PARTISAN REVIEW
the new culture itself, which was regarded more as a renewal than a
revolution. The Jews, who now had their own modem history to create,
entered, under Peretz, their own Renaissance, of which he was the
representative man.
But Peretz' statement of the radical-secular ideal was never simple;
it was accompanied by a counter-thesis to preserve not merely the spirit
of the sacred tradition but in some part the tradition itself. This was
necessary as a means by which the Jews could adopt a secular perspective
as Jews.
But the tradition must also
be
brought into touch with the
world, that it may continue to develop. "Dangerous to religion," he
maintained, "is only he who would stop (its development) at any point
along the way....
If
my idea of God grows
in me,
keeping pace with
my own growth, the language in which I speak with my God must
change, as must also the symbolism in which my faith expresses itself."
He who would stop the tradition from developing, murders it. But
Peretz was particularly contemptuous of those who, in the name of
renaissance and renewal, Spencer or statistics, would abandon the whole
Jewish idea and have the Jews disappear among the nations without a
trace. He was opposed both to crass and high-minded assimilation: to
baptism for gain and to baptism even in the fire of the workingclass
movement where liberation from their Jewishness was often among the
values for which Jewish revolutionaries fought. (As early as
1906
in
"Hope and Fear," a personal manifesto to the revolutionary movement,
he warned the oppressed against becoming the new oppressors. "My
heart is with you," he declared, while expressing the fear that a vic–
torious socialism would become corrupted by bureaucracy, and that it
would establish a dictatorship which would eradicate everything dissi–
dent, proud and creative in the human spirit.) His character was bal–
anced between the sacred and the secular, radical and conservative;
his expression as a poet and intellectual, between the religio-mythic and
the sociological.
It
was in the image of his own complex, intricate har–
mony that he should have wished to see the new Jewish culture come
forth.
There are a number of curiously German affinities here. In his
flair for dialectic-his arguments were frequently laid out in this form,
with the conclusion a synthesis of conflicting theses-Peretz, it is quite
likely, reached over Marx, directly to Hegel: his interpretation of history
was far from materialistic, and Jewish history in particular was for
him
a form of pure idea. And the idea of culture itself, which was his
foremost preoccupation and which he made into the defining property
of the Jews as a people, was such another: a pure idea, similar in mean-
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