THE WANDERING JEW
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contradicts their standards is somehow "unnatural," inferior, or evil.
Those, on the other hand, who live on the borderlines of various
civilizations comprehend more clearly the great movement and the
great contradictoriness of nature and society.
All these thinkers agree on the relativity of moral standards.
None of them believes in absolute good and absolute evil. They all
observed communities adhering to different moral standards and dif–
ferent ethical values. What was good to the Roman Catholic Inqui–
sition, under which Spinoza's grandparents had lived, was evil to
Jews; and what was good to the rabbis and Jewish elders of Am–
sterdam was evil to Spinoza himself. Heine and Marx experienced in
their youth the tremendous clash between the morality of the French
revolution and that of feudal Germany.
Nearly all these thinkers have yet another great philosophical
idea in common-the idea that knowledge to be real must be active.
This incidentally had a bearing on their views on ethics, for if knowl–
edge is inseparable from action or
Praxis,
which is by its nature rela–
tive and self-contradictory, then morality, the knowledge of what is
good and what is evil, is also inseparable from
Praxis
and is also rela–
tive and self-contradictory.
It
was Spinoza who said that "to be is
to do and to know is to do."
It
was only one step from this to,
Marx's saying that "hitherto the philosophers have interpreted the
world; henceforth the task is to change it."
Finally, all these men, from Spinoza to Freud, believed in the
ultimate solidarity of men; and this was implicit in their attitudes
towards Jewry. We are now looking back on these believers in hu–
manity through the bloody fog of our times. We are looking back at
them through the smoke of the gas chambers, the smoke which no
wind can really disperse from our eyes. These "non-Jewish Jews"
were essentially optimists; and their optimism reached heights which
it is not easy to ascend in our times. They did not imagine that it
would be possible for "civilized" Europe in the twentieth century to
sink to a depth of barbarity at which the mere words "solidarity of
men" would sound as a perverse mockery to Jewish ears. Alone among
them Heine had the poet's intuitive premonition of this when he
warned Europe to beware of the coming onslaught of the old Ger–
manic gods emerging ((
aus dem teutschem Urwalde,"
and when he
complained that the destiny of the modem Jew is tragic beyond ex-
