Ethnic Triangles, Assimilation, and the Complexities of Acculturation in a Multi-ethnic Society

Symbiosis and bivalence

The 'national' histories of 'Hungary', 'Poland', and 'the Jews' are entangled. In the course of the nineteenth century the territories of the national states of Europe acquired an ethnic character. Being Jewish had to relate to the national identity proclaimed by the state. One consequence of the ethnic 'nationalization' of states has been defined as follows:

People adopt their ethnic and national identities depending on the national context and are responsive to political and economic incentives. Even though people might believe that they belong to a particular ethnic or national group, they are included into or excluded from ethnic and national categories by elites for political, economic and cultural reasons.¹

In the political discourse of the late nineteenth century, Jews became a 'race' which was labelled 'semitic'. In conjunction with the emergence of the concept of race and the application of labels used by linguists for classifying languages, a similar confusion occurred everywhere in Europe as speakers of different languages became classified as 'ethnic groups'.² The concept 'lingual' coalesced with 'ethnic' and led to the concept of 'national minorities', which was codified at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919–20. The new states were obliged to safeguard the collective rights of the national minorities.³

After the First World War the League of Nations was created as an international organization to monitor the collective rights of national minorities. Jews became a national minority. The difference from other national minorities was that the Jews did not have a national state of their own.⁴ They became hyphenated citizens with different 'national' connotations. This implied bivalence—a positive connotation—or ambivalence—a negative connotation—in an individual Jew's self-identification and in the eyes of non-Jews.

In the process of the emancipation, secularization, and democratization of society, Jewish individuals might identify with Polish or Hungarian as well as with Jewish culture. The concept of bivalence has been used to denote the coexistence in an individual's mind of 'non-conflicting interlinking of elements selected from two cultures, possessed, approximately, in the same degree and accepted as close to one's value system'.⁵

Bivalence can be combined with the concept of 'symbiosis' if the focus is shifted from the individual to society. In Wilhelmine Germany, Jews and Germans were seen as an 'imagined community', as carriers of one and the same culture, a relationship described as 'symbiosis'. It was promoted among others by the renowned philosopher Hermann Cohen.⁶ In retrospect this symbiosis turned out to have been an illusion. Amos Elon has argued that it 'was always suspect', asking: 'Why does nobody ever speak of an American–Jewish, French–Jewish, or Dutch–Jewish symbiosis?'⁷ Riccardo Calimani describes 'the illusion of integration' of the Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Berlin. The alleged symbiosis was realized only in some individuals or in small groups but never became a central developmental trait. Even in the Weimar period, only a minority of Jews were part of German cultural life.⁸ The Holocaust might be understood, however, not as making the alleged symbiosis illusory but as bringing an end to it. The former German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, as if refuting Elon's argument, argued in 2003 that 'the pain from the loss, from the destruction of the German–Jewish symbiosis … all this is also a self-destruction of German culture.'⁹ Fischer thus was repeating the gist of Cohen's argument.

It is also appropriate to speak of a Polish–Jewish and a Hungarian–Jewish cultural symbiosis in Cohen's sense of a mutual bond. The Polish–Jewish and Hungarian–Jewish symbioses, as well as their ends, are linked to the German–Jewish symbiosis. This is because Yiddish, the original language of the Ashkenazi Jews, who constituted a majority of Jews in Poland and Hungary, is closely related to German,¹⁰ and because among the numerically largest categories of Ashkenazi Jews who were murdered by the Germans in the Holocaust were Poles and Hungarians.

The concepts of 'symbiosis' and 'bivalence' are...