Outsiders on the inside track

To come across a daring, original, sweeping work of history in this age of narrow specialization is not just a welcome event; it is almost a sensation. In just such a book, “The Jewish Century,” UC Berkeley history professor Yuri Slezkine makes the assertion that the 20th century was the Jewish century, that modernization is about everyone “becoming” Jewish.

According to Slezkine, Marxism was Jewish. So was psychoanalysis and even nationalism; one could add the theory of relativity and much of modern medicine. For all one knows, anti-Semitism too should be added to this list.

The author shows how he feels the Jews came to play this role. He moves easily from Greek mythology to outsider peoples in medieval Korea, from Proust to the burakumin “outcast” class in Japan as well as the kanjar in Pakistan. He quotes from the Chinese, Malay, Tuareg and various Gypsy and Ladino dialects. It is all a mind-boggling performance.

He proves that traveling ethnic groups (“Mercurians”) have been doing consistently better adjusting to modern times than peasants and other primary producers (whom he calls Apollonians). He also shows that the Chinese and Indian diasporas as well as Syrians and Lebanese, Iranians and Armenians have been doing very well outside their homelands.

All this information about outsiders and nomadic tribes is fascinating, but how reliable a guide is Slezkine for the history of the Jews? In the very first sentence he claims that “[t]here was nothing particularly unusual about the social and economic position of the Jews in medieval and early modern Europe.” But there was a slight difference, for they lived in a ghetto whereas the others did not. There is a problem with the author’s generalizations from the very beginning; he rightly notes in considerable detail that some Jewish entrepreneurs did very well during the last decades of czarist Russia. But it is equally true that the great majority in Poland and Russia lived in dire poverty and that this was one of the main reasons for their emigration.

He deals rather briefly with the social and cultural rise of the Jews in Germany, Austria-Hungary and France, and it is of course true that once the walls of the ghetto came down, there was a tremendous release of creative energy. Jews streamed into trade and banking and the professions, and they took a notable part in the cultural life of these countries.

But there never was a Jewish century, and it is misleading even as a metaphor. There was at most a decade or two of Jewish cultural prominence in Europe (and this is what the book is mainly about) prior to World War II; politically, socially and economically there was not even this. It is difficult to think of a predominant Jewish cultural influence in postwar Britain or Germany or Italy or indeed any other European country in the second half of the 20th century.

The major part of the book deals with the role of the Jews in the Russian revolutionary movement and the Soviet Union. Slezkine interprets “Jew” in a somewhat sweeping way, including a few non-Jews, more than a few half-Jews, converted Jews, anti-Jewish Jews and husbands of Jewish women. However, by and large, he is right. Their part was very big, but this has been written about widely. When the Nazis launched their massive campaign about Judeo-Bolshevism and Stalin being a puppet of the Jewish puppet masters, a new class had already emerged and the Soviet Jews had been squeezed out and quite often disappeared altogether -- into the gulag or a better world. Jewish prominence in Soviet cultural life lasted perhaps a decade or two longer, but there was no Jewish century, only perhaps a Jewish moment in Russian history.

True again, after the breakdown of the Soviet Union, some of the country’s most prominent non-identifying Jews, the so-called oligarchs, established big conglomerates. Now some are in exile, at least one is in prison, and the prospects of Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club in London, are under a cloud.

This is a strange book with astute observations on a variety of topics such as 19th and 20th century Russian history, James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, the family names of the early Jewish settlers in Palestine and the Frankfurt school of critical theory. But it is also replete with farfetched, abstruse analogies and generalizations. The history of the rise of the Jews in the Western world in the last two centuries remains to be written, but it will have to include the misfortunes and disasters, and it will be altogether a more modest and less sensational story.

Walter Laqueur is a distinguished scholar of the Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the author of many books, including “A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel.”