Glorious, Accursed Europe: An Essay on Jewish Ambivalence (review)

Glorious, Accursed Europe offers a fascinating and convincingly argued exploration into the European roots of modern Jewish identity. It accomplishes this feat by tracing the construction among Jewish intellectuals of an imaginary ideal of "Europe" during the past two centuries. In a series of related essays, Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit show the ambivalence with which these intellectuals perceived the continent and its Gentile population. This ambivalence reflects indelibly internalized European values and continues to shape Jewish politics, culture, and identity to this day. They locate the creation of a formative and durable set of self-perceptions in the writings of notable thinkers such as Simon Dubnow, Theodor Herzl, and Max Nordau, on whose writings the authors primarily focus. Their ultimate aim, however, is to establish a single, general history of Jews in the modern period on the basis of wider processes of acculturation. Reinharz and Shavit assert that even after leaving Europe en masse, Jews maintained many of the intolerant cultural assumptions of Christian Europeans. Despite a few problematic elements, Glorious, Accursed Europe intriguingly and forcefully argues for linking the development of modern Jewish identity to cultural and historical antecedents in the deeper European past.

As the title and subtitle suggest, Reinharz and Shavit's analysis revolves around an ambivalent dual image of Europe, a picture of simultaneous progress and barbarism. For Jewish intellectuals, of course, anti-Semitism always operated as the primary gauge for determining if the one outweighed the other. In 1897, the eminent historian Simon Dubnow predicted that with the gradual erosion of religious belief, older prejudices would disappear entirely. He provided a far more damning appraisal of Jewish-Gentile relations several years later in the wake of recurrent pogroms throughout the western Russian Empire, and reoriented his understanding of anti-Semitism to correspond with his advocacy for Jewish territorial autonomy within Europe. For the most part, however, Jewish thinkers could separate their idyllic conception of European society from the reality of increasingly virulent anti-Jewish sentiment. Dubnow did not abandon his faith in the potential of Western liberal culture, perhaps not even when the Nazis murdered him in 1941. In the eyes of Theodor Herzl, for whom anti-Semitism came to represent Europe's fatal and incurable disease, the righteousness of European civilization itself never came into question. He claimed in an 1899 letter, for instance, that Zionism built upon Herbert Spencer's belief in the power of human will and scientific thought to master the world. Max Nordau, who in 1892 produced with Degeneration one of the more famous pessimistic treatises on late-nineteenth century European culture, still felt that modern science and technology could refine moral behavior and create a just society. Jewish ambivalence towards Europe centered on the prevalence of anti-Semitism, not the triumphalist image of Western civilization; even those who renounced this heritage did not challenge widespread notions of inherent European superiority over other peoples.

Above all, Reinharz and Shavit call attention to the extent to which Jewish intellectuals voiced the racist and prejudicial attitudes of their Gentile counterparts. Nordau foretold a Malthusian demographic crisis that would prompt Europeans to conquer the "inferior races" of Africa and Asia and "extirpate them root and branch." (50) Uri Zvi Greenberg described Slavic Eastern Europe as the antithesis of Western values. He and the prominent rabbi Leo Baeck expressed the feelings of a significant number of German Jews who despised Slavs and denounced them as a primitive, savage family of peoples. These figures repeatedly invoked an "east-west antimony," supporting the general conviction that western Europeans held cultural precedence over the rest of humanity. Closer to home, Jewish intellectuals heaped ridicule on their unassimilated brethren for rejecting the benefits of European culture, and in doing so mobilized some of the same arguments used by Gentiles to demean and castigate non-European peoples and Jews themselves. By the end of the nineteenth century, some Jews harbored these attitudes to such a degree...