Isaac Deutscher The Non‑Jewish Jew: And Other Essays Verso, 2017. 176 pp.
Isaac Deutscher was born in 1907 and died in 1967. His life fell on an eventful period of Jewish history (as, indeed, other periods over the past two thousand years). Deutscher was born near Krakow to a Gererian Hasidic family and became one of the world's leading Marxist journalists and historians. He himself considered his biography a path from the Middle Ages to the present, from dusty prejudices to the cutting edge of historical science. The Gentile Jew, Deutscher's collection of essays on Jewish topics, first published in 1968 and just republished by the radical publisher Verso, opens with a biographical sketch written by Deutscher's widow, Tamara Deutscher. The key to this essay is the image of jumping over a historical abyss. “The gulf was so vast that it both puzzled and delighted him,” writes Tamara Deutscher. “He was both amazed and amused” that his early memories and later achievements belong to the same person. How did a boy "with a full shock of black hair and curly side-links" who timidly knocked on the rabbi's door to wake him up for morning prayers become a radical orator, speaking to a crowd of 15,000 students at a Berkeley debate?
These memoirs by Tamara Deutscher, titled "Raising a Jewish Child," remain practically the only source of Deutscher's youth. This essay is filled with quotations from Deutscher himself and appears to be his own text. Although it talks about the way from and from Judaism, there are many Jewish stories in the text. For example, it tells the story of Isaac's great-grandfather, a mitnaged (the term itself is not used), who because of his "fanatic beliefs" forbade his son to become a Hasid. The son, Isaac's grandfather, dreamed of joining the Hasidim of the Gerer Rebbe, but when he set off on his journey to the tzadik's court, his father made every effort to prevent him, even calling the Austrian police. This story is very reminiscent of another told by Nachman of Bratslav under the title "The Rabbi's Son". In this story, the father repeatedly prevents his son from going to the Hasidic rebbe. At the end of the story, we learn that all the bad signs that seemed to reinforce the prohibition imposed by the father were actually sent by Satan, and the young man’s meeting with the rebbe that did not happen, if it happened, would hasten the coming of the Messiah.
Deutscher's grandfather's rebellion was archetypal; so was his own rebellion. His story is reminiscent of the classic Maskilian autobiography; he could be Solomon Maimon talking about Lithuania in the 1760s. Deutscher was also a Talmudic prodigy who first became disillusioned with his studies, and then completely despised it. At the age of 13, writes Tamara Deutscher, Isaac gave a speech about the kikaion , "a bird that is large, beautiful and unlike other birds," appears once every seventy years, and its saliva has miraculous healing properties. Young Deutscher tried to answer the question of whether this saliva was kosher; he drew on many authoritative sources and responded with such brilliance that he was immediately ordained a rabbi.
So what, what's a kykaionin the Bible, this is not a bird, but a plant, that “pumpkin” that Gd ordered to grow instantly in order to shelter Jonah? So what if, as Bernard Wasserstein pointed out, this story has nothing to do with how rabbis were actually ordained? It doesn’t matter which of them was mistaken or exaggerated - Tamara or Isaac himself, history conveys to us the idea that it is intended to convey: that there is nothing more stupid and there is no more mediocre waste of intellectual power than traditional Judaism. At the age of 14, Tamara goes on to say, Isaac broke with religion with a spectacular blasphemy: he offended God by eating a ham sandwich at a rabbi's grave on Yom Kippur. Thunder did not strike, no retribution for this triple sin befell the blasphemer, and then Isaac realized that there was no G‑d. (And yet he was overwhelmed by a terrible sense of guilt - not so much before God, how much in front of parents: “At the family table, I could hardly raise my eyes. Never in my life have I repented so much.)
The subsequent events are briefly described by David Kaute in his 2013 book Isaac and Isaiah: The Secret Punishment of a Cold War Heretic, dedicated to Deutscher and Isaiah Berlin. As a teenager, Deutscher plunged into Polish literature: he wrote poetry and criticism and translated Thomas Mann. In 1927, at the age of 20, he joined the Polish Communist Party and was the editor of underground communist newspapers. Only his anti-fascism turned out to be premature: in 1932 he published an article warning against the threat of Nazism, but at that time the Communists still considered the main danger of the Social Democrats to themselves. Deutscher was expelled from the party, which turned out to be only for the best, because most of the leadership of the Polish Communist Party was destroyed by Stalin in 1938.
