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The Responsibility of Intellectuals, or The Reception, in Denmark, of Tudvad’s Book on Kierkegaard and the Jews

One of the funniest, and yet also saddest, pieces by Kierkegaard is on book reviewers. “The appearance of a book,” he writes in Prefaces (Forord in Danish), “is…an event that promptly sets the reading public in motion. Ordinarily there is an individual who even knows it somewhat in advance. … Such a person is fortune’s child, … welcome everywhere. [He] knows only something ambiguous about the title of the book and what it deals with, but this is precisely what is most endearing about him in the eyes of the reading public, because a rumor carries away the reading public as the muse’s impulse the poet.”

The piece goes on about how reviewers will pronounce judgment on works without even having read them.

I don’t know how most contemporary readers react to this diatribe against book reviewers. I know that when I read it, however, I assumed it was a phenomenon that was more or less restricted to 19th-century Copenhagen. I don’t mean to give the impression that I was incorrigibly naïve. I assumed there were still a few irresponsible book reviewers out there. I just took them to be the exception rather than the rule.

I fear now, however, that I may have been wrong. I haven’t actually counted how many reviews were published of Peter Tudvad’s new book, Stadier på Antisemitismens Vej: Søren Kierkegaard og Jøderne (Stages on the Way of Anti-Semitism: Søren Kierkegaard and the Jews), before the book actually came out. The number is sort of overwhelming. This was probably a result, at least in part, of the fact that there appears to have been a “krisemøde på teologi” (damage-control meeting of theologians) as soon as word got out that the book was on its way. The objective, it seems, was to find a way to inoculate Kierkegaard against the contagion of the charge that he was anti-Semitic by discrediting the argument of Tudvad’s book before anyone could actually read it. This, for those readers who do not immediately recognize it as such, is the fallacy known as “poisoning the well.”

The book did not come out until the 9th of November, yet the English theologian George Pattison wrote an article for the Nov. 3rd issue of Kristeligt Dagblad, “Søren Kierkegaard var hverken bedre ell værre end sin tid” (Søren Kierkegaard was neither better nor worse than his times [translated into Danish by Sara Høyrup]), in which he said that “anti-Semitism, in the modern sense, cannot be separated from 19th-century theories of race that are connected with a particular reading of Darwin” and that it is thus “inappropriate and anachronistic to connect the concept of anti-Semitism with Kierkegaard.” This statement, unfortunately, compounds the fallacy of “poisoning the well” with that of “equivocation” in that the first reference is to “anti-Semitism” in the “modern sense” whereas the second is not qualified in this way but is clearly to anti-Semitism in a more general sense. It’s obvious that Kierkegaard cannot be charged with anti-Semitism in the modern sense. No one who lived before Darwin could be charged with anti-Semitism in the modern sense. That does not mean, however, that there was no anti-Semitism before Darwin. Nor does it mean that Kierkegaard could not have been anti-Semitic, or that inquiry into this topic is somehow out of bounds. Pattison must either be shockingly ignorant of world history, prone to committing logical fallacies, or disingenuous.

These are very anti-intellectual times. Academics are under siege. We are constantly criticized and charged, for example, with being lazy and intolerant of views that depart from our own. Dismissing a book before one has even read it only adds fuel to the flames of such criticism. It looks as if many people are simply unwilling to accept that Kierkegaard could have been antisemitic, so they feel no compulsion to examine the evidence to that effect before dismissing the claim. It is precisely such behavior that has brought academics into ill repute. It behooves those of us who like to think of ourselves as intellectuals to do our homework before making public pronouncements on the works of our fellow intellectuals.

I’ll say more about the reception of Tudvad’s book later, after I have said a little more about the content.

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“Hip, Hip, hurrah” Antisemitic?

