almost everything Koestler wrote or did. When Koestler joins the German Communist Party, he is seeking an alternative way to “resolve the Jewish Question”: His Communist activities, his political engagements in Popular Front Paris, and his adventures in Spain only make sense to Cesarani when seen through the prism of Jewishness. How else to account for Koestler’s decision to leave Palestine in 1929 and engage in European politics? “A passionate involvement of seven years’ duration in Jewish affairs could not be dropped instantly, even less when events thrust the fate of the Jews into prominence. On the contrary, Koestler’s ideological, political and geographical peregrinations make more sense if they are seen in the light of his complex Jewish identity.”
This is reductionist. it is perfectly possible to turn away from seven years of youthful involvement in a political or national movement, and to redirect one’s attentions to an entirely different set of causes. Many of us have made precisely such a change. In the last, turbulent years of Weimar Germany, a switch from Jabotinsky to Stalin might seem unusual, but it was readily explicable—and Koestler was still only twenty-six years old when he joined the party.
According to Cesarani, however, it just doesn’t make sense: “Although he explained his dive into the Communist Party in a variety of more or less convincing ways, it appears most logical when it is seen as having a significant Jewish dimension.” Does it really? And what does logic have to do with it? Political choices in that time and in that place were made out of optimism, pessimism, fear, longing, illusion, calculation. Even if it were somehow “logical” for a Jew to become a Communist, that would not explain why any one Jew in fact did so. There were many non-Jewish Communists, and even more Jewish non-Communists, in interwar Europe; the isomorphic relationship between Communism and non-Zionist,nonpracticing Jews may seem evident to Cesarani, but it was less obvious at the time.
In a similar vein, Cesarani is not well pleased with Koestler’s attitude to Israel after 1948. Koestler left Israel in that year and did not return; his memoirs, written shortly afterward, do indeed play down his earlier involvement in Jewish affairs, something that Cesarani calls “repression.” In later years, in keeping with his rather Manichaean intellectual style, Koestler claimed that the existence of a national state offered Jews a clear and unavoidable choice between aliyah and assimilation, between Zionism and the abandonment of a redundant tradition. His insistence on the impossibility of any middle path provoked a famous correspondence in 1952 with Isaiah Berlin, who suggested that there were many ways to be Jewish, and that a certain untidiness and incoherence in one’s way of life might be preferable to the uncompromising options proposed by Koestler.
Cesarani goes further. He finds fault with Koestler’s etiolated account of Jewishness (“His version of Judaism was nonsensical . . . Judaism does have a national dimension, but it also has a universal message”) and rather disapproves of Koestler’s “un-Jewish” admiration for the civilization of Christian Europe. He censures Koestler’s decision to live for a while in the Austrian Alps, and cannot fathom his envy for the village communities that he saw around him in Alpbach (“until quite recently those very same Tyroleans had been shooting and gassing his ilk wherever they found them”). When Koestler suggests that the existence of Israel will help Jews overcome those characteristics that were shaped by and encouraged anti-Semitism, Cesarani interprets him as “blaming the victims of Nazi persecution for their appalling fate.” There is much more in this vein.
But Cesarani has missed something in his haste to hold Koestler up to contemporary standards of Jewish consciousness and find him sorely lacking. Koestler was as much an
This is reductionist. it is perfectly possible to turn away from seven years of youthful involvement in a political or national movement, and to redirect one’s attentions to an entirely different set of causes. Many of us have made precisely such a change. In the last, turbulent years of Weimar Germany, a switch from Jabotinsky to Stalin might seem unusual, but it was readily explicable—and Koestler was still only twenty-six years old when he joined the party.
According to Cesarani, however, it just doesn’t make sense: “Although he explained his dive into the Communist Party in a variety of more or less convincing ways, it appears most logical when it is seen as having a significant Jewish dimension.” Does it really? And what does logic have to do with it? Political choices in that time and in that place were made out of optimism, pessimism, fear, longing, illusion, calculation. Even if it were somehow “logical” for a Jew to become a Communist, that would not explain why any one Jew in fact did so. There were many non-Jewish Communists, and even more Jewish non-Communists, in interwar Europe; the isomorphic relationship between Communism and non-Zionist,nonpracticing Jews may seem evident to Cesarani, but it was less obvious at the time.
In a similar vein, Cesarani is not well pleased with Koestler’s attitude to Israel after 1948. Koestler left Israel in that year and did not return; his memoirs, written shortly afterward, do indeed play down his earlier involvement in Jewish affairs, something that Cesarani calls “repression.” In later years, in keeping with his rather Manichaean intellectual style, Koestler claimed that the existence of a national state offered Jews a clear and unavoidable choice between aliyah and assimilation, between Zionism and the abandonment of a redundant tradition. His insistence on the impossibility of any middle path provoked a famous correspondence in 1952 with Isaiah Berlin, who suggested that there were many ways to be Jewish, and that a certain untidiness and incoherence in one’s way of life might be preferable to the uncompromising options proposed by Koestler.
Cesarani goes further. He finds fault with Koestler’s etiolated account of Jewishness (“His version of Judaism was nonsensical . . . Judaism does have a national dimension, but it also has a universal message”) and rather disapproves of Koestler’s “un-Jewish” admiration for the civilization of Christian Europe. He censures Koestler’s decision to live for a while in the Austrian Alps, and cannot fathom his envy for the village communities that he saw around him in Alpbach (“until quite recently those very same Tyroleans had been shooting and gassing his ilk wherever they found them”). When Koestler suggests that the existence of Israel will help Jews overcome those characteristics that were shaped by and encouraged anti-Semitism, Cesarani interprets him as “blaming the victims of Nazi persecution for their appalling fate.” There is much more in this vein.
But Cesarani has missed something in his haste to hold Koestler up to contemporary standards of Jewish consciousness and find him sorely lacking. Koestler was as much an
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