These events made Deutscher a convinced critic of Stalinism, but did not shake either his commitment to Marxism or the ideal image of the Soviet Union he cherished. He managed to escape from Poland on the eve of the war - in April 1939 he went to London as a correspondent for a Zionist newspaper. After making a brief and unsuccessful attempt to serve in the Polish army in exile, Deutscher turned surprisingly quickly into an English journalist, becoming an employee of The Economist. After World War II, he became the leading expert on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; this reputation was strengthened by his groundbreaking biographies of Stalin and Trotsky. For two decades at the height of the Cold War, Deutscher basked in the glory of being a sympathetic but critical expositor of communism to Western audiences.
Isaac Deutscher. 1957getty
According to Deutscher, his whole life is designed to demonstrate the power of enlightenment. It is this vision that underlies the views on Judaism that he expresses in The Gentile Jew. The earliest essay in the collection was written in 1946 in defense of post-war Jewish refugees; the latest, containing a stern criticism of Israel's actions during and after the Six-Day War, appeared in 1967, shortly before the author's death. Over the years, all the utopian hopes that nourished the communist idealism of the young Deutscher have crumbled. Instead of liberation, the Jews of Europe experienced extermination. Instead of eradicating anti-Semitism, the communist authorities in the Soviet Union began to persecute Zionists and "rootless cosmopolitans." Finally, in an age when Marxist theory predicted the decline of the nation-state, the fate of the Jews began to depend on the prosperity of the Jewish state. Faced with these contradictions, Deutscher was forced to use all his dialectical abilities, as well as his ability to turn a blind eye to something, in order to maintain faith in Marxism as he saw it.
Thus, in the essay "The Russian Revolution and the Jewish Question," Deutscher writes that the Bolsheviks "were too optimistic about the chances of solving the Jewish problem." This statement contains two assumptions, which the author does not prove in any way: first, that the existence of Jewry was a problem that needed to be solved; second, that the Russian Communists sincerely sought to eradicate anti-Semitism. And the fact that they did not succeed, Deutscher explains partly by the deep roots of anti-Semite phobia in the Christian mind, and partly by the behavior of the Jews themselves.
Surely the Jews could not fail to notice, writes Deutscher, that the Jews were avoiding service in the Red Army, that they aspired to occupy administrative positions in the young Soviet state, and that they did not want to give up "the art and tricks of retailing"? As for Stalin's post-war paranoia, isn't it justified by the fact that Soviet Jews were, so to speak, attracted to America and gravitated toward relatives who emigrated there? If the American army entered Moscow, wouldn't the Jews become "collaborators"? In this way, Deutscher manages to justify both communist and anti-communist anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. The Jews aroused hatred because they were too visible in the party, and at the same time the Jews aroused hatred because they did not love the party enough.
Be that as it may, the only way to correct the shortcomings of communism is a new communism, this time the right one - internationalist and revolutionary, not Stalinist and nationalist Russian. The kind of communism that Deutscher converted to in his youth, and "converted" is the right word in this case. Although Deutscher himself believed that his path from Hasidism to Communism was one from superstition to reason, we can see from our privileged vantage point that it was actually a substitution of one faith for another. For Deutscher, as for many others, these beliefs were interchangeable, as they had much in common. Both were messianic, directed towards the future, when everything bad in life - in human life, but especially in Jewish life - would be abolished. Both combined intellectual sophistication with emotional elation. Both were based on the canon of sacred texts - the Torah or the Parisian manuscripts of Marx, which required deep study and careful interpretation. Both had their own charismatic leaders - the Gerer Rebbe or Lenin.
Strictly speaking, there is neither Greek nor Jew in communism. But, as the title of Deutscher's collection shows, he did not cease to feel himself a Jew even after he became a historical materialist. Considering what kind of world he lived in and what events were taking place at that time, this is not too surprising. But this sense of self posed a significant personal and ideological problem for Deutscher: what makes a person a Jew if he no longer believes in Judaism? “For me, the Jewish community still means only bad things,” he writes in the essay “Who is a Jew?”. "Religion? Yes, I'm an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. So I'm not Jewish in either sense." But in some third sense, he still was. How can this be?
