Jews and Gentiles: A Historical Sociology of Their Relations (review)

Werner J. Cahnman was a member of that last generation of German-Jews (however defined) who were trained and active in Weimar Germany. He was a lawyer for the Centralverein, the umbrella organization of Weimar Germany's Jews, and then, under the Nazis, active in the Kulturbund, the official structure for cultural activities created by the Nazis. In 1939 he fled to the United States and, through the intervention of Robert Park, the creator of the Chicago School of Sociology, was hired to teach sociology at the University of Chicago as a specialist in the sociology of “race.” It is in “sociology” that Cahnman made his mark, first at Chicago, then much later in 1961 at Rutgers. Cahnman's death in 1980, then emeritus at Rutgers, left the present sociological history of “Jewish-Gentile” relations unfinished, but as the editors of the present volume note, the roots of this project are in Cahnman's exposure to the debates in Berlin—specially in the Lehrhaus—in the 1920s and 30s. It is a book with a very long period of gestation and presents a fascinating synthesis of Frankfurt School sociology with the image of the world out of which it grew. Here Horkheimer's anxiety about the meaning of anti-Semitism in the 1930s has its final post-Adorno answer.

The very notion of writing the sociology of a relationship in historical dimensions is fraught with difficulties. Cahnman uses a model that looks both within the evolving structures and sensibilities of a “Jewish” culture and the relationship with its “host” culture, labeled by him as “Gentile.” But the tensions here are very clear. Cahnman is interested in those Abrahamic cultures—Judaism, Christianity (and its splinters), and Islam. He postulates, quite correctly, a “special relationship” among these three cultures, all of which need to contend with the chronological primacy of Tanach, the “OLD” Testament, and the use of Jewish belief systems if not rituals.

It is not in the realm of “belief” that a sociologist looks for such a relationship but in the artifacts of the social structure. Thus theology is of interest to Cahnman because it sets the parameters of the discourses between Jews and Christians beginning in the early Church. Jews are both a model for the “good” Christian and the image of what the Christian should no longer be. Thus permitted social practices such as usury and the special (though unstable) position of the Jews as “protected” shapes a Jewish self-consciousness. His look at Islam in Chapter 7 begins with a similar examination of the “pull” and “push” of Jewish difference in shaping Jewish attitudes towards the world in which they lived as well as their own self-representations. Here the dissection of the “Golden Age of Spain,” an ideological creation of the German-Jews of the Haskalah that Cahnman discusses in Chapter 11, is insightful and prescient. Cahnman's anxiety about the perfection of this world is well founded and reflects well on his historical as well as sociological approach.

Cahnman surveys Eastern Europe in light of “Catholic” and “Orthodox” attitudes towards the Jews and the construction of a Jewish life in such a world of contradictions. His examination of the early modern period in Western Europe with the creation of the “ghetto” and the development of a Jewish economic system does not replicate but answer Sombart's and Weber's notions of the role of religious identity in the creation of modern capitalism. To this point Cahnman has worried about social images and social reality. In what is without a doubt the most important chapter (13) on modernity, Cahnman turns to the difference between the “Actual Jew and the Mythical Jew.” Here he adapts Simmel's notion of the Stranger and asks how in the world of representations (literature) “Jewishness” is domesticated in Western Europe. His examples are German-language but they serve a purpose in sketching how images shape...