Table Of ContentJEWISH IDENTITY AND CIVILIZING PROCESSES
Jewish Identity and
Civilizing Processes
Steven Russell
Lecturer in Sociology
Monash University, Australia
Foreword by
Stephen Mennell
Professor of Sociology
University College, Dublin
9&
w First published in Great Britain 1996 by
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ffi First published in the United States of America 1996 by
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ISBN 0-312-15878-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Russell, Steven, 1956-
Jewish identity and civilizing processes / Steven Russell;
Foreword by Stephen Mennell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-312-15878-5 (cloth)
1. Jews—Emancipation—Germany. 2. Jews—History—Philosophy.
3. Jews—Identity. 4. Elias, Norbert. I. Title.
DS147.R87 1996
305.892'404—dc20 96-4371
CIP
© Steven Russell 1996
Foreword © Stephen Mennell 1996
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Printed in Great Britain by
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Contents
Foreword vi
Introduction ix
1 The 'Underground History'of Europe:
Elias's Central Thesis 1
2 Another 'Underground History':
Elias and European Jewry Prior to Emancipation 20
3 Removing the 'Civic Barrier':
Political and Legal Aspects of Jewish Emancipation 40
4 'Bending to the Constraints of Interdependence':
Personal Dimensions of Jewish Emancipation 62
5 Elias and the German Cultural Crisis I: The Crisis 87
6 Elias and the German Cultural Crisis II:
A Process-sociological Perspective 110
7 Norbert Elias and the German-Jewish Synthesis 132
Notes 155
Bibliography 159
Index 173
V
Foreword
In this major contribution to social theory, Steven Russell cleverly weaves
together two complementary strands of argument. On the one hand, he uses
the sociology of Norbert Elias - including the concepts and theories of civil
izing and decivilizing processes, state formation, and established-outsiders
relations - to cast new light on the position of the Jews in Europe from the
close of the Middle Ages to the First World War. On the other hand, he
simultaneously uses his interpretation of the position of the Jews to cast new
light on the character and origins of the theories developed by Elias, who
was of course also himself a European Jew born in the Kaiserreich.
Elias may still be a less than fully familiar figure to many readers of this
book. He became an intellectual celebrity quite exceptionally late in his
very long life. Born in the German city of Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland)
in 1897, he died at the age of 93 in Amsterdam in 1990. Most of his
writings were published in the last twenty years of his life. After seeing
action as a soldier on the western front, he studied philosophy and medicine
at Breslau and sociology at Heidelberg in the 1920s, then served as Karl
Mannheim's academic assistant in Frankfurt. It was there, before 1933,
that he wrote Die hofische Gesellschaft (The Court Society) - one of the key
works on which Russell draws - but the book was not published even in
German until 1969. In exile in London after Hitler's ascent to power, he
wrote his magnum opus, Uber den Prozess der Zivilisation (The Civilizing
Process)', it was published obscurely in Switzerland in 1939 - not, as Bryan
Wilson observed, the most propitious moment for a two-volume work in
German, by a Jew, on of all things civilization. It, too, was little known
until its republication in German in 1969 and in English in 1978-82. Yet,
in an extraordinarily productive old age, Elias published a dozen or so books
in the 1970s and 1980s.
Why did Elias leave it so late? Why did he publish so little in the middle
years of his life? The answers are surely bound up with his experiences
as a German-Jewish refugee from the Nazis. For nearly twenty years he
barely scraped an existence on the fringes of British academic life, before
securing a post at the University of Leicester when he was already 57.
Possibly more important, his mother's death in Auschwitz was, as he openly
acknowledged, the great trauma of his life. Though he continued to write,
and his commitment to a distinctive vision of sociology never waned,
Uttle was published. One can only speculate about the impact on his sense of
identity. In later life he tended to describe himself as a European of German
VI
Foreword vn
birth and Jewish ancestry (he was also by then a British citizen and resident
in the Netherlands), somewhat playing down his Jewishness. He specifically
denied that the Jewish religion had been of significance to him personally
in adulthood, and admitted to having been only 'briefly' a member of a
Jewish fraternity. That does not by any means disprove Russell's contention
that the historical experience of generations of European Jews was a key
influence on Elias's sociological thinking. Quite the contrary. Since Russell
finished writing this book, research by Jorg Hackeschmidt has revealed that
from his mid-teens Elias was, probably for many years, an active member
of a Zionist organization. His motivation must have been not religious but
a sense of identification with an outsider group to which he belonged by
birth. Why he should have wished to hide this later is not clear, but these
recently discovered facts provide significant, if circumstantial, support for
Russell's interpretation of the connection between Elias's thought and his
Jewishness.
In his broader concern with the European Jewish experience, Russell
focuses not on the terrible and much-studied events of the Holocaust, but
on the Jews in early modern Europe, through Emancipation and up to the
early twentieth century. As he argues, traditional explanations of Jewish
Emancipation have stemmed from classical liberal thought: Emancipation
has been seen as one facet of the progress of Enlightenment values, including
toleration, secularism and individualism. Russell argues that Elias's work
can be used to develop a more adequately sociological explanation.
