Mediation between Millstones: Werner Cahnman's Tale of an Antagonistic Jewish-Gentile Symbiosis

Abstract

Halfway into this book, in a chapter on The Splendor and Misery of the Jews of Spain, Werner Cahnman observes acerbically, The catastrophe of the Jews of Spain shows with great clarity the price Jews have to pay for their role as agents of the powers that be; it can happen that they are ground between the upper and nether (p. 75). That metaphor of the Jews between the up per millstones of the rulers and attached to them, and the lower millstone of the ruled, could well stand for the basic theme of this book: the emergence of the Jews over the past millennium as intermediaries attached to rulers and in an antagonistic relation to the middle or lower classes. Cahnman was well equipped to deal with this subject. From a distinguished German Jewish family, he held a Ph.D. from the Uni versity of Munich and was also a graduate of Dachau from where he was released through the intervention of no other than Rudolf Hess, an old classmate. After his release, he went on to studies at the University of Chica go and worked with Robert Park, Louis Wirth, and Everett Hughes. Later on, after stints at the New School and some other col leges, he held a professorship at Rutgers Uni versity. Periodically, and in different geographic contexts, he argues, the middle or lower classes would rise up, and instead of attack ing the rulers as the real source of their op pression, they vent their frustration on the Jews. This scapegoating thesis is, mildly put, not new and was not new in the 1970s when Cahnman prepared his manuscript. In Amer ican sociology it was Lewis Coser in particu lar who had made this point a long time ago. What I have not seen elsewhere, however, is Cahnman's bold and somewhat essentializing contention that while this precarious relation of the Jews emerged only in the Middle Ages, Jews and Gentiles: A Historical Sociology of Their Relations, by Werner J. Cahnman, edited by Judith T. Marcus and Zoltan Tarr. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004. 253 pp. $49.95 cloth. ISBN: 0765802120.