Obsession with “the Jew within” was also the lot of many assimilated and even baptized Jews, who often internalized the antisemitic imagery of their environment and consequently held a highly ambivalent perception of their own identity. This could be expressed in selftorment and ultimate self-destruction, as was illustrated, for instance, in the case of Otto Weininger, whose study Sex and Character (1903) presented Judaism as an extreme manifestation of the “feminine principle,” about to clash with Aryanism, the manifestation of the “masculine principle.” For Weininger, Zionism embodied all that was good and noble in the Jewish soul, but he predicted its defeat from within by Judaism, which would return the Jews to their natural place: destruction and the Diaspora. Rejected by Sigmund Freud, obsessed by the “Jewish principle” within himself (which led him to convert to Protestantism in 1902), and devastated by the cool reception of his book (which subsequently became a sensational best-seller), the twenty-four-year old Weininger shot himself in the same room where Beethoven had died.
But the notion of “the Jew within” was also, of course, apparent in the thinking of the fledgling Zionist movement. For the Zionist desire to create a “new Jew” in his own (home)land was accompanied by urgent calls to purge the Jews of what had made them into a Diaspora people, or of what the Diaspora had made of them, namely, those same insidious traits proclaimed by the antisemitic movement, which both created the occasion for Zionism and provided it with much of its anti-Diaspora rhetoric. Zionism pledged not only to take the Jews out of the Diaspora but also to take the Diaspora out of “the Jew.” The assimilated Jew’s “discovery” of his monstrosity or abnormality lay in his awareness of the discrepancy between his alien “essence” and his conventional outer appearance, whereby he ended up as neither Jew nor gentile. For just as the Jews were abandoning most, but not quite all, of what had made them into Jews, and saw themselves as almost, but not wholly, indistinguishable from their environment, they were increasingly reminded that it was precisely these remnants of their identity that made them appear all the more suspect to the rest of society. The proverbial “self-hating Jew” was predicated on this condition of almost yet not quite complete assimilation. And the solutions to this predicament were either selfannihilation, whether by physical or cultural suicide, or self-assertion, whether by return to Jewish tradition or by Jewish nationalism.
If, in Germany, many gentiles both before and after World War I could still say that some of their best friends were Jews, many German Jews discovered that some of their best friends still preserved antisemitic sentiments. Indeed, the elusive social enemies of the Jews were precisely those liberals who, while supporting Jewish emancipation and integration, insisted that they must eventually disappear as a distinct religious or ethnic category. This meant in turn that, especially in Central Europe, Jews in this period were torn between the desire to enter into gentile society as equals and a reluctance or inability wholly to give up their own sense of history and identity.
Tragically, just as German and Austrian Jews were desperately and often creatively seeking a solution to this dilemma, their environment was rapidly edging toward a total rejection of the Jewish-German symbiosis for which they had striven.