Practically speaking, Deutscher concludes, the Jewish sense of self in him supports anti-Semitism. This discovery is not new - Spinoza said about the same thing, as did Theodor Herzl - but after the Holocaust, this idea acquired a sharper sound. Now it was not just the presence of anti-Semitism that prevented assimilation, but rather the memory of the victims of Nazism made hopes of assimilation look deeply dishonorable.
Deutscher would have laughed at the religious guise of Emil Fackenheim's 614 commandment—don't let Hitler win posthumous victories—but in fact he wholeheartedly shared it. “I am a Jew by virtue of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and destroyed,” he concludes in his essay “Who is a Jew?”. "I am a Jew because I feel the Jewish tragedy as my own tragedy." In the same essay, Deutscher also writes that "Nazism is nothing but the self-defense of the old order against communism," but he experiences the pain and humiliation of Nazi crimes as a Jew, not as a communist.
If a person rejects both traditional definitions of Jewishness - as a religion and as a nation, but still constantly feels like a Jew, how to explain this feeling? The enduring relevance of this issue justifies the reprinting of Deutscher's book, because in the title essay of the collection he provides an answer to this question, which still inspires many Jews. The essay "The Gentile Jew" became so popular because in it Deutscher, in the Hegelian spirit he was so familiar with, brilliantly dialectically reverses the issue. He writes that hostility to Judaism does not make a person a bad Jew; on the contrary, it makes him a better Jew. Because the essence of Judaism is not obedience to God, following the Law, or self-identification with the people, but heresy. Genuine Judaism is a faith that rejects Judaism.
To prove his point, Deutscher uses his Talmudic training and refers to the image of Elisha ben Abuya, a heretic sage, known by the nickname Acher, "the other." Acher is mentioned several times in the Talmud as a halakhic authority that broke with the sages in a fundamental way, although it is not clear how exactly. In the famous Talmudic story, which Deutscher did not quote, although he was probably familiar with it, Acher is one of the four wise men who ended up in the pardes, the Garden of Eden; Acher could not stand the sight of this garden and "pulled out the plants." From Deutscher's point of view, Acher was an adventurer who crossed borders. "What made him cross the borders of Judaism?" Deutscher asks.
The question is not quite correct, of course; The Talmud speaks of Acher not as one who came out of Judaism, but as one who defiled it. But for Deutscher, Acher represents the best Jewish tradition possible, a tradition that also includes “Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxembourg, Trotsky and Freud. […] All of them found the boundaries of Jewry too narrow, too archaic, too narrow. All of them were looking for ideals and realizations outside of Jewry.” The freethinkers and revolutionaries mentioned by Deutscher considered Judaism a prison or a ghetto because they wanted to belong to another, better community - all of humanity.
Diego Rivera. The man who rules the universe. Fragment. 1934Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City
What they didn't understand, and what Deutscher didn't understand, was that the Jews already belonged to this community, humanity, without even being heretics. It does not happen that a person is immediately universal. House, as T.S. Eliot, this is where we start, and Judaism is no worse than other places in that regard. What really unites the great men who entered the Deutscher canon is that they considered Judaism especially unsuited to be the abode of the universal. Deutscher praises Freud, for example, for saying that “the person he analyzes is not a German, an Englishman, a Russian or a Jew – he is a universal person […] whose passions and desires, fears and anxieties are essentially the same, to which whatever race, religion, nation he belongs to.” But in fact, of course, Freud worked mainly with Jews. This, however, does not mean that their "passions and desires" were different from the passions and desires of other people, although it is possible that they were different. How are we to know if we do not take their Jewishness seriously, but are trying to “go beyond it” as soon as possible?
