“Rather More than One-Third Had No Jewish Blood”: American Progressivism and German-Jewish Cosmopolitanism at the New School for Social Research, 1933–1939

Abstract

The New School for Social Research’s University in Exile accepted more German and European exiled intellectuals than any other American institution of higher education. This paper argues that transnational, cosmopolitan ideological and interest-based affinities shared by left-leaning American progressives and German-Jewish intellectuals enabled the predominantly Jewish University in Exile to become a vibrant intellectual space accepted by the community of largely anti-Semitic American academics. These affinities also illuminate why, despite the fact that the émigrés’ exile was in large part the result of National Socialist hatred of Jews, Alvin Johnson (the founder of the University in Exile) and the faculty members that comprised it seldom discussed the University’s Jewish demographics. The Jewish faculty members ignored the relationship between their ethnicity and exile because to focus on it would have been to admit that the cosmopolitan project they had embraced in Central Europe had failed. Johnson ignored the faculty’s Jewish heritage for two reasons. First, he endorsed a cosmopolitan American nationalism. Second, he understood that the generally anti-Semitic community of American academics would have rejected the University in Exile if he stressed the faculty’s Jewishness. In ignoring the University in Exile’s Jewish demographics, Johnson and the University’s faculty successfully adhered to a strategy designed to foster the exiles’ entrance into the American intellectual community. Thus, while cosmopolitanism failed in Germany and Central Europe, the exiles’ later influence on the American academy indicates that it partially succeeded in the United States.

Introduction

Of all American institutions of higher education, the New School for Social Research in New York City accepted the largest number of German and European intellectual exiles during the era of National Socialism [1]. Founded in 1933 and soon renamed the “Graduate Faculty in Political and Social Science” (Graduate Faculty), this “University in Exile” served as the wartime home to 184 exiled scholars, seventy-four of whom hailed from Germany [2]. It was at the New School that a full one-quarter of all intellectual émigrés to the United States worked. The University in Exile saved several of the most influential academics of the twentieth century, including Hans Kelsen, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bronislaw Malinowski, Leo Strauss, and Max Wertheimer [3]. Several future policymakers, including Karl Brandt, Gerhard Colm, and Hans Speier, also made this institution their home. The story of the New School in the 1930s is one central to twentieth century American and transatlantic intellectual history.

The University in Exile has been the exclusive subject of one scholarly monograph, Claus-Dieter Krohn’s Intellectuals in Exile [4]. Krohn’s work is a complete account of the gestation, founding, and influence of the Graduate Faculty, particularly its economists, on American social science. However, in explaining how the New School thrived in the 1930s and 1940s, Krohn focuses almost exclusively on structural factors, particularly the relationship between the University in Exile and its financial backers. This work assumes that securing funds was the most crucial factor in enabling the Graduate Faculty to find an intellectual home in America. While Krohn relates how Alvin Johnson, the individual behind the University in Exile, recruited politically and culturally like-minded scholars to the New School, Intellectuals in Exile generally ignores the role ideas played in allowing the University in Exile to thrive in its early years.

This paper augments Krohn’s structural account by demonstrating how transnational ideological and interest-based affinities shared by left-leaning American progressives and German-Jewish intellectuals enabled the predominantly Jewish University in Exile to become a vibrant intellectual space accepted by anti-Semitic American academics [5]. I argue that both groups—American progressives and European Jewish exiles—embraced complementary cosmopolitan ideologies. Left-leaning progressives like Johnson subscribed to a social vision that sought to reinvigorate American nationalism by incorporating ideas and traditions from European cultures [6]. They thus supported the possible contributions European exiles could make in America. This idea was accepted, and indeed embraced, by the German-Jewish intellectuals who comprised much of the Graduate Faculty. These individuals were the inheritors of a post-emancipation German and Central European Jewish intellectual tradition that sought to deny the importance of Jewish ethnicity in favor of a secular and cosmopolitan intellectual identity. Both Johnson and the members of the University in Exile adhered to ideologies that embraced the notion of an international Republic of Letters in which intellectuals from any nation could contribute positively to a society’s development. The cosmopolitan affinities shared by Johnson and the faculty members explain why the New School functioned smoothly as an institution, with Johnson and faculty members rarely disagreeing as to the University in Exile’s American mission.

These affinities also illuminate why, despite the fact that the émigrés’ exile was the result of National Socialist hatred of Jews, Johnson and the faculty members seldom discussed the University in Exile’s Jewish demographics. The Jewish faculty members ignored the relationship between their ethnicity and exile because to focus on it would have been to admit that the cosmopolitan project they had embraced had failed. Moreover, in both the European and American contexts, integration was at stake. Therefore, when the émigrés first came to America, they continued in the same mode they had in Europe. At the same time, if Johnson mentioned the faculty’s Jewish heritage, the largely anti-Semitic community of American academics would have rejected his own cosmopolitan undertaking. In ignoring the University in Exile’s Jewish demographics, Johnson and the faculty successfully adhered to a strategy designed to foster the exiles’ entrance into the American intellectual community. Each had an interest in promoting the University in Exile’s scholarship and eliding the émigrés’ Jewishness was central to this goal. Indeed, in the late-1930s, collections published by the University in Exile received almost uniformly positive reviews, indicating that the faculty was not “tainted” by its Jewish makeup. By the end of the decade, however, the Jewish members of the Graduate Faculty could no longer ignore the special place occupied by Jews in the National Socialist imagination. In “Forms and Features of Anti-Judaism,” a biting essay released in 1939, Erich Kahler explicitly rejected the cosmopolitan project embraced by his colleagues. This essay inaugurated New School scholars’ new focus on Jewish issues. With the failure of the European cosmopolitan project, the University in Exile’s faculty turned to examining what they had so long ignored: their Judaism. Their ability to do so, however, indicated the American achievement of their cosmopolitan goals.

