Юрий Слёзкин Отвечает…

SUMMARY:

Yuri Slezkine thanks all the participants; admits that Chapter 1 is old-fashioned but offers no apology for it (other than to say that most useful knowledge is old-fashioned); defends his use of metaphors as analytical concepts (on the grounds that some of the world’s most useful analytical concepts are metaphors); argues that “a Jew” is as easy to distinguish from “Mercurianism” as “a Puritan” from “the Protestant ethic”; quotes from the book’s introduction to the effect that the book is about members of traditional Jewish communities and their children and grandchildren (especially those who sought to reject the traditional Jewish communities); claims that Jewishness “by blood” is not a particularly eccentric concept; explains why a peasant may be under greater pressure to become a student than a student, to become a peasant; refuses to let Trotsky bully historians into considering him a “social-democrat by nationality”; points out to Natan Meir that it is no coincidence that The Jewish Century is about what it says it is about; considers Eugene Avrutin’s questions to be worth pursuing in another book; assures David Shneer that he (Slezkine) did not mean to proclaim the end of Jewish history (as opposed to the end of Communism as a Jewish ideology); and ends by disagreeing with Alexander Etkind on the question of ethnic guilt and collective responsibility – or rather, by agreeing with Karl Jaspers that “probably every German [Russian, Jew] capable of understanding will transform his approach to the world and himself in the metaphysical experiences of such a disaster. How that happens none can prescribe, and none anticipate. It is a matter of individual solitude.”