by Rabbi Jeremy Rosen
Following my piece about Franz Fanon, here is one about another very unusual but influential and almost forgotten idealist, Eric Hoffer. He was a brilliant, non-conformist, self-taught intellectual. He was highly critical of mass political movements. His thinking is so relevant to the intellectual madness and corruption that has infected the intellectual world today.
He is not to be confused with Jimmy Hoffa, born in1913. The corrupt boss of the Teamsters Union, who got into bed with the Mafia and disappeared, probably at their orders, in 1975 never to be found (declared legally dead in 1982)!
Eric Hoffer, was a tramp who became a much-respected voice in the radical world of the nineteen fifties and sixties. He criticized intellectuals and academics for succumbing to banal slogans and fake theories, rather than objective and factual research. He condemned the violent student protests of the 60s. He would certainly have objected to today’s lunacy.
Hoffer’s origins and history are clouded in mystery. He claimed he was born in Brooklyn. But it seems he came from Germany with his parents as a young child and always spoke with a thick German accent. His parents died when he was young, and he became a drifter ending on skid row in California.
In San Diego in 1934 he was so destitute that a truck driver drove him to El Centro, 90 miles east of San Diego to a federal homeless shelter. Hoffer became an itinerant worker, picking vegetables up and down California’s Central Valley. He was, for a while, a gold miner in the Sierras. In 1942, he was rejected by the army but became a docker, joined the union and when not working he began writing and frequenting universities.
His best-known book The True Believer was published in 1951 and that gained him entry into the academic world, however much he despised it. He was offered an adjunct position by U.C. Berkeley, where, one afternoon a week, he was happy to talk or debate with anyone who showed up.
Hoffer disliked professional intellectuals, detached from practical realities, who promoted ideologies that could lead to mass movements. They often contributed to the rise of totalitarian regimes, he said, by undermining existing social structures without providing viable alternatives. They tended to seek power for themselves.
“The intellectual knows that all men are not equal and there are few things that he cares for less than a classless society. Intellectuals regard the common man as a means, and, in an age of democracy, egalitarianism is the ideal weapon. Equality is forever unattainable, so “more” is always needed. Intellectuals are particularly antagonistic to the United States, because it dispersed power outward to the masses in a way that no country had ever done before. “
He believed that while some movements may promote social progress, others resulted in oppression and violence. Leaders often charismatic and opportunistic, manipulated their followers. They attracted individuals who were dissatisfied with their lives because of personal failure, lack of opportunities, or conditions that prevented them from achieving their goals. Professional protestors were overindulged spoilt overgrown children seeking purpose, direction, and identity through collective action. Individuals committed to one cause, could easily transfer their allegiance to another, seemingly disparate one
His distaste for professional rabble rousers and their dupes is so relevant to the campus and popular upheavals this year, using the Palestinian problem as an excuse, and attracted a whole array of other alienated and disaffected people to their cause.
There is some indication that Hoffer was Jewish though he never admitted to it. He rejected organized religion. Yet Hoffer could speak Hebrew which he claimed he had learned, along with botany and chemistry, on skid row in Los Angeles. But towards the end of his life, he became passionately committed to the idea of a Jewish homeland in Israel having experienced the almost universal hatred of Jews in the USA at every level of society. Before publication, he submitted The True Believer to a Rabbi (Saul White) for his approval. The fate of Israel became an obsession. The survival of Israel after the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War became the latter-day passion of his life.
He wrote in 1979 in “Before the Sabbath”
“ A world that did not lift a finger when Hitler was wiping out six million Jewish men, women and children is now saying that the Jewish state of Israel will not survive if it does not come to terms with the Arabs. My feeling is that no one in this universe has the right and the competence to tell Israel what it has to do in order to survive. On the contrary, it is Israel that can tell us what to do. It can tell us that we shall not survive if we do not cultivate and celebrate courage, if we coddle traitors and deserters, bargain with terrorists, court enemies and scorn friends” (pages 6&7).
"Civilized countries fell over each other to court Hitler even as he turned Germany’s Jews into pariahs. The same countries are now falling over each other to court the Arabs, who are determined to destroy Israel. The world feels no shame when it betrays Jews. It is as if fate has placed the Jews outside the comity of mankind.” (pages 62, 63)
Hoffer had experienced anti Judaism and hatred of Jews at all levels in American society before, during and after the war. He would not have been surprised at how easy it was to remove the constraints and allow the disease of hatred to metastasize and spread as it has.
He was just the sort of non-conformist intellectual I admire. Someone who challenged accepted views and would not be bound or constricted by any dogma or label.
I don’t know if he was aware of Albert Einstein’s famous quote but it would have suited him perfectly
“The person who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The person who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever seen before.”
If only there were more like him today!
4th July 2024
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Jeremy Rosen was born in Manchester, England, the eldest son of Rabbi Kopul Rosen and Bella Rosen. Rosen's thinking was strongly influenced by his father, who rejected fundamentalist and obscurantist approaches in favour of being open to the best the secular world has to offer while remaining committed to religious life. He was first educated at Carmel College, the school his father had founded based on this philosophical orientation. At his father's direction, Rosen also studied at Be'er Yaakov Yeshiva in Israel (1957–1958 and 1960). He then went on to Merkaz Harav Kook (1961), and Mir Yeshiva (1965–1968) in Jerusalem, where he received semicha from Rabbi Chaim Leib Shmuelevitz in addition to Rabbi Dovid Povarsky of Ponevezh and Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Shapiro of Yeshivat Be'er Ya'akov. In between Rosen attended Cambridge University (1962–1965), graduating with a degree in Moral Sciences.