The Founding of the University in Exile

In 1919, a group of well-known liberals, radical democrats, and philanthropists that included Charles A. Beard, John Dewey, Horace M. Kallen, Thorstein Veblen, and Felix Frankfurter founded the New School for Social Research. These liberal progressives created the New School in response to Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler’s dismissal of several professors for refusing to take a loyalty oath to the American government and opposing U.S. engagement in World War I [7]. Angered at Butler’s stifling of intellectual expression, these intellectuals formed the New School as a self-conscious bastion of academic freedom, partially modeled on the German Volkshochschulen dedicated to adult and worker education [8]. Similar to many American educational progressives of the day, these intellectuals hoped to use social science to achieve liberal socioeconomic goals [9].

Alvin Johnson, the central force behind the creation of the University in Exile, was one of the New School’s founders. Johnson was born and raised in Nebraska, the son of Danish immigrants. He served in the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War, and at the end of the war matriculated as a graduate student in economics at Columbia University. At Columbia, he studied under E.R.A. Seligman and Franklin Giddings and received his Ph.D in 1902 [10]. Johnson worked in academia until 1915, when Herbert Croly, the founder of The New Republic, invited him to join the magazine as an assistant editor [11]. Johnson accepted the offer, and through The New Republic became involved with the progressive New York intellectual circle that founded the New School. He was naturally attracted to John Dewey’s progressive educational philosophy and eagerly accepted a position as one of the New School’s first faculty members. By the early 1920s, Johnson had become the New School’s first president. For the next decade, he improved the institution’s finances, enlarged its scholarly focus from the policy and social sciences to the humanities, and built its reputation as a local leader in arts education.

Transatlantic connections forged in the 1920s became the seeds of the University in Exile’s germination. Johnson was fluent in German and had since the beginning of his career been interested in German academia [12]. In 1924, Johnson and the Jewish financier-statesmen Bernard Baruch traveled to Germany to study the hyperinflation and derive lessons for how American policymakers could avoid a similar economic crisis. On this trip, Johnson made the acquaintance of Emil Lederer, a Jewish economist and member of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) then teaching at the University of Heidelberg. Johnson and Lederer retained their friendship and continued to correspond throughout the 1920s. In 1927, Johnson accepted Seligman’s offer to serve as associate editor of an American encyclopedia of the social sciences modeled on the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften. Upon doing so, he asked Lederer to recommend German colleagues to contribute [13]. Over the next several years, Lederer recommended numerous German academics that wound up contributing to the encyclopedia. By the time the Encyclopedia ofeventually fifteen-volumes began to appear in the 1930s, several future members of the University in Exile, including Lederer, Gerhard Colm, Fritz Lehmann, and Hans Speier, had written entries.

These positive experiences with German academia generally, and Lederer specifically, enlarged Johnson’s already considerable respect for German social science. As he watched the rise of National Socialism from abroad, Johnson began to recognize that, if Hitler triumphed, many left wing and Jewish academics would require a home in exile. Soon after Hitler’s seizure of power in January 1933, Johnson began to create an institution dedicated to preserving the German academic tradition he correctly believed the Nazis would destroy. He hoped that this new “University in Exile” would serve “as a liaison between American university culture and the pre-Nazi German university culture [14].” Echoing his colleague Dewey’s idea of developing an “international nationalism,” Johnson maintained that providing a safe haven for German academics would be beneficial not only to the rescued Germans, but to American society and intellectual culture as well. This intellectual migration, Johnson hoped, would reinvigorate American social science and provide it with the necessary tools to affect social change.

Lederer was centrally involved in the University in Exile’s creation. In February 1933, Harold Butler, the Director of the International Labor Office, invited Lederer to participate in a Parisian conference on the relationship between technological progress and unemployment. After leaving Germany to attend the conference, Lederer never returned, immigrating instead to London. This was a prescient decision, as Lederer was one of the first professors the Nazis intended to dismiss, likely due to his socialism. From the beginning, Johnson had intended Lederer to be the major German intellectual force behind his envisioned institution. In early 1933, he approached Lederer about his plans “to get ten or a dozen [German professors] to the U.S. to set up a German university in exile [15].” Lederer quickly accepted Johnson’s request and turned down a position at the University of Manchester to move to New York [16]. According to Lederer’s student, Hans Speier, who himself became the youngest founding member of the University in Exile, Lederer “was impressed by Johnson’s pragmatic liberalism and considered work at a new free university, which in the prevailing circumstances could become a political symbol, to be more worthwhile than joining a well-established institution [17].” In joining the University in Exile, Lederer symbolically demonstrated to the German and international academic community that, despite the attempts of domestic political reactionaries, academic freedom would always find an international home.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1933, Johnson diligently worked to raise funds for his institution [18]. By May 13, he had collected $120,000 from the Jewish philanthropist Hiram Halle and the Rockefeller Foundation, which allowed him to fund fifteen professorships at a salary of $4,000 per year [19]. To win American intellectual support for his and Lederer’s venture, Johnson drafted a letter signed by several hundred social scientists supporting the University in Exile’s founding [20]. In June of that year, Johnson applied for and received a provisional charter from the Board of Regents of New York State [21].

At Lederer and Johnson’s request, throughout the summer of 1933, Speier, who was a Lutheran (although married to a Jewish pediatrician), traveled back and forth between London and Germany with contracts for the University’s founding members. Over that summer, Johnson, Lederer, and Speier successfully recruited ten academics to found the University in Exile. In the schema of early- to mid-twentieth century United States immigration law, intellectuals were considered “non-quota” immigrants and could thus immigrate more easily than members of other social groups [22]. The ten founding members of the University in Exile were Karl Brandt (agricultural science); Gerhard Colm (economics); Arthur Feiler (economics); Eduard Heimann (economics); Erich von Hornbostel (sociology of music); Herman Kantorowicz (law); Lederer (economics); Speier (sociology); Max Wertheimer (Gestalt psychology); and Frieda von Wunderlich (social policy). The progressive Johnson recruited these scholars because each “supported the democratic government under the Weimar constitution [23].” Additionally, most were Social Democrats or held social democratic sympathies, were empirically oriented social scientists, and were associates of Lederer [24]. The New School scholars hailed primarily from three institutions: the University of Frankfurt, the Kiel Institute for World Economics, and the Berlin-based Hochschule für Politik (College for Politics) [25]. Most importantly for Johnson and Lederer, each New School member was an intellectual concerned with using social science as a means to reach social and economic progressive ends [26].

