The Chosen People (Page 3)

Slezkine's interpretation of Jewish history, meanwhile, has its strengths and weaknesses. It is wonderfully antiparochial not only vis-à-vis the Jews but vis-à-vis America, which, he reminds us, not everyone saw as a promised land and which large portions of the huddled masses struggled to avoid. (His discussion of how Fiddler on the Roof Americanized Sholem Aleichem's Tevye, who actually despises the United States, is particularly bracing.) Considering the flood of right-wing propaganda inundating us nowadays, the fact that he shows any sympathy at all for the Russian Revolution is faintly astonishing. Far from surrendering to the Bolshevik steamroller, Jews were active participants, carrying out a revolution against their own rabbinate and bourgeoisie that in many respects was more ferocious than the larger revolution of which it was a part. "Most Jewish rebels did not fight the state in order to become free Jews; they fought the state in order to become free from Jewishness," Slezkine observes. In a 1903 letter to Theodor Herzl, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann complained that even though the unfolding revolutionary movement "consumes much Jewish energy and heroism, and is located within the Jewish fold, the attitude it evidences towards Jewish nationalism is one of antipathy, swelling at times to fanatical hatred. Children are in open revolt against their parents." Thus, Jewish Bolsheviks revolted against Judaism not so much because they wanted to destroy it but because they wanted to use it as a springboard to something higher.

On the negative side, Slezkine is a captive of his metaphor, and the picture he paints is to a degree one-sided and incomplete. Reading The Jewish Century, one sometimes gets the impression that all footloose service providers are Mercurians and that all Mercurians are in the vanguard of social change. But this raises the question of why some Mercurians become part of the vanguard and others do not, and why some wind up doing both. The Jewish response to the first wave of European modernization, for instance, was not to rush forward and embrace the brave new world unfolding around them but to pull back further into their shell. Lost in Talmudic obscurantism, they seemed as hopelessly backward from roughly the fifteenth to the eighteenth century as the Gypsies, those other European Mercurians, may seem today. It was not until the French Revolution that attitudes began to change, and not until 1848, as Eric Hobsbawm recently noted in The London Review of Books, that they became prominent in the front rows of European radicalism. Only then did the image of the Jew sealing himself off behind high ghetto walls give way to the image of the Jew as pioneer of the new.

The Jewish Century falls short in another respect. By reducing everything to a matter of Mercurians versus Apollonians, Slezkine comes close to lopping off an entire intellectual dimension. Jews played a key role in the creation of the modern world not merely because they were close to the center of action but because of their ideological role in what, from the tenth century on, was becoming the most ideologically fraught corner of the globe. Although small in number, they were the Christians' and Muslims' intellectual equal for much of the medieval period and their superior for a portion of it. Not only did they pioneer the concept of universalism; they used it to mount a sustained critique of their own behavior. (As the classical historian Morton Smith said of the Golden Calf episode and other instances of Hebrew backsliding in the Old Testament, "That constantly recurrent national apostasy should be made the leit-motif of an entire literature is something unparalleled in antiquity.") Jewish self-excoriation--or self-hatred, if you will--may seem neurotic, but it turned out to be highly useful in an age of neurosis based on ruthless intellectual self-examination and debate. Some sons and daughters of rabbis and peddlers tried to turn themselves into model Gentiles à la Maugham's Blands/Bleikogels. ("You know," Bland père remarks hilariously at one point, "I've got an idea that nowhere in the world now is the Greek ideal of life so perfectly cultivated as by the English country gentlemen living on his estates.") But once the idea of a universal god had fallen by the wayside, others sallied forth to do battle with the new universal ideas taking its place--psychoanalysis, theoretical physics, socialism and so on--astonishing the world with their aggressiveness and intellectual ferocity. If Jews felt a special affinity for Bolshevism (which they undoubtedly did), it was because it was the most universal, radical and militant form of Modernism yet and hence the only kind they could completely embrace.

Somehow describing them as merely another group of wandering craftsmen and information purveyors seems inadequate. Slezkine also observes that Jews are not the only Mercurians to suffer barbaric violence. Levantines in Latin America, West Africa and the Caribbean; Chinese in Southeast Asia; Indians in East Africa--all have been at the receiving end of riots and pogroms that are no different from those of czarist Russia. Yet, he writes, "there is no word for 'anti-Sinicism' in the English language, or indeed in any language except Chinese (and even in Chinese the term, paihua, is limited in use and not universally accepted)." On the one hand, this suggests that the Jews are not unique. On the other, by showing how anti-Jewish animosity has been uniquely ideologized, it suggests that something about their role is different after all.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.