The Ashkenazi Revolution

93or to present helpful and relevant solutions. For a hundred years, from thedawn of the French Revolution until the writing of “The Autoemancipation”by Pinsker, the New Hebrew Literature dealt with thepolitical questions of Ashkenaz and we are shocked by the paucity ofresults from this toil. We cannot forget that there were, within the NewHebrew Literature, great personalities; first and foremost among them thenoted poet, Yehuda Leib Gordon. In a few lines of the pamphlet byPinsker, there is more political content than in all the extensive politicalliterature, by the authors of the Enlightenment, which were written over thecourse of a hundred years. This fact is first and foremost rooted in the factthat Pinsker looked upon the Jewish Question from an objective vantagepoint, and saw in front of him the entire people in its masses, but theauthors of the Enlightenment saw this question within the context of theneeds, ambitions and hatreds of the small intellectual class.The modern era disrupted the Jewish life that depended upon the conquestof time to the exclusion of any normal grasp of space. The normalizationof the life of the Jews had one understanding and one implication: Thepassage from the ghetto to wide and sovereign spaces, from a life immersedin religion among peoples who controlled space, to a life that, itself,depended upon the control of space. But the New Hebrew Literature waspuzzled by the revolutionary character of the solution and it sought refugefor itself in various guises which promised normalization not throughpolitical means but through a slight change in the external appearance andimage of the Jew, without changing the political elements of his life orsystem through which he related to the ruling peoples. The saying ofYehuda Leib Gordon, “be a man when you go out and a Jew in your tent”,which was a “principle of faith” of the Enlightenment, symbolizes this lackof content. It avoids the fact that the foreign peoples, who control space,are masters over Jewish life to the extent that this life is a physical one withexternal expression. Therefore they are the ones who determine to whatextent the Jew may exit the ghetto, that is to say, to be “a man”, and towhat extent he may protect his physical existence at all. Yehuda LeibGordon, and the authors of the Enlightenment, did not see the historicalroots of the Jewish reality. It was not the stubbornness of “those of