Yesterday, while the Internet was out in my neighborhood (cut cable), I finished a terrific book, * The Jewish Century*, by the Russian-American historian Yuri Slezkine. I can’t recommend it strongly enough. It tells you a lot about Jews in the modern world, but also a lot about the modern world, and human nature itself. Believe it or not, the book helped me understand why my own deeply rooted Louisiana family could not figure out how to relate to me and my wife and kids. Let’s dive in.
The name Yuri Slezkine will be familiar to some of you. He wrote the masterful history of the Bolshevik Revolution, * The House of Government*, which I quoted in
In The Jewish Century, Slezkine, who is of partial Russian Jewish ancestry, explains how the social character of Jews (meaning Ashkenazi Jews, the Europeanized ones of the diaspora) made them especially suited to thrive in modernity — talents that also made them vulnerable to the rage of dominant society.
He begins not by talking about Jews at all, but about how most societies have historically developed.
The opposition between purity and pollution lies at the heart of all moral order, be it in the form of traditional distinctions (between body parts, parts of the world, natural realms, supernatural forces, species of humanity) or of various quests for salvation, religious or secular.
Because of the diaspora, in which the Jewish people were exiled by the Romans from the land of Palestine circa AD 70, Jews have been wandering nomads. Of necessity, they became “service nomads” — a type of social group seen around the world (e.g., the “Overseas Chinese” in Southeast Asia, and Lebanese in Latin America). Service nomads are a people not of the majority group in a society, who have become integral to that society’s economic functioning, because they have special skills that the society needs. Jews, for example, became bankers in Christian Europe not only because they were exceptionally good at finance, but because Christians needed their banking services, as they, being Jews, were not subject to Christian prohibitions against usury. More:
Before the rise of secularism and industrialism, everyone in agrarian societies seems to have agreed that service nomadism meant homelessness, and that homelessness was a curse.
When I read that line, I immediately remembered something my late father told me in my youth, when I asked him about the Jews of our town. Prior to the 1927 flood, there was a sizable Jewish merchant class in our Mississippi River town. The flood destroyed them economically, and they moved on. I recall my father, who was born in 1934, simply being unable to grasp why they would leave. “Their businesses were ruined,” I told him. “They didn’t know how to work the land. What else were they to do?” He still didn’t get it. For him, a man whose social imagination was formed by an agrarian society, it was a matter of loyalty. As with the Jews, so with me, his son. Not long before he died, he told me wished sometimes that he had moved away from our town when he was a young man, but that he couldn’t conceive of being disloyal to his family in that way. Anyway, just giving you a glimpse at how this book struck home.
Slezkine invents two categories, their labels drawn from Greek mythology, to distinguish service nomads from the majority: Apollonians and Mercurians. In Greek mythology, Apollo was the god of agriculture and settled existence. Mercury (Hermes) was the god of messengers, merchants, craftsmen, and those who live by their wits.
The difference between Apollonians and Mercurians is the all-important difference between those who grow food and those who create concepts and artifacts. The Mercurians are always sober but never dignified. Whenever the Apollonians turn cosmopolitan, they find the Mercurians to be uncommonly recalcitrant and routinely accuse them of tribalism, nepotism, clannishness, and other sins that used to be virtues (and still are, in a variety of contexts).
Such accusations have a lot to do with the old mirror-image principle: if cosmopolitanism is a good thing, strangers do not have it (unless they belong to a noble savage variety preserved as a reproach to the rest of us). But they have even more to do with reality: in complex agrarian societies (no other preindustrial kind has much interest in cosmopolitanism), and certainly in modern ones, service nomads tend to possess a greater degree of kin solidarity and internal cohesion than their settled neighbors.
This is true of most nomads, but especially the mercurial kind, who have few other resources and no other enforcement mechanisms. In the words of Pierre van den Berghe, “Groups with a strong network of extended family ties and with a strong patriarchal authority structure to keep extended families together in the family business have a strong competitive advantage in middleman occupations over groups lacking these 2 characteristics.” Clannishness is loyalty as seen by a stranger.