With the faculty and funding in place, the University in Exile—renamed the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science because the New York State Department of Education would not allow an institution with only a single faculty to call itself a “university”—opened its doors in October 1933 [27]. The Graduate Faculty grew significantly over the next few years. In the spring of 1934 there were 18 faculty members; by the summer of 1939, there were 33. After Germany’s defeat of France in the summer of 1940, many more came. Student enrollment also increased as the Graduate Faculty’s reputation rose in the 1930s. In the fall of 1933, the University in Exile had only 92 students; by 1940 that number had risen to 520. [28]. As these numbers indicate, the Graduate Faculty flourished in the 1930s and 1940s.

The Presentation of the University in Exile, 1933–1939

Two-thirds of the Graduate Faculty’s founding members were Jewish [29]. Many more Jewish academics came to the New School as the Nazi erawore on. However, throughout the 1930s, Johnson, Lederer, and the rest of the New School faculty refused to present the University in Exile as a haven for German Jews. They instead offered the New School as an institution dedicated to defending intellectual freedom and the best aspects of the pre-Nazi German academic tradition. There was very little talk of Judaism or the role the faculty’s ethnicity played in their immigration. At first, such a position was defensible, as the Nazis’ initial program was premised upon removing political as opposed to racial enemies. Nevertheless, by April 1933, the Nazis had begun to strip Jews of their rights and it was clear that the Jews were no longer welcome in Germany.

This unwillingness or inability to discuss the New School scholars’ Jewish identity had two intellectual sources, each of which hailed from one side of the transatlantic divide. The first was an American progressive vision, argued most explicitly by John Dewey, which sought to incorporate European intellectual, social, and cultural traditions into a reinvigorated American nationalism. Dewey, Johnson, and other left-leaning progressives believed that they must work to create a new “international nationalism” that was nevertheless American. This international nationalism, they hoped, would result in a cultural exchange that would undergird a progressive American future [30].

Nonetheless, this ideology did not necessarily mean that Johnson had to deny completely the faculty’s Judaism. He could have mentioned their ethnicity but downplayed it. I argue that Johnson’s total elision of the faculty member’s Jewish heritage was both a consequence of his progressive commitments and a strategy designed to avoid the anti-Semitism that permeated American higher education during the interwar period. Johnson hoped that American academics would accept the University in Exile as a peer institution. At the time, however, many American universities were permeated with anti-Semitism. Most, including almost all of the elite colleges, had imposed strict quotas on Jewish students and faculty. Johnson was very much aware of educational anti-Semitism and railed against it from his position as president of the American Section of the International League for Academic Freedom [31]. He had himself received criticism from colleagues who believed that there was no room for Jews in American academia [32]. If Johnson had stressed the faculty’s Judaism, he would have alienated his academic peers.

The post-emancipation German-Jewish embrace of the universalist Bildung educational philosophy constituted the second, European intellectual source of the New School’s position regarding its Jewish demographics. Traditional Bildung referred to the idealist-romantic process of “cultivating” oneself through extensive reading in classical texts of the Greco-Roman and German traditions and the conduct of original research in one’s Wissenschaft (science). Engagement with Bildung and Wissenschaft was supposed to engender a coherent Weltanschauung (worldview) in a student [33]. As one scholar notes, the “pursuit of truth was to lead to something like integral insight and moral certainty” [34]. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Central European Jewish intellectuals believed that participation in Bildung was the key to their acceptance by secular society. This Jewish embrace of Bildung, however, came at the expense of particularist Jewish identities. Jews denied their Judaism and appropriated the cosmopolitanism of Bildung. This was Jewish intellectuals’ strategy of assimilation and acceptance (ironically, this cosmopolitanism was primarily about Jewish integration into a national community). By ignoring their Judaism in the 1930s, the majority of faculty members did the same in America as they had in Germany, defining themselves as secular intellectuals, not Jews [35]. With this vision, they believed they could contribute positively to society’s advance while fostering their own acceptance into the American intellectual community.

In the 1930s, the New School’s University in Exile was an institutional site that saw the merging of two coherent and complementary philosophies. Both the left-leaning American progressive and Central European Jewish traditions were cosmopolitan in character. As we will see, even in the face of the Nazi threat, Johnson, Lederer, and the majority of the New School scholars remained silent about the faculty’s Judaism. This helped engender their acceptance into American academia. It was not until 1939, when it had become too clear to deny that Hitler and the National Socialists posed an existential threat to European and world Jewry, that faculty members began to address their Judaism.

Johnson and Judaism

In the Graduate Faculty’s first course catalogue, which was almost certainly written by Johnson (perhaps with minor aid from Lederer and other faculty members), there was no mention of National Socialist racial policy nor the regime’s specific animosity toward Jews [36]. Johnson justified the creation of the University in Exile with reference only to “the reorganization of German university life under the National Socialist revolution.” Because of Nazi political regulations, Johnson continued, scholars of “international reputation have been dismissed” or given indefinite furloughs from teaching. He declared that the Nazis denied politically problematic scholars “academic liberty” and, as “an American institution,” the New School was obligated “to express by word and act its own faith” in intellectual freedom [37]. Throughout the catalogue, Johnson continued to downplay the faculty’s Judaism. His only critique of Nazi racism occurred within a discussion of the regime’s educational policy. According to the catalogue, all faculty members believed “that real education begins where racial, religious and political intolerance ends.” A salient display of Johnson’s general unwillingness to underline the unique position occupied by Jews in the Nazi racial imagination was the fact that the catalogue never mentioned the word “Jew.” He instead repeatedly referred to the faculty as comprising only “German professors.” Johnson thus presented the founding of the University in Exile as a defense of democracy and intellectual freedom, not a rejection of Nazi racism [38].