Peter Tudvad’s excellent Stadier på Antisemitismens Vej: Søren Kierkegaard og Jøderne (Stages on the way of antisemitism: Søren Kierkegaard and the Jews) is full of interesting facts. I reported already how N.F.S. Grundtvig, a pastor in the Danish Lutheran Church, was a staunch defender of the Jews. Well, I learned something else very interesting last night. The English expression “hip, hip, hurrah” is possibly of anti-Semitic origin. It seems “hep” (or “hepp”) was a cry Germans used in the herding of goats. They also used it, however, to taunt Jewish men, It’s unclear, observes Tudvad, whether this was because it was an acronym for ‘Hierosolyma est perdita’ (‘Jerusalem is lost,’ an exclamation purportedly from the Roman conquest of Jerusalem and burning of the temple in the year 70) or because the beards of Jewish men were taken to resemble goats’ beards (pp. 38-39; see also, Tudvad’s reference to Alex Bein, Die Judenfrage. Biographie eines Weltproblems [The Jewish Question: the Biography of a Global Problem], [Stuttgard, 1980], vol. 2, p. 160). This, in any case, observes Tudvad, is the description of the expression Kierkegaard would have found in his copy of Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste (General Encyclopedia of the Arts and Sciences),  2nd section, eds. Georg Hassel and Andreas Gottlieb (Leipzig, 1829), part 5, p. 361.

It seems “hep, hep” became the rallying cry not only of the mob violence that broke out against Jews across Germany in 1819, but also the violence that broke out against Jews in Denmark in the same year.

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Kierkegaard and Antisemitism

Peter Tudvad’s new book, Stadier paa Antisemitisms Vej: Søren Kierkegaard og Jøderne (Stages on the Way of Antisemitism: Søren Kierkegaard and the Jews) (Rosinante, 2010) has elicited even more controversy in the first few weeks after its appearance than did his exposure of the errors in Joakim Garff’s biography of Kierkegaard. As of last week, approximately 90 articles had been published in the Danish media on the book, some of which appeared even before the book itself. Those of you who can read Danish should check out Tudvad’s Facebook page because he has links to many of the articles there.

I’m going to assume, however, that most of you cannot read Danish, so I am going to post brief summaries of various part of the book, and comments on it, as I make my way through it. This is going to take some time, mind you, because at 500 pages (not including the notes) it’s a hefty tome. Like Tudvad’s other books, however, it is meticulously researched and completely absorbing. It also stands a very good chance of being translated into English because much of it is an account of the situation of the Jews in 19th-century Denmark and will thus be of great interest both to a broad spectrum of historical scholars and to general readers interested in Jewish history.

Tudvad has thoughtfully divided the book into chapters that can be read independently of one another, so readers interested primarily in Jewish history, or the history of antisemitism, don’t have to read the material on Kierkegaard. The chapter titles (freely translated) are as follows: “Ten Theses on Kierkegaard’s Relation to Jews and Judaism.” “The Jewish Conflict: From Literary Feud to Physical Violence,” “The Wandering Jew: Despair,” “The Perception of the Jews” (this chapter is divided into six sections that look at the theological, the historical, the political, the literary, the dramatic and the Bourgeois perspectives on Jews and Judaism), “Kierkegaard’s Jewish Acquaintances,” “Young Germany and Old Denmark,” “Abraham: The Father of Faith,”  and finally, “Offense: The Infernal Jew.”

I’m still on the part of the first chapter that deals with the literary feud. It’s disappointing to read how virulent was antisemitism in Denmark in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Christian Bastholm wrote, for example, in Den Jødiske Historie (The History of the Jews), that “the Jews are a people whose main characteristics are pride and greed,” and that “the Jews are one of those insects that can never be completely exterminated” (p. 28)

There’s lots of more encouraging information there though as well, such as the fact that N.F.S. Grundtvig was a staunch defender of the Jews. Part of the literary feud between prominent anti-Semites and defenders of the Jews involved using the Hebrew Bible against the Jews. “The method of attacking the Jews,” wrote Grundtvig however, “through the use of their own sacred books is evidence of how unchristianly the learned of our day dare to write and speak” (p. 31).

Grundtvig actually used the Hebrew Bible in defense of the claim that Jews made good citizens, pointing out, for example that Jews are commanded in Jeremiah to show loyalty to the state that gives them refuge.

“One can confidently assert,” observes Grundtvig, “that there is in general among the Jews less ungodliness and a greater sense of right and wrong, just as there is more external discipline, than there is in those assemblies that are now called ‘Christian,’ and that the Jews would thus be made worse by becoming more like ‘Christians'” (p. 32).

Kierkegaard’s father too, emerges as strong friend of the Jews. That’s all I’ll say for now though. If you can read Danish, then get your hands on a copy of the book. If you can’t, then keep checking for new posts. I’m not going to cover everything in the book, of course, but I’ll give you a sense of what it contains and, as I said, my suspicion is that you won’t have to wait too long before there will be an English translation.