For Deutscher, the rejection of the Jewish particular in the name of what he calls "the liberation of the universal man" is the best expression of Jewishness. "I hope," he writes, "that, along with other nations, the Jews will find their way back to the spiritual and political legacy of those great Jews who transcended Jewry." Logically, however, this idea is completely untenable. Jews who have gone beyond the boundaries of Jewry would not have been able to accomplish this feat if it were not for Jewry itself with its boundaries. A society consisting of heretics alone is just as unthinkable as a society consisting of revolutionaries alone. The prestige of exclusivity requires exclusivity itself. And it is somehow ugly to attribute this prestige to oneself alone. To say that I am a Jew, inheriting Spinoza and Heine, is like saying that I am a Christian, inheriting Kant or Beethoven: great,
But the main problem with the ideal of the "non-Jewish Jew" is that he is not someone who goes beyond religion in the name of the universal. Rather, we see here a repetition in secular terms of one of the most important vectors of European culture. This is a movement from the letter to the spirit, from the law to love, from the particular to the general, a movement that lies at the foundation of the Christian consciousness. Deutscher carefully avoids this comparison by choosing Acher as the model Jewish heretic, not Jesus. But as soon as any Jew tells other Jews that they are selfishly concerned only with themselves, while he cares about the salvation of all mankind, he - consciously or not - goes along the original anti-Jewish path of Christian civilization.
Therefore, any theologian can say about Christianity exactly what Deutscher says about Spinoza's thinking: that it was “Jewish monotheism taken to its logical conclusion, and a Jewish universal Gd thought through to the end; and when thought through to the end, this god ceased to be Jewish. Contemporary philosophers such as Alain Badiou or Slava Zizek have not failed to note the similarities between Christian anti-Judaism and Deutscher's Jewish anti-Judaism. They seized on this image of the non-Jewish Jew because it lends anti-Judaism an unmistakably Jewish character and protects them from accusations of anti-Semitism.
But reading Deutscher, we understand that there is one nuance. In the essay "Who is a Jew?" he writes: “It is strange and bitter to think that the extermination of six million Jews gave new life to Jewry. I would rather see six million men, women and children survive and Jewry itself perish.” Jewry—that is, Jewishness—deserves to die, Deutscher argues, because Marx was right: Judaism is just another name for capitalism. So the Deutscher Marxist ideal state is similar to the Nazi ideal state: both are judenrein, free of Jews. The apparent inability of Western thought to imagine an ideal society not involved in the destruction of Judaism constitutes a great and constant danger to the Jews living in the West. And we will not avoid this danger by declaring our desire to abolish ourselves. 
Isaac Deutscher The Non‑Jewish Jew: And Other Essays Verso, 2017. 176 pp.
Isaac Deutscher was born in 1907 and died in 1967. His life fell on an eventful period of Jewish history (as, indeed, other periods over the past two thousand years). Deutscher was born near Krakow to a Gererian Hasidic family and became one of the world's leading Marxist journalists and historians. He himself considered his biography a path from the Middle Ages to the present, from dusty prejudices to the cutting edge of historical science. The Gentile Jew, Deutscher's collection of essays on Jewish topics, first published in 1968 and just republished by the radical publisher Verso, opens with a biographical sketch written by Deutscher's widow, Tamara Deutscher. The key to this essay is the image of jumping over a historical abyss. “The gulf was so vast that it both puzzled and delighted him,” writes Tamara Deutscher. “He was both amazed and amused” that his early memories and later achievements belong to the same person. How did a boy "with a full shock of black hair and curly side-links" who timidly knocked on the rabbi's door to wake him up for morning prayers become a radical orator, speaking to a crowd of 15,000 students at a Berkeley debate?
These memoirs by Tamara Deutscher, titled "Raising a Jewish Child," remain practically the only source of Deutscher's youth. This essay is filled with quotations from Deutscher himself and appears to be his own text. Although it talks about the way from and from Judaism, there are many Jewish stories in the text. For example, it tells the story of Isaac's great-grandfather, a mitnaged (the term itself is not used), who because of his "fanatic beliefs" forbade his son to become a Hasid. The son, Isaac's grandfather, dreamed of joining the Hasidim of the Gerer Rebbe, but when he set off on his journey to the tzadik's court, his father made every effort to prevent him, even calling the Austrian police. This story is very reminiscent of another told by Nachman of Bratslav under the title "The Rabbi's Son". In this story, the father repeatedly prevents his son from going to the Hasidic rebbe. At the end of the story, we learn that all the bad signs that seemed to reinforce the prohibition imposed by the father were actually sent by Satan, and the young man’s meeting with the rebbe that did not happen, if it happened, would hasten the coming of the Messiah.