Theoretically, in the first months of Hitler’s rule, one could have argued that the Nazis mainly were persecuting political enemies. By the autumn of 1933, however, the National Socialist perspective regarding Jews was very clear. Events such as the April 1, 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses, the April passing of laws that banned Jews from serving as civil servants (including university professors), lawyers, or editors—and which also enacted Jewish student quotas—andthe thousands of anti-Semitic references that recurred throughout Nazi speeches, propaganda, and publications made the degraded position that Jews now occupied in Germany clear. In spite of these obvious signals, however, this first course catalogue presented the University in Exile as a space where liberal German professors could teach “German methods” and the “German point of view” (both of which were, in actuality, the German-Jewish point of view) to American students. It was Nazi “political requirements,” not racial hatred, which had resulted in the dismissal of the new faculty members [39]. Throughout the 1930s, Johnson offered similar claims in Social Research (the journal created to popularize the Graduate Faculty’s work in America), for example referring to the National Socialist triumph solely as a “political” revolution [40].

In the first course catalogue, Johnson repeatedly appealed to the language of international scientific cosmopolitanism when discussing why a university in exile was “an institution long overdue in the modern world [41].” When praising German universities, for example, Johnson singled out for special admiration the fact that earlier in history German universities retained “a highly international” character [42]. When discussing Social Research, he declared that it would focus exclusively on “international tendencies” in the social sciences [43]. In the first issue of the journal, he similarly stated that the knowledge produced by the Graduate Faculty was “of the world at large [44].” Declarations that “scholarship is international” and that all defenders of intellectual freedom, particularly Americans, who “justly clai[m] a position of leadership in civilization,” must work together to create institutions dedicated to serving exiles for the purpose of reinvigorating American culture, peppered his writings. Such claims mirrored typical left-leaning progressive language. Echoing Dewey and other leftist progressives, in Johnson’s conception the international, European contributions of the New School would contribute to the renewal of American life. Eventually, this would benefit not only America, but the world.

Johnson thus presented a vision of a world characterized by an international society at the center of which stood the American nation. This society, he declared, must become the haven for all intellectuals rejected by their homelands. Anyone dedicated to democratic values, whether from Europe or America, could help create new, practical, and progressive knowledge. In the post World War I era of crisis, Americans must incorporate exiles’ ideas to aid in their quest for a progressive future.

The desire to elide the faculty’s Judaism was made starkly clear in Johnson’s 1935 declaration that:

The men who compose this German faculty were expelled from their posts essentially for one reason only. They chose to be free. In the majority of cases the official ground for dismissal was ‘political unreliability.’ They could not consent to stultify themselves by accepting the official political and social doctrines and thereby forfeit their scholarly right to follow the truth wherever it might lead. They regarded liberty as worth whatever sacrifices it might entail, and therewith placed themselves in the honored company of the [American] men who, by their readiness to endure sacrifice, won liberty for the English-speaking peoples [45].

This is an astonishing passage. In presenting the search for intellectual freedom and adherence to democratic political values as the reasons for the Graduate Faculty’s exile, Johnson downplayed the importance of the race-based dogmatisms of National Socialism. Although it was true that many of the faculty were politically unacceptable to the Nazis, being socialists, fellow travelers, or liberals, many left for racial reasons. Even Speier, a non-Jew, fled Germany because he was married to a Jewish woman. Yet in Johnson’s presentation, it was only intellectual and political, not racial, considerations that necessitated the University in Exile’s creation. Johnson’s denial of the ethnic heritage of the faculty members was further evident in the historical precedents for the Graduate Faculty that he cited. For instance, he referred to the University in Exile as the intellectual-institutional heir of the University of Padua, which was founded in the early 13th century in response to political oppression experienced at the University of Bologna. This ignored cases to which the University in Exile was truly analogous, such as Puritan exiles’ founding of Harvard in 1636. Johnson asserted that what the Nazis rejected was “liberalism,” not Judaism [46].

Johnson’s most outrageous denial of the faculty members’ Judaism came in the section of a 1935 report to the New School’s trustees entitled “Racial and Political Constitution of the Faculty.” Here, Johnson explicitly disavowed the Jewish character of the Graduate Faculty. As he said, “[t]here is a prevalent conception that the German professors expelled from their chairs were all either ‘Marxians’ or Jews. This conception is not valid so far as the Graduate Faculty is concerned. In selecting scholars for the faculty,” Johnson continued, “no attention was given to such irrelevant matters as race and religion” [47]. He stressed that “rather more than one-third [of the faculty] had no Jewish blood at all and of the others several could be classed as non-Aryan only by virtue of the ‘grandparent clause [48].’” Johnson took pains to portray the faculty as specifically non-Jewish, as only Jewish under the ridiculous laws of the Nazis. The University in Exile was not to be tainted publicly by the Jewish blood that did in fact comprise it.

Johnson’s presentation of the University in Exile as a cosmopolitan intellectual haven for political refugees closely mirrored John Dewey’s educational philosophy and views of cultural immigration. Johnson and Dewey were colleagues who belonged to the same progressive New York intellectual circles. Dewey and Johnson also worked together at the New School, and Dewey was on the University in Exile’s board. The respect Johnson had for Dewey was clearly reflected in his helping to found the John Dewey Society, an organization devoted to progressive education and educational philosophy, in 1935 [49]. Moreover, at Dewey’s ninetieth birthday, Johnson was invited to give a tribute to him, a favor which Dewey repaid at Johnson’s seventy-fifth birthday [50]. Later in life, Johnson would designate Dewey as one of the “great men” of twentieth century American thought [51]. In addition to these personal connections, Dewey’s philosophy strongly influenced Johnson, which one sees when comparing the former’s work with the latter’s presentation of the University in Exile.

