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So I'd like to start my talk with a deceptively simple question.
What is Jewish history?
Now Jewish history is what?
The study of ethnicity?
Is it the study of a religion?
Is it the study of a nation or is it all of these things?
And what I'd like to argue today is that yes it's all of these things
but it's also something different and what I'd like to say is that we'd need
to expand the boundaries of what Jewish history is and how we understand Jewish history
and I'd like to do so by examining this guy.
Hans Speier.
Now Hans Speier is a very interesting guy.
He's one of the most important members of the first generation of defense intellectuals,
the academics who decided that they had something to say about American foreign policy
and left the university to have an effect on it.
And what I'd like to argue today is that Speier is although a non-Jew technically, religiously,
ethnically, he was actually a part of Jewish history and what I'd like to do is show
that he was a non-Jew influenced specifically by Jewish culture that emerged
from a specifically Jewish experience and that he brought this Jewish culture
to bear on the cold war United States.
Now to do so we have to go back, as we always do,
to 19th century Germany and the idea of bildung.
Now I don't know if there are any Germanists in here but bildung refers
to this traditional German process of education that is very internally focused.
It's a romantic notion.
The idea is that you become educated for yourself
and yes this education would eventually help you interact in the world
but ultimately it's a self directed process.
Through bildung you become a full person, you become one with yourself and this is the idea
of German education in the 19th century.
Now over the course of the 19th century many of you might know that the Jews in Germany,
or in the German states, became emancipated over time.
It happened at different times at different places
but by the late 19th century all the Jews were essentially emancipated
and so what Jewish intellectuals did was that they decided to become in some sense more German
than the Germans and that they fully embraced this idea of bildung.
They were no longer going to be in the ghetto.
They were going to leave the ghetto, join the university and become a member of the Reich.
They were going to become real Germans.
They were going to do it by committing themselves to this idea of bildung.
And this becomes very popular from the late 19th century until around the 1920's.
Now what happens in the 1920's.
Well everyone here is not speaking German so we won World War I
and so the German state was completely transformed after their loss in World War I.
It was no longer an imperial state and it became a democratic state.
Now long with democracy came a bunch of other processes, industrialization,
advanced industrialization, advanced democratization of the educational sphere
and a variety of other processes that we today associate with modernity.
And as this happened all of a sudden this traditional idealist sense
of bildung no longer made sense.
The discursive coalition that supported bildung began to fall apart
and this presented a significant problem to Germany's Jews
because as I had earlier just stated they had used bildung
as a way to assert their Germanness.
So what happens is that over the course of the 1920's a number of prominent German Jews begin
to redefine what bildung meant and two of the most important of these were Emil Laderer
and Karl Mannheim and they were both professors at the University of Heidelberg in the 1920's
and they would later become Speier's teachers.
Now what both Lederer and Mannheim argued was that they needed to,
and what all German intellectuals needed to do, was reform bildung,
not to stress this internal process but actually to stress practical political engagement
with the world and Mannheim developed a political science specifically organized towards
this goal and Lederer worked for the Socialist party of Germany and they basically argued
that they needed to reform bildung to stress practical political engagement and Speier was
in fact their student and it was this perspective that he imbibed so he was born
in 1905 and then he matriculated at the University of Heidelberg in the mid 1920's
and he began taking classes with both of these guys and though he was a Lutheran
and though both of his parents were members of the middle class,
he associated himself very forcefully with the left wing intellectual Jewish community
of the University of Heidelberg and he imbibed this perspective.
For Speier it didn't make sense to be an intellectual
if you were just doing it for yourself.
It only made sense to be an intellectual if you were doing something for the world.
So he associated this Jewish reformulation of bildung and he brought it with him
to the United States where he became the youngest founding member
of the University in Exile in New York City.
Now some people might know the University in Exile at the New School for Social Research.
It saved a number of very prominent academics including Leo Strauss, Claude Levi-Strauss,
Bronislaw Malinowski, and later people like Hannah Arendt and Hans Morgenthau taught for it.
And Speier actually became the youngest founding member and also one
of the only non-Jewish members of the University in Exile in 1933.
But what's most important for our purposes is that over the course
of the 1930's Speier developed a program of activist exile
and this program becomes most clearly expressed in his 1937 essay,
The Social Conditions of the Intellectual Exile.
And in this essay he lambasted his fellow German exiles, people like Max Horkeimer,
people like Theodor Adorno who were associated some might know
with the Frankfurt School which was at Columbia University and he lambasted them
for basically continuing to argue about debates that he thought had been settled in Germany,
for example whether Marxism was true, what you should do in a newly democratized German state
and instead what Speier argued, building off this idea of bildung
that his mentors Emil Laderer and Karl Mannheim developed, was that intellectuals needed
to become political actors themselves and this is his political project over the course
of the 1930's and it's a project that emerged directly
from the Jewish reformulation of bildung.