Deutscher's grandfather's rebellion was archetypal; so was his own rebellion. His story is reminiscent of the classic Maskilian autobiography; he could be Solomon Maimon talking about Lithuania in the 1760s. Deutscher was also a Talmudic prodigy who first became disillusioned with his studies, and then completely despised it. At the age of 13, writes Tamara Deutscher, Isaac gave a speech about the kikaion , "a bird that is large, beautiful and unlike other birds," appears once every seventy years, and its saliva has miraculous healing properties. Young Deutscher tried to answer the question of whether this saliva was kosher; he drew on many authoritative sources and responded with such brilliance that he was immediately ordained a rabbi.
So what, what's a kykaionin the Bible, this is not a bird, but a plant, that “pumpkin” that Gd ordered to grow instantly in order to shelter Jonah? So what if, as Bernard Wasserstein pointed out, this story has nothing to do with how rabbis were actually ordained? It doesn’t matter which of them was mistaken or exaggerated - Tamara or Isaac himself, history conveys to us the idea that it is intended to convey: that there is nothing more stupid and there is no more mediocre waste of intellectual power than traditional Judaism. At the age of 14, Tamara goes on to say, Isaac broke with religion with a spectacular blasphemy: he offended God by eating a ham sandwich at a rabbi's grave on Yom Kippur. Thunder did not strike, no retribution for this triple sin befell the blasphemer, and then Isaac realized that there was no G‑d. (And yet he was overwhelmed by a terrible sense of guilt - not so much before God, how much in front of parents: “At the family table, I could hardly raise my eyes. Never in my life have I repented so much.)
The subsequent events are briefly described by David Kaute in his 2013 book Isaac and Isaiah: The Secret Punishment of a Cold War Heretic, dedicated to Deutscher and Isaiah Berlin. As a teenager, Deutscher plunged into Polish literature: he wrote poetry and criticism and translated Thomas Mann. In 1927, at the age of 20, he joined the Polish Communist Party and was the editor of underground communist newspapers. Only his anti-fascism turned out to be premature: in 1932 he published an article warning against the threat of Nazism, but at that time the Communists still considered the main danger of the Social Democrats to themselves. Deutscher was expelled from the party, which turned out to be only for the best, because most of the leadership of the Polish Communist Party was destroyed by Stalin in 1938.
These events made Deutscher a convinced critic of Stalinism, but did not shake either his commitment to Marxism or the ideal image of the Soviet Union he cherished. He managed to escape from Poland on the eve of the war - in April 1939 he went to London as a correspondent for a Zionist newspaper. After making a brief and unsuccessful attempt to serve in the Polish army in exile, Deutscher turned surprisingly quickly into an English journalist, becoming an employee of The Economist. After World War II, he became the leading expert on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; this reputation was strengthened by his groundbreaking biographies of Stalin and Trotsky. For two decades at the height of the Cold War, Deutscher basked in the glory of being a sympathetic but critical expositor of communism to Western audiences.
Isaac Deutscher. 1957getty
According to Deutscher, his whole life is designed to demonstrate the power of enlightenment. It is this vision that underlies the views on Judaism that he expresses in The Gentile Jew. The earliest essay in the collection was written in 1946 in defense of post-war Jewish refugees; the latest, containing a stern criticism of Israel's actions during and after the Six-Day War, appeared in 1967, shortly before the author's death. Over the years, all the utopian hopes that nourished the communist idealism of the young Deutscher have crumbled. Instead of liberation, the Jews of Europe experienced extermination. Instead of eradicating anti-Semitism, the communist authorities in the Soviet Union began to persecute Zionists and "rootless cosmopolitans." Finally, in an age when Marxist theory predicted the decline of the nation-state, the fate of the Jews began to depend on the prosperity of the Jewish state. Faced with these contradictions, Deutscher was forced to use all his dialectical abilities, as well as his ability to turn a blind eye to something, in order to maintain faith in Marxism as he saw it.
Thus, in the essay "The Russian Revolution and the Jewish Question," Deutscher writes that the Bolsheviks "were too optimistic about the chances of solving the Jewish problem." This statement contains two assumptions, which the author does not prove in any way: first, that the existence of Jewry was a problem that needed to be solved; second, that the Russian Communists sincerely sought to eradicate anti-Semitism. And the fact that they did not succeed, Deutscher explains partly by the deep roots of anti-Semite phobia in the Christian mind, and partly by the behavior of the Jews themselves.