In the pre-World War I era, many progressives believed that the large number of European immigrants who began settling in America in the nineteenth century needed to undergo a process of “Americanization [52].” Right-leaning progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt adopted an avowedly nationalistic perspective that advocated immigrants’ complete divestment of their European cultural heritage and full embrace of “American” values. Many other progressives, such as Jacob A. Riis, similarly believed that one must work to dissolve and replace the ethnic heritages of European immigrants. Dewey and other left-leaning progressives rejected these arguments. They instead advocated for immigrants to retain aspects of their cultural heritages and inject them into American life [53]. Dewey and others believed these cosmopolitan injections would lead to a rejuvenated “cosmopolitan American nationalism” that would support the achievement of progressive goals [54].

Thus, before 1918, Dewey wanted to create a new, international American nationalism, undergirded by core American ideals but enriched by European cultures [55]. A number of well-known progressives advocated a similar position, including Horace Kallen (the immigrant son of an orthodox rabbi who taught at the New School in the interwar years), Jane Addams, Emily Greene Bach, and Randolph Bourne [56]. However, after World War I, many left-leaning progressives abandoned this cultural focus in favor of highlighting American economic injustice [57]. When in the early-1930s Johnson advocated the use of the New School as a means to create an international American culture, he was somewhat of an atavism. But, unlike most progressives, Johnson had since 1924 been very much concerned with German developments, particularly the rise of National Socialism. This likely led him to be more sensitive to cultural issues than his economically focused contemporaries. Indeed, progressives would re-embrace cultural arguments in the 1930s and 1940s, as Nazi and Soviet successes re-indicated the important role culture played in modern life.

Johnson’s cosmopolitan presentation of the German exiles as strengthening American social science with their own European intellectual traditions mirrored Dewey’s philosophy of international American nationalism. But why, then, did Johnson downplay the faculty’s Judaism while stressing their German-ness? In theory, he could have highlighted the faculty’s ethnic identity while maintaining that, once the best parts of this identity were assimilated, it would be transcended. The answer to this question lies in the prevalent anti-Semitism of the American university system in the interwar period. The problem of Jewish quota systems at major universities was well known at the time, with a variety of newspaper and magazine articles addressing the subject [58]. Although elite, American protestant culture had long been defined by what scholars have termed “genteel anti-semitism”—a type of polite, non-violent, yet pervasive distrust and fear of Jews—it was only in the interwar years that Protestant-dominated American colleges and universities began to engage in serious efforts to limit Jewish enrollment [59]. Johnson, a college president interested in educational administration and philosophy, was very aware of this issue. To overcome it and reach his cosmopolitan goals, Johnson strategically ignored the faculty’s Judaism. This, he hoped, would foster their American acceptance.

Johnson was also likely worried about the New School’s standing as an elite institution. Since its founding as a progressive offshoot of Columbia, the New School had attempted to position itself as an alternative to other elite American universities. The fact that Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler and Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell had made clear their belief that Jewish enrollment would endanger Anglo-Saxon protestant culture must have strengthened Johnson’s commitment to ignoring the exiles’ Judaism.

Various trends bolstered American academics’ fear of Jews in the 1920s and impelled the creation of the quota system. There was worry over immigration (which manifested in the 1924 Immigration Act) and the concomitant rise of nativism and racial science. Protestant elites also feared that they could not compete with Jews academically and that Jewish business success (enabled by education) would lead to the erosion of their own economic standing and social prestige. In addition to such academic and economic anxieties, protestant elites shared the cultural fear that the infiltration of supposedly effeminate Jews into the American aristocracy would attenuate the masculinity of the next generation of elites [60]. The ancient religious charge that the Jews were the murderers of Jesus Christ fortified these anti-Semitic impulses. The process of American universities’ democratization also strengthened these economic and cultural fears [61]. In the 1920s and 1930s, then, many American Protestant intellectuals considered the Jews as economic and cultural challengers who must be prevented from entering the American elite [62].

Such attitudes manifested in the quota systems, limiting Jewish student enrollment and faculty appointments. In the interwar years, many universities, including Adelphi, Barnard, Brown, Cincinnati, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, New York, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Princeton, Rutgers, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Washington and Lee, and Yale, imposed quotas on Jewish students and faculty [63]. Yale did not promote a Jew to the position of full professor until 1946. The humanities, in particular, were bastions of anti-Semitic prejudice [64]. In their anti-Semitism, American protestant intellectuals echoed more general social attitudes toward Jews [65]. Unique among immigrant groups, the more Jews succeeded in American society the more Americans resented them [66]. Presenting the New School as a Jewish institution in an overtly anti-Semitic educational environment would have made it difficult, if not impossible, for Johnson to achieve his cosmopolitan goal of popularizing German academia among American intellectuals. Had he stressed the faculty’s Judaism, he would have done little but contribute to their American alienation.

The argument that Johnson’s ignoring of the ethnic identities of the Graduate Faculty was a strategy designed to increase the likelihood of their American success is bolstered by the fact that Johnson was by no means an anti-Semite and was quite attuned to Jew hatred. In addition to his personally saving more than one hundred European-Jewish scholars, Johnson repeatedly devoted himself to fighting educational anti-Semitism. He did so throughout the 1930s as a member and president of the American Section of the International League for Academic Freedom. Later, in 1946, he helped found the New York State Committee against Discrimination in Education specifically to fight the Jewish quota system [67]. Johnson was very clearly not an anti-Semite. However, given the interwar climate of intellectual and university-associated anti-Semitism, it would have been an imprudent strategy for Johnson to focus on, or even acknowledge, the faculty’s Jewish identity. This could have, in theory, alienated not only fellow academics but also some of the non-Jewish associated funding sources upon which the Graduate Faculty relied. Indeed, representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation had made disparaging remarks about Jews in the past [68]. Doing anything to limit exiles’ acceptance into American academia would have been foolhardy [69]. For cosmopolitanism, Johnson denied the faculty’s Jewish demographics.

