Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States

7. Why Are Jews Preeminent in Science and Scholarship? The Veblen Thesis Reconsidered

7 Why are Jews Preeminent in Science and Scholarship? The Veblen Thesis Reconsidered The “cosmopolitan Jew” is a stereotypical character in the drama of modern history, a figure sometimes seen as a threat to this or that provincial culture’s “home truths,” but in other contexts seen as wholesome explorer of a wider and wider world. Among the soundest bases for the stereotype is the remarkable demographic overrepresentation of Jews in the international communities of science and scholarship. Just why there are so many Jews among Nobel Prize winners and elsewhere in the ranks of leading intellectuals is a puzzle of long standing. One of the most influential attempts to solve this puzzle was made in 1919 by the American social theorist, Thorstein Veblen. The piece below is an appraisal of Veblen’s thesis from today’s perspective. Veblen’s thesis focused on the social location of Jewish intellectuals between two solidarities. When Jews departed from the traditional Jewish community, hoping for acceptance within gentile communities, they were often rebuffed by gentiles. The resulting rootlessness endowed Jews, Veblen argued, with virtues of detachment and disinterestedness that Veblen believed conducive to intellectual achievement. But this thesis actually explains very little, and begs a host of questions it raises. I argue that Veblen’s extravagant admiration 135 for a sensibility of alienation and his almost fanatical antipathy for commercial pursuits blinded him to a number of facets of Jewish history that could help solve the puzzle. I argue, further, that we need a demystified approach to the study of Jewish overrepresentation, according to which we would analyze Jewish intellectual preeminence alongside, rather than in isolation from, Jewish preeminence in many other callings, including the arts, the service professions , and finance. Some readers who found my critique of the Veblen thesis sound, and who were convinced by my account of how and why Veblen came to the conclusions that he did, complained that I stopped short. What might a good, demystified answer to the puzzle of Jewish preeminence look like? Under such prodding I pushed the envelope a bit farther in the piece I reprint in this volume following this discussion of Veblen. Hence this essay and the piece following it are best read as a pair. This essay was first published in Aleph II (2002): 145–63. Why were one-third of the German citizens who won Nobel Prizes between 1901 and 1940 born into that tiny fraction of the German population that was of Jewish descent? Why have Jews been demographically overrepresented by factors of six and even ten or twelve in departments of the leading universities of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century? Questions like these often lead to Thorstein Veblen, the most creative American social theorist of the early twentieth century. In 1919, twenty years after he published his most famous work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, this Wisconsin-born son of Norwegian immigrants wrote “The Intellectual Preeminence of Jews in Modern Europe.’’1 At that time, the drift of gentile opinion was in a decidedly anti-Semitic direction. Quotas were being introduced to limit Jewish enrollment in colleges and universities, and editorial attacks on the Russian Revolution called portentous attention to the fact that many of the leading Bolsheviks were Jews. But Veblen, like such Anglo-Protestant contemporaries as Randolph Bourne and Hutchins Hapgood, was enthralled by the Jews he 136 Why Are Jews Preeminent in Science and Scholarship? • met on the Lower East Side of New York City. Veblen went against the anti-Semitic tide. His essay was one of the most adamantly philosemitic treatises ever written by a gentile. After more than eighty years, it remains the most influential analysis of Jewish intellectual creativity. Veblen’s answer to the question of Jewish overrepresentation in the ranks of leading scientists and scholars centered on the partial liberation of Jews from traditional Judaism and Jewish communal life. This liberation in itself yields a skeptical temper, Veblen explained, which is then reinforced by the refusal of gentile society to altogether welcome the Jew. The combination of withdrawal from Jewish tradition and only partial assimilation into gentile society endows the intellectual Jew with the virtue of detachment . Skeptical, estranged, alienated, the liberated Jew, as Veblen described this distinctive character in the drama of modern European history, was ideally suited for a career of science and scholarship. This marginal...