Surely the Jews could not fail to notice, writes Deutscher, that the Jews were avoiding service in the Red Army, that they aspired to occupy administrative positions in the young Soviet state, and that they did not want to give up "the art and tricks of retailing"? As for Stalin's post-war paranoia, isn't it justified by the fact that Soviet Jews were, so to speak, attracted to America and gravitated toward relatives who emigrated there? If the American army entered Moscow, wouldn't the Jews become "collaborators"? In this way, Deutscher manages to justify both communist and anti-communist anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. The Jews aroused hatred because they were too visible in the party, and at the same time the Jews aroused hatred because they did not love the party enough.
Be that as it may, the only way to correct the shortcomings of communism is a new communism, this time the right one - internationalist and revolutionary, not Stalinist and nationalist Russian. The kind of communism that Deutscher converted to in his youth, and "converted" is the right word in this case. Although Deutscher himself believed that his path from Hasidism to Communism was one from superstition to reason, we can see from our privileged vantage point that it was actually a substitution of one faith for another. For Deutscher, as for many others, these beliefs were interchangeable, as they had much in common. Both were messianic, directed towards the future, when everything bad in life - in human life, but especially in Jewish life - would be abolished. Both combined intellectual sophistication with emotional elation. Both were based on the canon of sacred texts - the Torah or the Parisian manuscripts of Marx, which required deep study and careful interpretation. Both had their own charismatic leaders - the Gerer Rebbe or Lenin.
Strictly speaking, there is neither Greek nor Jew in communism. But, as the title of Deutscher's collection shows, he did not cease to feel himself a Jew even after he became a historical materialist. Considering what kind of world he lived in and what events were taking place at that time, this is not too surprising. But this sense of self posed a significant personal and ideological problem for Deutscher: what makes a person a Jew if he no longer believes in Judaism? “For me, the Jewish community still means only bad things,” he writes in the essay “Who is a Jew?”. "Religion? Yes, I'm an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. So I'm not Jewish in either sense." But in some third sense, he still was. How can this be?
Practically speaking, Deutscher concludes, the Jewish sense of self in him supports anti-Semitism. This discovery is not new - Spinoza said about the same thing, as did Theodor Herzl - but after the Holocaust, this idea acquired a sharper sound. Now it was not just the presence of anti-Semitism that prevented assimilation, but rather the memory of the victims of Nazism made hopes of assimilation look deeply dishonorable.
Deutscher would have laughed at the religious guise of Emil Fackenheim's 614 commandment—don't let Hitler win posthumous victories—but in fact he wholeheartedly shared it. “I am a Jew by virtue of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and destroyed,” he concludes in his essay “Who is a Jew?”. "I am a Jew because I feel the Jewish tragedy as my own tragedy." In the same essay, Deutscher also writes that "Nazism is nothing but the self-defense of the old order against communism," but he experiences the pain and humiliation of Nazi crimes as a Jew, not as a communist.
If a person rejects both traditional definitions of Jewishness - as a religion and as a nation, but still constantly feels like a Jew, how to explain this feeling? The enduring relevance of this issue justifies the reprinting of Deutscher's book, because in the title essay of the collection he provides an answer to this question, which still inspires many Jews. The essay "The Gentile Jew" became so popular because in it Deutscher, in the Hegelian spirit he was so familiar with, brilliantly dialectically reverses the issue. He writes that hostility to Judaism does not make a person a bad Jew; on the contrary, it makes him a better Jew. Because the essence of Judaism is not obedience to God, following the Law, or self-identification with the people, but heresy. Genuine Judaism is a faith that rejects Judaism.
To prove his point, Deutscher uses his Talmudic training and refers to the image of Elisha ben Abuya, a heretic sage, known by the nickname Acher, "the other." Acher is mentioned several times in the Talmud as a halakhic authority that broke with the sages in a fundamental way, although it is not clear how exactly. In the famous Talmudic story, which Deutscher did not quote, although he was probably familiar with it, Acher is one of the four wise men who ended up in the pardes, the Garden of Eden; Acher could not stand the sight of this garden and "pulled out the plants." From Deutscher's point of view, Acher was an adventurer who crossed borders. "What made him cross the borders of Judaism?" Deutscher asks.
