The Chosen People (Page 2)

Jews are different, in other words, except that other people are also different in comparable ways. Not only do Mercurians tend to be multilingual--Hermes was also "the god of eloquence," Slezkine notes--but they are also usually endogamous (marrying within the group so as to avoid outside entanglements), devoted to elaborate purity codes involving food and blood (another means of limiting contact with the outside world) and, in the case of the men, seemingly weak and feminine (since they usually avoid confrontations with their more numerous hosts rather than seeking them out). The Jains of India started out as members of the Kshatriya warrior caste but then, upon adopting vegetarianism and nonviolence, turned to moneylending, jewelry-making, shopkeeping and, eventually, banking and industry. No one knows whether vegetarianism or moneylending came first, but there is no question that they were mutually supportive. The Parsis of Bombay and Gujarat, descendants of Zoroastrians who fled Persia after the Muslim conquest, practiced endogamy as a way of avoiding entanglement with the Hindu caste system. Their self-imposed outsider status led them to take up peddling and liquor dealing and then, with the arrival of the Europeans in the 1500s, brokering, moneylending, shipbuilding and eventually international trade. "By the mid-nineteenth century," Slezkine writes, "the Parsis had become Bombay's leading bankers, industrialists, and professionals, as well as India's most proficient English-speakers and most determined practitioners of Western social rituals." We can be sure their English overlords also sneered at them as parvenus for weakly imitating European ways.

If Slezkine had left off there, his book would have significantly added to our understanding of minority cultures and the functions they perform. But this is merely the opening gambit in a richly detailed study that aims not only to recast our understanding of the modern Jewish predicament but of the modern predicament as a whole. In essence, The Jewish Century argues that the world passed through a Star Trek-like portal somewhere in the late 1800s so that, for the first time in history, Mercurian values became ascendant over Apollonian ones. Jews were intimately bound up with the change not because they were better than other Mercurians but merely because they were closest to the center of action. For the first time in centuries, their special mix of skills and abilities--multilingualism, adaptability, intellectual agility, etc.--were in demand.

Slezkine is hardly the only one to link Judaism with the emergence of capitalist modernity. And nowhere was the connection more striking than in czarist Russia, a vast agrarian empire on Europe's eastern edge and a kind of frozen monument to the Apollonian virtues of staying put. When at last this edifice began to crack in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a number of Mercurian elements rushed into the breach--Armenians, ethnic Germans and high-achieving Old Believers (Russian Orthodox dissidents analogous in some respects to the Amish or Quakers). But no one was more prominent in the changeover than the Jews. Despite endless legal impediments placed in their way, Jewish capitalists were soon conspicuous in banking, shipping and mining and were involved in the construction of fully three-fourths of the czarist rail system. In Odessa, Jews were responsible for 57 percent of factory output as of 1887 and 90 percent of grain exports as of 1910. They ran much of Russia's timber industry and, on the eve of World War I, owned a third of all sugar mills in Ukraine. Elsewhere, Jews flocked to the universities, entered en masse into professions like medicine and law, and flooded into the arts. "Jews are so clever that no law can be counted on to restrict them," czarist finance minister V.N. Kokovtsev complained in 1906. But "they needed to be restricted," Slezkine adds, simply because "they were so clever."

If the Mercurian triumph created an opening for Jewish capitalists, it created an even greater one for Jews on the revolutionary left. Russian radicalism developed in two stages, an early agrarian stage followed by a proletarian-industrial stage from roughly the 1890s on. Jews were prominent in the first, but they retreated in confusion when peasant radicalism turned anti-Semitic. They were far more at home in the second, whose values were completely different. Mercurian rather than Apollonian, to use Slezkine's terminology, Russian socialists extolled industrialism, urbanism, learning, mobility and modernization. They despised tradition, religion and rootedness in general. For Lenin, one of the positive aspects of capitalistic development is that it tended to "replace the thick-skulled, boorish, inert, and bearishly savage Russian or Ukrainian peasant with a mobile proletarian." A quarter Jewish himself (although he didn't know it), Lenin unabashedly admired the "great, universally progressive traits in Jewish culture: its internationalism and its responsiveness to the advanced movements of the age." Ironically, Jews were at first more numerous among the Mensheviks. But once the Revolution and Civil War got under way, Jews flocked to the Bolsheviks because they were the only ones who took a strong line against anti-Semitism. According to Slezkine,

For those who wished to fight, there was but one army to join. The Red Army was the only force that stood earnestly and consistently against Jewish pogroms and the only one led by a Jew. Trotsky was not just a general or even a prophet: he was the living embodiment of redemptive violence, the sword of revolutionary justice.

Slezkine's attitude toward the Soviet Union is ambivalent at best. He dedicates The Jewish Century to his grandmother, who was imprisoned under the czar, immigrated to Argentina, returned to Russia in 1931 to help build socialism and in her old age, he says, "considered most of her life to have been a mistake." Plainly, a latter-day Bolshevik he is not. But while he regards the Soviet experiment as a failure, he believes "the Jewish century" presented the Jews with a series of choices, none of them completely satisfactory. They could lose themselves in the Mercurian transformation of imperial Russia. They could immigrate to the United States, a country founded by Protestant Mercurians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and take their place alongside all the other Mercurianized immigrant groups as part of a general celebration of American "diversity" and "ethnicity" (however bogus those terms may be). Or they could turn Zionist, move to Palestine and become tillers of the soil, Apollonian peasant warriors in a world struggling to leave all that behind.

The first choice led to a dead end when Stalin's neo-Apollonian Russification policy led to a resurgence of anti-Semitism. The second has led to Bush, while the third has led to permanent warfare in an ethno-chauvinist state that Slezkine describes as "the sole Western survivor (along with Turkey, perhaps) of the integral nationalism of interwar Europe." The very concept of a Jewish state, he adds, is the contemporary equivalent "of such politically illegitimate concepts as 'Germany for the Germans' and 'Greater Serbia,'" while "the rhetoric of ethnic homogeneity and ethnic deportations, tabooed elsewhere in the West, is a routine element of Israeli political life." American and Israeli Jews should not automatically assume that their choice was the right one.

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