The Graduate Faculty and Judaism

The fact that Jewish New School scholars similarly kept silent about their Judaism facilitated the Graduate Faculty’s success and aided Johnson’s strategy of assimilation. Like Johnson, the Graduate Faculty publicly denied that the creation of the University in Exile had anything to do with Nazi racial policy. As a collective they first displayed this belief in their academic constitution. Mirroring Johnson’s language, the University in Exile’s constitution declared that the Graduate Faculty was primarily “founded upon the principles of academic freedom” [70]. The only mention of race or religion came in a sub-clause that forbade discriminating against a potential hire for “scientifically irrelevant considerations.” As late as 1939, when National Socialist persecution of German Jews had become incontrovertible, the Graduate Faculty still refused to mention their Judaism in official reports to the New School’s board and donors (implying that fears of pulled funding contributed to their denial of Judaism) [71]. In no way did faculty members wish publicly to portray the University in Exile as a Jewish institution.

To understand how Jewish New School scholars portrayed themselves to the outside world, one must examine the articles they wrote for Social Research. Although the journal was intended to promote not only faculty scholars’, but also other exiles’ work, for its first few years the majority of Social Research contributors were members of the University in Exile. Johnson and the faculty were fairly successful in disseminating Social Research: by September 1936, the journal had 523 American and 114 foreign subscribers [72]. What is most striking about 1930s articles from Social Research is the almost complete lack of discussion regarding Judaism, Jews, and the German and European Jewish problem. Throughout the mid-1930s, the word “Jews” was mentioned in only 21 Social Research articles and book reviews; “Jewish” in 16; “Judaism” in six; variations on “anti-Semitism” in six; variations on “anti-Semitic” in five; and “Jew” in four. Many of these terms were used in the same articles. Zionism was not mentioned at all [73]. Compare this to the fact that the term “intellectual” was used in 111 articles and book reviews.

When Jewish New School scholars did discuss Judaism, it was primarily in an oblique, passing fashion. In 1935, for example, Albert Salomon briefly referred to “the pariah existence of the Jews” in an essay that discussed Max Weber’s sociology [74]. Arthur Feiler made a similar fleeting reference to Jews in 1937, declaring that the “great changes” in social life that occurred under German fascism came from “the degradation of Jews, socialists, liberals, Catholics, Protestants and women [75].” The fact that Feiler mentioned Jews as the first group in a series of those persecuted by fascism implied he understood Jews occupied a special place in the Nazi racial pantheon. He did not, however, engage in a protracted analysis or discussion of the Jews’ position.

The few articles that did discuss Jewish issues at some length submerged these discussions within other subjects. In an essay on “Education in Nazi Germany,” Frieda Wunderlich mentioned that in the National Socialist imagination, political and civil rights were “derived from the folk,” a “mystic community of blood” from which the Jews were excluded [76]. Wunderlich further underlined that a major goal of the National Socialists was to awaken “sound racial forces [77]”. In a later book review, she argued that racial restrictions had led to a decline in the quality of German scholarship, while elsewhere she emphasized that the Nazis considered the Jews to be their major enemy [78]. However, Wunderlich’s statements were made with reference to a specific topic, be it Nazi education or philosophical justice. Her essays indicate that she was well aware of the special place Jews occupied in the Nazi imagination, but she remained unwilling to discuss the Jewish problem at length.

The example of Wunderlich demonstrates that faculty members were aware of the centrality of the Jewish question to the Nazi project. For the most part, however, the Graduate Faculty ignored Judaism, even in instances where it would have made sense to mention it. When talking about the loss of liberty under dictatorships, Lederer argued that every autocracy prosecuted “a ‘purge’ eliminating all those who dare to resist” [79]. He made no mention of Judaism. Of course, few Jews resisted National Socialism, and Lederer’s 1937 remarks make little sense. Moreover, his description of dictatorship included no mention of the racial aspects upon which Nazi autocracy rested. He simply declared that dictatorships “extol violence and brutality, they appeal to the ferocious instincts, they build up a sinister mythology of national pride and superiority, and establish crude standards of discipline and of stereotyped thinking to which everyone must conform [80].” Lederer could have added that the German dictatorship was premised upon racial exclusion, an exclusion that caused his own and his colleagues’ exiles. The fact that he did not demonstrates his unwillingness to address the Jewish issue [81].

Between 1933 and 1939, the Graduate Faculty spent no time discussing the peculiar features of modern German anti-Semitism or the Jewish nature of their exile. Faculty members did, however, collectively define themselves as cosmopolitan intellectuals. That the Jewish scholars of the New School identified strongly as intellectuals may first be seen in the fact that one of their major proffered explanations for Nazism’s success was that intellectuals had failed in their duty to defend Weimar democracy [82]. Lederer blamed intellectuals—and hence himself and his colleagues—for failing to overcome the German labor movement’s inherent wariness of them. Lederer maintained that because intellectuals were unaware that policy was not a completely rational phenomenon, but depended on the manipulation of emotions, they were unable to speak to German workers in an effective manner [83]. Without intellectuals, workers, who did not understand the world’s complexity, were unable to seize power [84]. Eduard Heimann similarly maintained that Weimar intellectuals were unwilling to develop a philosophical principle that had the capacity to unite the disparate elements of the German nation and thus organize an anti-reactionary political bloc able to seize and retain power. Heimann further declared that intellectual democrats were unable to use education to give students a coherent Weltanschauung that would have allowed them to reject National Socialist appeals [85]. Adolf Löwe also blamed the German university system for failing to provide students with a “social consciousness” that had at its center the defense of democracy. Without such a social consciousness, Löwe retrospectively argued, the interwar explosion of academic unemployment was bound to result in a general social upheaval that found academics serving as the “propagandists and officers of the counterrevolution [86].” Wunderlich and Colm echoed this latter viewpoint [87].

In blaming intellectuals for democracy’s failure, the Jewish New School scholars were implicitly placing responsibility for Weimar’s collapse on themselves. Yet they were also signaling to American audiences that they identified primarily as intellectuals, not Jews. Faculty members’ self-identification as intellectuals was further displayed in their strong advocacy of intellectual involvement in American life. Throughout the 1930s, Lederer argued that science was integral to political life, and that exiled intellectuals like himself and his colleagues must do what they could to have their work speak to the contemporary problems of their adopted homeland. Without social science, “complicated procedures of government and administration, of business, industry, commerce, journalism,” could not possibly be performed [88]. This was doubly true during the Great Depression, which many of the faculty members—reflecting their German experiences—believed threatened democracy. In Lederer’s opinion, the basic calling of modern intellectual life, especially for exile intellectuals denied academic freedom in their homeland, was to defend democratic values. Intellectuals must become men of action, “uniting and giving strength” to liberty’s defense [89]. These actions, however, had nothing to do with overcoming the racial hatred that led to their exile.

