The Jewish Century (review)

An extraordinary work, this book is difficult to describe in conventional academic terms; but it is a text that should interest every reader of Common Knowledge. For it provides a fascinating and quite original view of the experience of the Jewish people in the last two centuries—ever since, as it were, they left the ghettos in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Not an ordinary history, although packed with impressive and sometimes very moving empirical and sociological information, the categories that Professor Slezkine uses are mainly derived from myth, religion, or literature. The Jews are Mercurians, which means adept at "becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious and occupationally flexible." History has endowed the Jews with such qualities, which are called Mercurian after the messenger of the Greek gods linked with commerce and thievery (among other attributes). These are also the attributes fostered by the modernization of the world in the last several centuries: "modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish."

Opposed to modernization are the Apollonians, "peasants and princes" who do not wish to be detached from their native soil and resist being swept into the turbulence of social-economic change. But despite such unwillingness, we are nonetheless living in the great leap forward of the Jewish century. The illustration on the book jacket is an exhilarating painting by Chagall, in which a stylized (presumably Jewish) young man is flying through the air over the rooftops. With tragic irony, however, the Jewish century is also the century of anti-Semitism because "the principal religion of the Modern Age is nationalism, a faith that represents the new society as the old community and allows newly urbanized princes and peasants to feel at home abroad." (This brilliantly stated insight gives some notion of the aphoristic pyrotechnics of Slezkine's style.) Since the Jews do not belong to any nationality, they are a group that "combined spectacular success with tribal foreignness" and posed a special problem both to themselves and to the majority Apollonians.

The Jews thus found it necessary to work out their own solutions to their dangerously ambiguous status in the Jewish century—solutions that Slezkine expressively dramatizes with imagery taken from Proust, Isaac Babel, and Fiddler on the Roof. More abstractly, they turn out to be Freudians, whose doctrines he sees as an effort to "turn the beleaguered loneliness of the newly emancipated" into a universal condition of the individual human soul (most Freudians finally came to the United States). Or they turn out to be Zionists, who "argued . . . that the proper way to overcome Jewish vulnerability was not for everyone else to become like the Jews but for the Jews to become like everyone else" (hence they founded Israel). A third answer was Marxism, which had begun with Marx maintaining that capitalism was mainly Jewishness and that the end of capitalism would thus mean the end of the Jewish problem for both the Jews and everyone else. This solution worked for a time in Russia, at a terrible human cost, but finally nationalism was victorious there as well.

Each of Slezkine's chapters is devoted to depicting the history of one of these pseudosolutions, drawing on a dazzling erudition that ranges from the obscure dialects spoken by Mercurians all over the world to Joyce's Ulysses (and of course Russian literature galore). He goes off on side paths that are entirely unexpected but turn out, in his mythical-social-psychological framework, to be quite relevant and revealing. The sections dealing with Russia and the United States, even to those more or less familiar with the material, illuminate the subject from entirely original perspectives and in a continually provocative style. Slezkine's book bubbles over with intellectual excitement as well as pathos; and his evocations, especially of the Russian material, are very deeply felt. His sweeping hypotheses throw scholarly caution to the winds, and there is certainly much to be argued about in his daring assertions and juxtapositions. But no one can read him without being thoroughly impressed and stirred...