264 Part III: Emigration Years
current research activities in Morningside Heights were gradually
wound up with his departure and Horkheimer’s to Santa Monica, near
Los Angeles.
For his study of ‘Cultural Aspects of National Socialism’, Adorno
designed texts on the topics of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural crises’. Although
the institute had made great efforts to enlist the advice and support
of recognized American scholars such as Carl Joachim Friedrich, the
project was unsuccessful in its application to the Rockefeller Founda-
tion. Unexpectedly, financial assistance was not forthcoming. Similarly,
the first attempt to carry out a detailed study on anti-Semitism failed
to obtain financial backing from the American Jewish Committee. The
institute, and Adorno especially, had done everything in their power
to produce a solid methodological and theoretical foundation for this
project.^121 Horkheimer conjectured that questions of academic politics
must have been at the root of this rejection. ‘There is a much larger
issue at stake here, the universal law of monopolistic society. In such
societies science is controlled by its trusted agents. They constitute an
elite that works hand in glove with the economic powers-that-be.’ Only
those who adjust and adapt have a chance in the American academic
system, not those who avoid control and insist on their independence.
But this was the precondition of a theory of society in the tradition
of Marx.^122 The resigned tone and the rather prolix reflections on the
dependence of research on large foundations provoked a succinct reply
from Adorno: ‘Socially, this is a question of the relation of a cartel to
independent small business.’^123 The fact that no American money was
forthcoming for the undeniably important anti-Semitism project did
not deter Adorno and Horkheimer from trying to construct a theory of
anti-Semitism, which now began to preoccupy them more than anything
else. As early as 18 September 1940, Adorno sent his first drafts to
Horkheimer, who was in California, where he intended to settle down –
for preference somewhere near Hollywood. An enclave of affluent
German émigrés was already living there.
In his brief exposé Adorno sketched elements of ‘a prehistory’ of
anti-Semitism. He based it on the assumption that, ‘at a very early stage
of history, the Jews... either scorned the transition from a nomadic
existence to a settled one, or else clung to the nomadic form or... only
made an imperfect transition.’ They are thus ‘the secret gypsies of
history’. Adorno connected the fact that the Jews always refused
to recognize all particular and local deities with their unwillingness ‘to
acknowledge any one, limited home’ as their own. The Jews were the
people ‘who did not allow themselves to be “civilized” and subjected
to the primacy of labour. They have not been forgiven for this and
this explains why they are the stumbling block in class society.’ This
specific Jewish ‘extraterritoriality’ is what was then being expressed in
both anti-Semitism and the Jewish reaction to it.^124 These speculative
ideas on the history of anti-Semitism represented Adorno’s attempt to