Other Jewish faculty members echoed this appeal to intellectual engagement in social and political life. Salomon declared that periods of economic and political crisis like the 1930s created the social conditions that allowed intellectuals to “arrive at definite insights into the primordial phenomena of social life and the intellectual connection of antagonistic concepts within a higher spiritual unity [90].” He argued that European exile intellectuals, who retained a deeper philosophical knowledge than pragmatic American colleagues, must remove religious, moral, and social values from dogmatism. Doing so enabled societies to rediscover universal humanism, the philosophical basis of Western civilization [91]. Without such an attitude, democratic political life could not be maintained. Salomon argued that by promoting humanism, intellectuals enabled “the statesman to gain from philosophy a spiritual and intellectual power which enables him to suffer the adversities of political and social life with calmness of soul [92]”. This resulted in political moderation, the sine qua non of democracy. As with Lederer, the goal remained defending democracy, not combating anti-Semitism [93].

Gerhard Colm similarly emphasized that exiled social scientists had a “social responsibility” to defend democratic values. Academic work, while objective, retained within it an “element of responsible decision.” Social science must speak to “the task it has to fulfill in a specific historical situation,” which in the 1930s centered upon defending democracy and fighting fascism. Like Salomon, Colm argued that moments of crisis allowed intellectuals to revise traditional assumptions, enabling them to reach greater insights than in the past and prepare the way for a civilized future [94]. In addition to Lederer, Salomon, and Colm, Wunderlich maintained that social scientists must dedicate themselves to preventing fascism’s spread, while Löwe declared that intellectuals must seek, through creativity and rationalism, to “satisfy the social and spiritual demands” that led people to dictators by fostering “a new spirit of conscious cooperation and solidarity” dedicated to social reconstruction [95]. The Jewish New School scholars discussed themselves and their social mission with reference to their intellectual identity and need to defend democracy. There was little to no discussion of Jewish issues.

In these ways the graduate faculty identified with democratic cosmopolitanism while dismissing the role anti-Semitism played not only in modern life but also in their own experiences of exile. What explains this lacuna? The New School scholars’ impulse to ignore their Jewish identity and stress their collective belonging to an intellectual Republic of Letters reflected a defining cultural characteristic of the post-emancipation German-Jewish intelligentsia. Since the nineteenth century, many Jews had rejected their Jewish identity and replaced it with German Bildung [96]. In an attempt to navigate a middle path between Judaism and particularist German nationalism while becoming part of the German cultural community, German Jews seized upon Bildung and membership in the Bildungsbürgertum (educated middle class) as a replacement identity [97].

This embrace led Jewish intellectuals to advocate the primacy of Kultur over race. In the fin-de-siècle, Jewish intellectuals hoped joining the Bildungsbürgetum indicated wider German society’s acceptance of them as Germans. This was especially true amongst left-leaning Jews like those who joined the Graduate Faculty. As several scholars have argued, this (incorrect) belief impelled Jews, during the rise and triumph of National Socialism, to project “their ideals of a tolerant Germany onto a quite different, far more brutal reality [98]”. The Graduate Faculty’s essays reflect this phenomenon. Accepting this perspective entailed willfully ignoring the anti-Semitic undercurrents permeating late-19th and early-20th century German society. Throughout the Wilhelmine era, for example, the terms “cosmopolitan,” citoyen du monde, and Weltbürger developed anti-Semitic overtones [99].Anti-Semites regularly mocked the Jews’ for their cosmopolitan dreams [100]. Nevertheless, the desire to be exiled for what you thought, as opposed to who you were, led many Jewish intellectuals to ignore the realities of racialist National Socialism. As evidenced above, this denial continued during many intellectuals’ first years in exile. Lederer and his colleagues believed that, first and foremost, they were intellectuals, not Jews. The Nazis, however, thought differently.

This belief in universal, cosmopolitan intellectualism was not confined to German Jewish culture. It was also a characteristic of Central European Jewish intellectual culture generally. During the interwar years, throughout Central Europe, particularly in the areas formerly united into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Jewish intellectuals maintained that each had a “universal intellectual self” that enabled them to belong to a “cosmopolitan scholarly community [101].” As the majority of non-Jews abandoned whatever allegiance they may have had to cosmopolitanism, German-speaking Jewish intellectuals continued to uphold and defend this ideology. In Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the other areas of Central European Jewish settlement, Jews, caught between various ethnonationalistic particularities, declared their membership in an imagined, supranational intellectual community [102]. Like their German counterparts, this led Jews stubbornly to ignore the realities of radical, racialist nationalism. Thus, when non-German Jewish intellectuals came to find safe haven at the University in Exile from the mid-1930s onward, their intellectual identities overlapped with their German antecedents. In sum, the belief in a universal, cosmopolitan intellectual identity led the Jewish members of the Graduate Faculty to downplay their Judaism in their first years of exile. The exiles also, of course, hoped to be accepted by the American academy, and eliding their Judaism contributed to this goal. The émigrés’ ideology and interests thus overlapped with Johnson’s.

Their cosmopolitan dreams and hopes for acceptance led Johnson and the Jewish members of the Graduate Faculty to deny the faculty’s Jewish demographics. Johnson hoped to use the European exiles to reinvigorate American life. The only way to do so was to have the exiles’ scholarship accepted by an anti-Semitic American intellectual community. To foster this acceptance, Johnson ignored the faculty’s Jewish heritage. The Jewish faculty members, for their part, were unwilling to emphasize the role Judaism played in their exile because doing so would have denied the cosmopolitan project that had characterized the German-Jewish intelligentsia since the late-19th century and further contributed to their alienation. They wanted to participate in American intellectual life. This similarity in beliefs enabled the New School to function smoothly throughout the 1930s. There was little disagreement between Johnson and faculty members regarding the goals of the New School or how it should present itself to the outside world. These intellectual congruencies engendered the University in Exile’s acceptance by American academics.