The question is not quite correct, of course; The Talmud speaks of Acher not as one who came out of Judaism, but as one who defiled it. But for Deutscher, Acher represents the best Jewish tradition possible, a tradition that also includes “Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxembourg, Trotsky and Freud. […] All of them found the boundaries of Jewry too narrow, too archaic, too narrow. All of them were looking for ideals and realizations outside of Jewry.” The freethinkers and revolutionaries mentioned by Deutscher considered Judaism a prison or a ghetto because they wanted to belong to another, better community - all of humanity.
Diego Rivera. The man who rules the universe. Fragment. 1934Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City
What they didn't understand, and what Deutscher didn't understand, was that the Jews already belonged to this community, humanity, without even being heretics. It does not happen that a person is immediately universal. House, as T.S. Eliot, this is where we start, and Judaism is no worse than other places in that regard. What really unites the great men who entered the Deutscher canon is that they considered Judaism especially unsuited to be the abode of the universal. Deutscher praises Freud, for example, for saying that “the person he analyzes is not a German, an Englishman, a Russian or a Jew – he is a universal person […] whose passions and desires, fears and anxieties are essentially the same, to which whatever race, religion, nation he belongs to.” But in fact, of course, Freud worked mainly with Jews. This, however, does not mean that their "passions and desires" were different from the passions and desires of other people, although it is possible that they were different. How are we to know if we do not take their Jewishness seriously, but are trying to “go beyond it” as soon as possible?
For Deutscher, the rejection of the Jewish particular in the name of what he calls "the liberation of the universal man" is the best expression of Jewishness. "I hope," he writes, "that, along with other nations, the Jews will find their way back to the spiritual and political legacy of those great Jews who transcended Jewry." Logically, however, this idea is completely untenable. Jews who have gone beyond the boundaries of Jewry would not have been able to accomplish this feat if it were not for Jewry itself with its boundaries. A society consisting of heretics alone is just as unthinkable as a society consisting of revolutionaries alone. The prestige of exclusivity requires exclusivity itself. And it is somehow ugly to attribute this prestige to oneself alone. To say that I am a Jew, inheriting Spinoza and Heine, is like saying that I am a Christian, inheriting Kant or Beethoven: great,
But the main problem with the ideal of the "non-Jewish Jew" is that he is not someone who goes beyond religion in the name of the universal. Rather, we see here a repetition in secular terms of one of the most important vectors of European culture. This is a movement from the letter to the spirit, from the law to love, from the particular to the general, a movement that lies at the foundation of the Christian consciousness. Deutscher carefully avoids this comparison by choosing Acher as the model Jewish heretic, not Jesus. But as soon as any Jew tells other Jews that they are selfishly concerned only with themselves, while he cares about the salvation of all mankind, he - consciously or not - goes along the original anti-Jewish path of Christian civilization.
Therefore, any theologian can say about Christianity exactly what Deutscher says about Spinoza's thinking: that it was “Jewish monotheism taken to its logical conclusion, and a Jewish universal Gd thought through to the end; and when thought through to the end, this god ceased to be Jewish. Contemporary philosophers such as Alain Badiou or Slava Zizek have not failed to note the similarities between Christian anti-Judaism and Deutscher's Jewish anti-Judaism. They seized on this image of the non-Jewish Jew because it lends anti-Judaism an unmistakably Jewish character and protects them from accusations of anti-Semitism.
But reading Deutscher, we understand that there is one nuance. In the essay "Who is a Jew?" he writes: “It is strange and bitter to think that the extermination of six million Jews gave new life to Jewry. I would rather see six million men, women and children survive and Jewry itself perish.” Jewry—that is, Jewishness—deserves to die, Deutscher argues, because Marx was right: Judaism is just another name for capitalism. So the Deutscher Marxist ideal state is similar to the Nazi ideal state: both are judenrein, free of Jews. The apparent inability of Western thought to imagine an ideal society not involved in the destruction of Judaism constitutes a great and constant danger to the Jews living in the West. And we will not avoid this danger by declaring our desire to abolish ourselves. 
