The Mitteler Rebbe, Alexander Herzen, Lubavitch and the Moscow Intelligentsia

Nokolay Ogariov and Alexander Herzen (c. 1860s?)

When the Mitteler Rebbe hoped that strangers on a street would talk about yihudo illoye and yihudo tattoye he was only desperate that the same spiritual intensity that was about to overtake the Russian Intelligentsia would rub off on the provincial peasants. In his essay “Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia” Isaiah Berlin describes the catharsis surrounding the discovery of the Hegelian philosophy in Moscow in 1938-48. Isaiah Berlin quotes from the great Alexander Herzen:

“…there is no paragraph in all the three parts of the Logic, two parts of the aesthetic, of the Encyclopedia … which was not captured after the most desperate debates lasting several nights. People who adored each other became estranged for entire weeks because they could not agree on a definition of ‘transcendental spirit’, were personally offended by opinions about ‘absolute personality’ and ‘being in itself. The most worthless tracts of German philosophy that came out of Berlin and other [German] provincial towns and villages, in which there was any mention of Hegel, were written for and read to shreds-till they came out in yellow stains, till pages dropped out after a few days. Thus, just as Professor Francoeur was moved to tears in Paris when he heard that he was regarded as a great mathematician in Russia, that his algebraical symbolism was used for differential equations by our younger generation, so might they all have wept for joy-all these forgotten Werders, Marheineckes, Michelets, Ottos, Vatkes, Schallers, Rosenkranzes, and Arnold Ruge himself. . . – if they had known what duels, what battles they had started in Moscow between the Maroseika and Mokhovaya [the names of two streets in Moscow], how they were read, how they were bought… I have a right to say this because, carried away by the torrents of those days, I myself wrote just like this, and was, in fact, startled when our famous astronomer, Perevoshchikov, referred to it all as ‘bird talk’. Nobody at this time would have disowned a sentence like this: ‘The concrescence of abstract ideas in the sphere of the plastic represents that phase of the self-questing spirit in which it, defining itself for itself, is potentialised from natural immanence into the harmonious sphere of formal consciousness in beauty.”

Alexander Hertzen continues:

“A man who went for a walk in Sokolniki [a suburb of Moscow], went there not just for a walk, but in order to surrender himself to the pantheistic feeling of his identification with the cosmos. If, on the way, he met a tipsy soldier or a peasant woman who said something to him, the philosopher did not simply talk with them, but determined the substantiality of the popular element, both in its immediate and its accidental presentation. The very tear which might rise to his eye was strictly classified and referred to its proper category – Gemuth, or ‘the tragic element in the heart.”

Isaiah Berlin then quotes Pavel Annenkov (one of the first people to befriend and write about Karl Marx). Annenkov describes that decade:

“…only one thing was not allowed, and that was to be a philistine. Not that what was expected were flights of eloquence or flashes of brilliant wit – on the contrary, students absorbed in their own special fields were respected deeply. But what was demanded was a certain intellectual level and certain qualities of character… They protected themselves against contacts with anything that seemed corrupt… and were worried by its intrusion, however casual and unimportant. They did not cut themselves off from the world, but stood aloof from it, and attracted attention for that very reason, and because of this they developed a special sensitiveness to everything artificial and spurious. Any sign of a morally doubtful sentiment, evasive talk, dishonest ambiguity, empty rhetoric, insincerity, was detected at once, and… provoked immediate storms of ironical mockery and merciless attack… The circle… resembled an order of knighthood, a brotherhood of warriors; it had no written constitution. Yet it knew all its members scattered over our vast country; it was not organised, but a tacit understanding prevailed. It stretched, as it were, across the stream of the life of its time, and protected it from aimlessly flooding its banks. Some adored it, others detested it.”

• Chabad and Intelligentsia
• Was there Lubavitch South-West in Purkersdorf in the years 1934-35?
• From Bakunin and Herzen to Berlin and Sartre

Tagged as: culture, history, karl marx, philosophy, russia, russian jews