The faculty’s American acceptance was reflected in the very positive reviews their essay collections received in scholarly journals. For example, Merle Fainsod called the New School’s 1937 collection Political and Economic Democracy “suggestive,” “stimulating,” “rewarding,” and, in parts, “brilliant.” Fainsod also referred to the Graduate Faculty only as a “distinguished company of European scholars [103].” The 1939 collection War in Our Time received similarly positive reviews [104]. In the latter case, Nathan Leites referred to the volume’s “high level of analysis [105]”. None of these reviews mentioned the faculty’s Jewish demographics. Although there was some trepidation about the non-empirical focus of some of the essays, in no way was the New School “tainted” as a Jewish institution. These reviews indicate that Johnson and the faculty members successfully disassociated the University in Exile and the German-Jewish scholars that largely comprised it from Judaism.

By 1939, however, the degraded sociopolitical space the Jews occupied in National Socialist Germany had become too obvious to ignore. In 1935, the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws, which forbade marriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans; made it illegal for Jews to employ German women under the age of 45 as domestic workers; and stripped Jews of German citizenship. In 1938, the Nazis forced Jewish men to adopt the middle name Israel and Jewish women to take the middle name Sarah and forbade Jews from attending German schools. These laws, coupled with the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, clearly signified not only that the Nazis hated the Jews, but that that they had made Jew hatred an organizing principle of German society.It was too much for even the Jewish members of the Graduate Faculty, who remained committed to a cosmopolitan intellectual identity, to ignore.

For these reasons, in 1939 the first essay in Social Research dedicated to examining anti-Semitism, Erich Kahler’s “Forms and Features of Anti-Judaism,” appeared. Unlike his colleagues, Kahler, a Czechoslovakian Jew, highlighted the specifically anti-Jewish aspects of National Socialism. Broadly, the essay argued that anti-Semitism was a universal feature of history that could be found in all societies in different, yet recurring, forms [106]. In Kahler’s opinion, the modern period of anti-Semitism was unique in that for the first time in history, anti-Judaism was not predicated on religious hatred, but was rather undergirded by patently false “scientific” racial theories. Unlike other faculty members, Kahler placed racial hatred at the center of the National Socialist triumph. He declared that the rise of the Nazis had demonstrated the utter failure of cosmopolitan Jewish attempts at assimilation. Christians had never accepted the Jews, and “[w]hen the time came,” the Nazis made easy “use of popular [anti-Semitic] tendencies which had always lain ready beneath the surface” of Christian society [107]. By arguing this, Kahler implicitly rejected the entire cosmopolitan project of German and German-speaking Central European Jewry. There was no such thing as a Republic of Letters for the Jews to join. In the eyes of their enemies, they would always be first and foremost Jews. The Jewish intellectuals had been naïve to believe that their oppression could ever end.

Kahler emphasized that the Nazi attack on the Jews was not only an attack on Judaism, but also an attack on the cosmopolitan project of liberal democracy itself. He stressed that because “their spiritual law [was] never compatible with an unlimited claim to human power,” the Jews had always “stood for democracy, for social equality and for peace [108]”. The fact that the Jews lived in all countries also made them a potent symbol of cosmopolitan internationalism. For these reasons, Nazi attacks on the Jews were really attacks on the cosmopolitan project and the Nazi victory signaled this project’s death [109].

Kahler’s essay represented a strong blow against the German and Central European cosmopolitan ideal still embraced by the Jewish members of the Graduate Faculty. In painstaking detail, Kahler elucidated how from antiquity to the present Jew hatred was endemic to western society. Anti-Semitism crossed borders and cultures like no other ideology. He implied that it was foolhardy for his colleagues to think differently. Their cosmopolitan project, while admirable, had ended in defeat. Indeed, in the next years Social Research displayed a new sensitivity to Jewish issues. Between 1940 and 1945, the term “Jews” appeared in 45 articles and book reviews; “Jewish” in 40; variations on “anti-Semitism” in 17; “Jew” in 16; “Judaism” in 10; and variations on “anti-Semitic” in 4.

 The death of the European cosmopolitan project led to the emergence of a new focus on Jewish particularism. However, one must recognize that it was American progressive cosmopolitanism that helped save the generation of scholars who found a home at the New School; it was this cosmopolitanism that allowed the University in Exile’s faculty members to examine their Jewish particularism. Although the cosmopolitan project failed in Central Europe, it partially succeeded in America.

Conclusions

In Intellectuals in Exile,Claus-Dieter Krohn convincingly demonstrates that the success of the University in Exile relied extensively upon receiving the necessary funding to support exiled German scholars. In emphasizing the financial structures that undergirded the New School’s becoming the largest institutional home for intellectual exiles, however, Krohn largely ignores how ideological similarities contributed to the Graduate Faculty’s flourishing. This paper illuminates how the cosmopolitan and interest-based congruencies between left wing American progressives and German- and Central European-Jewish intellectuals helped engender the University in Exile’s achievements by allowing the institution to function well and impelling its acceptance by American academics. In demonstrating this, it also explains why in the 1930s Johnson and other faculty members devoted so little attention to Jewish issues.

There still remains much work to be done on the University in Exile’s faculty members’ relationship to Judaism. Questions that remain to be answered include: To what degree was the cultural-intellectual life of the faculty members “Jewish,” that is to say, informed by Jewish cultural traditions? Were Johnson and faculty members speaking in a coded language when referring to the New School’s “German” professoriate? How did de-emphasizing the faculty members’ Judaism affect how Jewish donors like Halle viewed the Graduate Faculty? Did faculty members discuss their Judaism in publications outside of Social Research? If so, how?What, if any, were the New School scholars’ opinions regarding Zionism? How did the faculty members relate to the New York intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish? These and other questions open up fruitful areas of future research.