure people wedded to Mother
Earth has fueled all past and present Fascist movements, including
Naziism. Through Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis took over the Slavophile
beliefs which initiated and maintained the pogroms.
That Nock was totally dedicated to the culture of individualism is not
to be denied, nor even questioned. It is odd, then to conclude that he
would be a partisan of a dogma extolling the pure people of one spirit.
When Nock examined "the Jewish problem in America," he noticed
the trend toward Orientalism among many of the Jews in America.
This was the effect of a collapse of Judaic development within the
Jewish Pale of Czarist Russia. In Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine,
Bessarabia, and parts of Austria, the Kahal (the governing assembly of
elders) was replaced by fanatic observance analogous to the frenzy of
the Russian Raskolniks ("Old Believers"). The oppressed
community became a mirror of the oppressor. A new Jewish "collective
" soul began to emerge. (This was Heine's report in On Poland.
Heine, of course, represented a different tradition, the enlightened
Haskalah of Moses Mendelssohn.) Nock saw the tendency toward
collectivism, as the core of the Jewish problem. He did not attack Jews
as Jews, nor Judaism as Judaism, but, rather, he lamented the abrogation
of individualism which compelled the formation of a Jewish collective
soul. If Nock was anti-Semitic, then so was Heinrich Heine. If Nock was
anti-Semitic, then so was Mendele Moicher Sforim, who made the same
criticisms in his allegorical novel, The Nag. If Nock was
anti-Semitic, then so was Moses Mendelssohn, who proclaimed that the
significant thing about the God of the Jews was not His exclusiveness
but His universality. As opposed to an ethnic tribal God, the God of the
Old Testament is the God of all people.
The real reason for the attacks on Nock was not his alleged
anti-Semitism. (There was no basis for such a charge.) What Albert Jay
Nock's critics and detractors could not tolerate was that one man should
believe himself important, and, what is worse, that he should
demonstrate his importance. Nock's detractors could not accept his love
of diversity and individualism. All Marxists and Fascists basically are
reactionaries, yearning for the Oriental despotisms of pre-Hellenic
times, the neolithic culture that preceded the rise of
self-consciousness and egoism. Nock proved through his writing to be a
bard of the recalcitrant individualists. Such individualists do not
arise in pre-Homeric cultures, and are not allowed in Marxist cultures.
They are oracles of what we must become if we are to survive.
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