More:
If one values mobility, mental agility, negotiation, wealth, and curiosity, one has little reason to respect either prince or peasant. And if one feels strongly enough that manual labor is sacred, physical violence is honorable, trade is tricky, and strangers should be either fed or fought (or perhaps that there should be no strangers at all), one is unlikely to admire service nomads. And so, for much of human history, they have lived next to each other in mutual scorn and suspicion—
not because of ignorant superstition but because they have had the chance to get to know each other.[Emphasis mine — RD]
Here’s the key to the book:
Modernity was about everyone becoming a service nomad: mobile, clever, articulate, occupationally flexible, and good at being a stranger. … The Age of Universal Mercurianism became Jewish because it began in Europe.
This, by the way, is exactly what Zygmunt Bauman says in discussing “liquid modernity”. Mercurians thrive in modernity, because its social and economic conditions favor the adaptability that Mercurians have.
In the 19th century, residual anti-Semitism forced Jews into occupations for which they were especially well suited — and which were vital to modern life:
Because civil service jobs were mostly closed to Jews (and possibly because of a general Jewish preference for self-employment), most Jewish students went into the professions that were “liberal,” congruent with Mercurian upbringing, and, as it happens, absolutely central to the functioning of modern society: medicine, law, journalism, science, higher education, entertainment, and the arts.
The more Jews came to be seen as the embodiment of modernity and secularism, the more peoples who disliked modernity and secularism hated and feared Jews, says Slezkine. This is especially true because the Jewish tradition of valorizing disciplined study, which held up even among poor shtetl farmers and merchants, allowed Jews to achieve great success in the professions, once they were allowed in. The more socially free and more capitalistic a society became, the greater the opportunities for Jews.
Yet Jews at the advent of capitalist modernity, says Slezkine, faced an impossible dilemma. In the nationalistic 19th century, many young Jews rebelled against their fathers, meaning the closed tribal world of diaspora Judaism, the shtetl. But:
Deprived of the comforts of their tribe and not allowed into the new ones created by their Apollonian neighbors, they became the only true moderns.
For me, the most fascinating part of the book is Slezkine’s discussion of how generations of 19th and early 20th century Jews rebelled against their fathers, and therefore against Jewishness.
This is why so many Jews back then were vastly overrepresented in socialist and communist movements. They dreamed of creating a world in which being Jewish did not matter. Note well: they weren’t seeking a world in which traditional Jews could have a place at the table. They were seeking a world in which Judaism did not matter. They had turned their back on the Jewish God, the religion and traditions of the Hebrew people. But they had not abandoned the social justice core of traditional Jewish ethics. They just secularized it — and, by joining radical left-wing movements, sought to enforce their idea of social justice using the power of the state.
Jewish participation in radical movements of the early twentieth century is similar to their participation in business and the professions: most radicals were not Jews and most Jews were not radicals, but the proportion of radicals among Jews was, on average, much higher than among their non-Jewish neighbors. According to Stephen J. Whitfield, “if Jews have been disproportionately radicals, it may be because they have been disproportionately intellectuals”—the reason being either traditional strangeness or a newfound marginality.
It is impossible to understand why so many Russian Jews, for example, became Bolsheviks without understanding how terrible Jews suffered under tsarism. Reading the book, I recalled a dinner table conversation in Moscow, in 2019, with a Russian Orthodox family. When I said it made no sense to me why so many people in the early 20th century believed in Bolshevism, the father launched into a discourse about how Russian aristocrats had ground the faces of the poor into the dirt for many centuries. People — not just Jews — were desperate for deliverance from an unjust social order. That’s what the Bolsheviks promised. The father said he’s certainly not defending the choice for Bolshevism, which was catastrophic, but explaining why it seduced many.
About the 19th and early 20th century Jewish revolt against their fathers:
The wealthier ones bemoaned their fathers’ capitalism, the poorer ones, their fathers’ Jewishness, but the real reason for their common revulsion was the feeling that capitalism and Jewishness were one and the same thing. According to the historian Andrew Janos, [bloodthirsty Hungarian Communist leader] Béla Kun’s young commissars “sought out traditionalist Jews with special ferocity as targets of their campaigns of terror.”
For Karl Marx, who was ethnically Jewish (he had been baptized Christian), killing capitalism was the same thing as killing Judaism, and setting Jews free from the chains of tradition. The Jewish disciples of Marx, says Slezkine, shared this view. Slezkine:
No history of Russian radicalism is conceivable without the story of the Jewish children’s “open revolt against their parents.” … He is ready—“if necessary”—to burn down the old temple, and he looks forward to a fiery apocalypse “when the old rabbi dies under the collapsed wall of his synagogue.” The death of the rabbi signals the birth of the Bolshevik.
