A Chosen Calling: Jews in Science in the Twentieth Century

Conclusion: When All Worlds Were New Worlds

94 As historian Yuri Slezkine wrote, Jews at the start of the twentieth century had three great “destinations”—the metropolises of America, the great cities of the Soviet Union, and the arid rough of Palestine—each representing “alternative ways of being modern.” Even before Nazis had destroyed most of Europe’s Jews, these three destinations had become capitals of Jewish life. Well before mid-century, most Jews called one or the other of them home.1 In each of these places, as we have seen, science played a large role in the lives and livelihoods of Jews, and not only that—science played a similarly large role. In New York, Moscow, and Jerusalem, Jews extolled the virtues of science in different languages but in like terms. In all three destinations, Jews of substance praised science as a means to create a more perfect society , to better defend their adoptive homeland, and to more surely advance all of humanity. There were those, too, who said that science might help to demonstrate once and for all that Jews had finally earned a place in the society in which they lived, in their homeland, in the family of humanity. This similar affinity for science that one finds among Jews in the United States, the USSR, and mandatory Palestine is a puzzling historical fact. What accounts for it? The three great Jewish destinations differed in large ways and small; indeed, they could hardly have been more diverse. As Slezkine observed, each had its own ism: liberalism in the United States, Communism in the Soviet Union, and Zionism in Palestine. The impacts of these broad ideologies on the lives of those who lived in their light and shadows were complicated and variegated, but they were never negligible . The material challenges facing Jewish immigrants in each of the three destinations differed greatly. Just as Jewish pushcarts were appearCONCLUSION When All Worlds Were New Worlds Conclusion 95 ing on New York’s Lower East Side, they were disappearing in Moscow’s Otrendoe neighborhood, banned as an ugly vestige of an outmoded social economy—the same reasons for which they were disparaged in the Hadar quarter of Haifa. The cultural challenges facing Jewish immigrants in each destination differed greatly, too. What it meant to be a Jew, or to cease to be a Jew, was largely a function of geography, leaving Americans a set of options—Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist, Ethical Culture, atheist, and more—that differed greatly from the choices faced by Soviet Jews and, in turn, by Jews in Palestine. At the same time, the institutions in which sciences were taught and practiced differed enormously from place to place. That these three very different places produced among Jews attitudes toward science that were not so very different—and in some aspects were quite similar—is a curious fact that demands an explanation. It is like the scenario in a sci-fi movie when a crew from earth settles on a distant planet and discovers creatures who breathe air and speak English. At first this seems natural enough; upon reflection, it comes to seem impossibly, laughably , weird. It defies reason and begs explanation. When explanations have been given in the past, the similar pull that science had for Jews in the United States, the USSR, and Palestine has usually been attributed to traits of mind putatively shared by these distant Jews, to their similar yiddisher-kupfitude. Sometimes these explanations take a biological slant (generations bred Jews to be clever, endowing them with naturally selected brains that excel equally under capitalism, Communism, and Zionist collectivism) and sometimes a cultural slant (because of generations of venerating learning, Jews were trained to hit the books with enthusiasm , be they Talmudic tractates or physics monographs). Whether biology or culture, these explanations posit that Jews are Jews and that something in their character accounts for the alacrity with which they take to science, whether they are in Chicago, Kharkov or Kfar Saba. As I wrote in this book’s introduction, explanations of this sort do not survive scrutiny. For one thing, they offer no account of why, with only a few exceptions, Jews were mostly indifferent to science and displayed no special talents for it until the first decades of the twentieth century. For another, the notion that natural selection endowed Jews with special genius in the short span (by evolutionary standards, anyway) that they have been around is a biological implausibility. And while it may be true that learning held a...