Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought by Chad Alan Goldberg (review)

This admirably concise and thoroughly researched study begins with two important stipulations. The author is not interested in Jews as producers of social thought but as objects of social thought. And he understands theory reflexively: while it may capture dimensions of how the Jewish experience and aspects of "modernity" interrelate, theory also constructs such interrelationships. These stipulations allow Goldberg to avoid the one-dimensional analysis that embarrassed earlier works on the topic, such as John Murray Cuddihy's The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (1974), and to show how Jews and Judaism came to supply a polyvalent play of symbolic differences in the various attempts of classical sociology to define and evaluate "modernity."

Goldberg neatly maps three discourses regarding modernity onto three national traditions in social thought. Establishing the French tradition of academic sociology, Émile Durkheim centered his work on the legacy of the French Revolution. While reactionary anti-Semites viewed Jews as subversive of the old regime's traditional solidarities, and while radical anti-Semites saw the Jews as resistant to the general will of the nation, Durkheim argued for a universalist interpretation of the revolution and for a cult of the individual that could accommodate Jews in a socially liberal republic and a pluralistic society. Durkheim's German contemporaries turned from the political modernity of Alexis de Tocqueville's "great democratic revolution" to the economic modernity of Karl Polanyi's "great transformation." Some German social thinkers cast Jews as quintessential capitalists, but they could differ profoundly on the assessment of that role. Jews, Werner Sombart would have it, promoted a free competition and free trade that contradicted Christian ethics and German Kultur. Conversely, Georg Simmel maintained that Christian ethics and the nascent national communities of the European Middle Ages made strangers of Jews, for whom, as a result, money's ever increasing abstract functionality offered a means of emancipation. For Simmel's friend Max Weber, however, the Jews' medieval marginalization consigned them to a precapitalist pariah mentality of usury and cronyism; capitalism was the achievement neither of Sombart's trader nor of Simmel's banker but of industrialists and entrepreneurs who invested in the rational organization of production. Finally, for the first Chicago school of sociology, the Jews became an ideal example for discussing what its members understood to be the two sides of American modernity during the decades between the 1890s and 1930s: increasing immigration to the United States, especially from Eastern Europe, and accelerating urbanization. By now the model of the "marginal man," Jews sometimes could loom as a specter of social dissolution and demoralization. More often, especially in the work of W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki or Robert Park, Jews embodied the promise of a new, more cosmopolitan—more open, more mobile, and more democratic—American civilization.

Goldberg knows well that there were "other others" that served social theorists in France, Germany, and the United States as points of reference for making sense of the modern; at various times, women, peoples of African descent, Protestants, Italian immigrants to the United States, and, most recently, Muslims, have all been recruited to this role. But only the Jews became a "universal other" and proved able to carry so much conceptual weight and so many conflicting interpretations. They did so because the processes by which Jews and Christians initially distinguished themselves from one another came to offer a particularly potent code for signifying grand social transitions. The various positions within the classical German sociology of capitalism clearly illustrate Goldberg's point. These positions built on alternatives within an earlier German philosophical critique of religion, both of which were still explicitly in play in the evolution of Marx's social thought: was capitalism a Judaizing reduction of Christianity, as the early Marx seemed to claim—or did capitalism require the supersession of a legalistic Jewish particularism by an ascetic Christian universalism, as the later Marx suggested? Social...