This is something that today’s casual antisemites surely don’t know: that Jewish left-wing radicalism comes out of a REVOLT against religion and tradition!
In Slezkine’s formulation, European Jews responded to the advent of modernity by choosing one of three “ideological destinations”:
Freudianism became associated with a nonethnic (or multiethnic) liberalism in the United States; Zionism represented a secular Jewish nationalism in Palestine; and Communism stood for the creation of a nation-free world centered in Moscow. The story of twentieth century Jews is a story of one Hell and three Promised Lands.
Jews initially did well in the Soviet Union, relative to their position in Tsarist Russia. Slezkine says that Jews made model Bolsheviks, not only because they were much more intelligent and skilled, overall (e.g., three-quarters of the Russian rail system was built by Jews), but because they also desperately wanted to shake off their Jewishness, and become Apollonians (that is, fully Soviet). But eventually the old Russian anti-Semitism came roaring back. (The tragedy of Jews in modernity is that no matter how assimilated they become — and it was harder to find people more celebratory of, say, Russian and German high culture than the Jews of those countries — the Apollonian majority will never fully accept them.)
Jews thrived incredibly in America, where anti-Semitism was relatively weak, and where they thrived under capitalism and individualism (the 1960s radical students were heavily Jewish, and came from upper middle class families: killing the fathers again!). America is the quintessential Mercurian country, after all.
Only in Palestine (Israel) did the Jews try to establish a place for themselves by ceasing to be Mercurians, and becoming, for the first time in 2,000 years of exile, Apollonians (“the Zionists were trying to transform Mercurians into Apollonians”). About Israel, Slezkine writes:
After two thousand years of living as Mercurians among Apollonians, Jews turned into the only Apollonians in a world of Mercurians (or rather, the only civilized Apollonians in a world of Mercurians and barbarians). They were still strangers—but this time they were welcome (to the Westerners) because they remained remote. During the quarter of a century following World War II, Israel was everyone’s fantasy of youthful vigor, joyful labor, human authenticity, and just retribution. It was the only place where European Civilization seemed to possess a moral certainty, the only place where violence was truly virtuous.
Note this stunning paragraph:
In the most general sense, Zionism prevailed over Communism because nationalism everywhere prevailed over socialism. Tribalism is a universal human condition, and the family is the most fundamental and conservative of all human institutions (as well as the source of most religious and political rhetoric). All human cultures are organized around the regulation of reproduction, and reproduction—whatever the regulatory regime—requires a preference for some partners over others and the favoring of one’s own children over those of others. All radical attempts to remake humankind are ultimately assaults on the family, and all of them either fail or dissimulate.
For most humans most of the time, the pursuit of happiness involves pursuing the opposite sex, being fruitful, and raising children, all of which activities are forms of discrimination and inexhaustible springs of tribalism. No vision of justice-as-equality can accommodate the human family however constituted, and no human existence involving men, women, and children can abide the abolition of the distinction between kin and nonkin. Christianity, which urged human beings to love other people’s children as much as their own, managed to survive by making marriage (a pledge of exclusive loyalty to one person) a religious sacrament analogous to the central institution of all tribal societies.
Communism, which was Christianity’s foolish, literal-minded younger brother, withered away after the first generation’s idealism because it failed to incorporate the family and thus proved unable to reproduce itself. In the end, it was nationalism that triumphed decisively over both because it updated the traditional (genealogical) brand of immortality by introducing the tribal way of being modern and the modern way of being tribal. Nationalism needs no doctrine because it seems so natural.
And yet, we get to today:
In an act of tragic irony, the Zionist escape from strangeness has led to a new kind of strangeness. From being exemplary Mercurians among Apollonians, the Israeli Jews have become exemplary Apollonians among universal (Western) Mercurians. By representing violent retribution and undiluted ethnic nationalism in a world that claims to value neither, they have estranged themselves from the states they wanted to join.
So, here’s what I think. When I was in Israel last week, I saw a country that is modern, dynamic, youthful, confident, and, generally speaking, socially conservative without necessarily being religious. Israelis have their liberals, sure, but nobody in Israel can indulge in wokeness, because tha…