Now luckily for Speier and a bunch of other exiles, unluckily for the world though,
is that World War II happened and what does the U.S. government need during World War II?
It needs people who speak German and who know German language, culture, politics, and society
and so what you see is that the government winds up recruiting a bunch of Germans
to join it during the war and Speier became one
of the most prominent people to join the wartime government.
He first started his career at the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service being the head--
, and he became the head of the division that analyzed all Nazi propaganda broadcast
to the United States and in 1944 he joined the Office of War Information and this is his pass,
his OWI pass, where he became the person who actually developed all
of the propaganda directives that guided the U.S. propaganda that was directed at Germany.
So Speier was able to actualize his political project of using his social science skills,
his research skills, in the service of the American state to defeat Naziism
and again this was a project that emerged directly from the Jewish reformulation
of bildung in the 1920's so Speier was essentially bringing this Jewish cultural idea
to bear in the American context.
He did this first in his essays throughout the 1930's and he did it again during World War II
when he became head of this Office of War Information division
and he later also became head of the State Department's division for occupied areas.
So of course the war ends but then a number of people become very, very nervous
and these people are military and government officials.
They were worried that all of the nerds that they had brought
to Washington were eventually going to leave and go back to the university
because it was difficult to work in the government.
So what they did was that they decided to create new institutions,
one of which was The Rand Corporation, that would attract intellectuals to stay associated
with the American government and continue to use their research in the service of the state.
And so what you see over the course of the late 1940's is the establishment
of Rand Corporation, of the Rand Corporation.
Now Rand stands for research and development.
It continues to exist.
It's headquartered in Santa Monica and has offices elsewhere but it emerged in this context
and it emerged with the specific purpose of allowing these intellectuals
to use their research and to bring it to bear on American foreign policy.
So in 1947 Rand holds this conference and it invites a number
of the most prominent intellectuals at the time, people like Bernard Brody
who you might know was a very important nuclear strategist, or Harold Lasswell
who revolutionized a bunch of different social sciences in the [inaudible] period and beyond
or Franz Neumann and a number of these people and of course they invited Speier.
And they were so impressed at the conference with Speier's ability
to bring theoretical concerns to bear in practical politics that they invited him
to become the founding head of its social science division.
So Speier accepts this officer and from 1948 until 1960 he's the director
of Rand's social science division and he oversees the development of a number
of the most important ideas of American foreign policy including various nuclear strategies
as well as political simulations.
I don't know if anyone in here was a model U.N. person
but Speier actually helped develop the idea that you could
through these simulation processes learn to become better
and more efficient decision makers.
And again Speier is using his knowledge in the service
of the state fulfilling this Jewish reformulation
of bildung that began in the 1920's.
So beyond that Speier's at Rand like I said from the 1940's to the 1960's
but he uses these connections at Rand to associate with the Ford Foundation
which at the time was one of the most powerful
and influential private foundations in the United States.
And Speier helped convince the Ford Foundation, he was actually the crucial person here,
that they needed to invest in other organizations like Rand,
organizations that would continue to bring intellectual research to bear
on American foreign policy and by virtue
of his lobbying the Ford Foundation helped fund MIT's Center for International Studies as well
as Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the behavioral sciences and MIT's Center
for International Studies is particularly influential.
A number of very famous people, for example Walt Rostow who became the National Security Advisor
in the 1960's as well as Daniel Lerner who helped develop modernization theory,
began their policy careers at the Center for International Studies in the 1950's.
And at Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the behavioral sciences a number
of very prominent ideas, for example the development of comparative politics
as a field, occurred in the 1950's.
But what's most important is to see these institutions as the realization
of this interwar specifically Jewish project to reformulate bildung
to stress practical, political engagement.
So in this way Speier was able to actualize the project begun by his mentors,
Emil Lederer and Karl Mannheim in the 1920's.
So I return to the original question.
What is Jewish history?
And what I had hoped to show here is that we as historians and just as engaged people
in the world need to expand the boundaries of Jewish history
and to consider people like Speier as part of it.
So historians have a phrase called non-Jewish Jews.
People whose parents might have converted but were really steeped in the Jewish community.
What I'd like to propose is that we need to have a new term, Jewish non-Jews.
People like Speier who chose to live a life in Diaspora, who married a Jewish woman,
who became part of specifically institutions, specifically Jewish institutions
like the University of Exile in New York City and who was able
to actualize a Jewish intellectual project begun in the 1920's.
So I'd just like to conclude with a plea that we as Jewish historians need
to expand the boundaries of Jewish history to consider people like Speier as part of it.
Thank you.
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