The hallmark of Elias's sociology is the way he 'bridges the macro-micro
gap'. Changes in the broad structure of society, particularly state formation
(that is, the growth of monopolies of force and taxation by central author
ities), the development from barter to money economies, the growth of
towns, trade and the continuing division of labour - all these bring about
longer chains of social interdependence and changes in the power-ratios
between groups within society. These processes, Elias argues, are associated
in turn, in the long-term, with a changing degree of social constraint towards
self-constraint, and with the changes in social standards of 'polite' behaviour
and codes of manners characteristic of the European civilizing process.
Russell shows how the European Jews played a part out of proportion
to their numbers in the long-term processes of structural change. Their
role in commerce has long been familiar, but Russell also points to the
importance of the 'Court Jews' in state formation processes. Yet Jews as
a whole remained outsider groups in relation to more powerful Christian
established groups and - like many other outsider groups - most of them
for long remained relatively insulated from the civilizing pressures which
came to bear on the manners of nobles and later hauts bourgeois Gentiles.
viii Jewish Identity and Civilizing Processes
This, as Russell shows, has important consequences for the fate of Jewish
communities, and for what has been called the Jewish 'ordeal of civility'.
Russell remarks that he was able to use only a rough translation of Elias's
The Germans, the last book published (in German) in the author's lifetime.
As it happens, an English translation by Eric Dunning and myself will
be published by Polity Press at about the same time as Russell's book
appears. Although The Germans is by no means wholly, or even mainly,
concerned with the fate of the Jews, it was certainly written against the
background of the overwhelming question of how the Holocaust was pos
sible in supposedly 'civilized' Europe. More important, Elias brilliantly
clarifies the connections and tensions between civilizing and decivilizing
processes, showing how each provides a counterpoint to the other, con
tinually contending for dominance. The Germans should finally refute the
misconception of the theory of civilizing processes being another simple
account of historical 'progress'. It is a great tribute to Russell's book that
it can be read together with Elias's The Germans.
Steven Russell brought an unusual combination of skills and know
ledge to the writing of this book. An ordained priest, he took degrees in
theology from the University of Melbourne and in philosophy, politics and
sociology from Murdoch University, Perth. When I arrived in Australia in
1990, he was Ecumenical chaplain to Monash University. We soon became
good friends and agreed that I should supervise his doctorate. His vocation
has now, for good or ill, shifted to the academic world, and he is now a
Lecturer in Sociology at Monash University, Gippsland. This fascinating
book is his first, but I am sure it will not be his last.
STEPHEN MENNELL
Introduction
This book has its origins in a coincidence. At about the same time as I first
read the second edition of John Murray Cuddihy's The Ordeal of Civility:
Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity, I met
Stephen Mennell and embarked with him on a series of intensive discus
sions about the work of Norbert Elias. I soon realized that what Cuddihy's
examination of those three thinkers in the light of the 'sociology of knowl
edge context of Jewish Emancipation' revealed about the inner dynamics
and intent of their work could apply equally to Elias. As I reflected fur
ther on this, I began to entertain the somewhat more audacious notion that
Elias's sociological perspective offers great potential for a richer and fuller
understanding, not only of the specific problems of Jewish emancipation,
but also of some of the most difficult, controversial and puzzling aspects
of the experience of Jews in Europe since at least the early Middle Ages.
These initial hunches became the germ of this study. I believe that they
have been amply confirmed through the kind of testing to which I have
exposed them here. The coincidence was indeed a fruitful one.
The structure of this book is quite simple. The first two chapters intro
duce some of the main themes and issues from a more general perspective.
Chapter 1 is an all-too-brief outline of the central thesis of Elias's work
(especially as it is elaborated in The Civilizing Process), and Chapter 2
applies that thesis to some of the more salient themes and issues of the
experience of Western European Jewry from the early Middle Ages to the
dawn of the Emancipation era. The third and fourth chapters are devoted
to a detailed consideration of the Emancipation. In Chapter 3, legal and
political aspects are discussed and in Chapter 4 attention is turned to some
of the more neglected personal impacts and implications. In each case,
distinctively Eliasian approaches are employed to elucidate the problems
and suggest new resolutions and possible lines of approach. The finalt hree
chapters bring us up to the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods in Germany
and the cultural and intellectual crisis which marked that era. Elias's work
is examined as a product of that era and then applied to the specific
situation of German Jews (such as Elias) in the midst of that crisis. There
is, therefore, both a gradual narrowing of the focus of the study, temporally
and geographically, and an intensification of the discussion of sociological
and philosophical issues.
At the outset it was proposed to include a chapter or a section on the
Holocaust. It would, tentatively, have looked at that tragedy principally in
ix
