The Jewish Century by Yuri s> Slezkine (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 349 Slezkine, Yuri. TheJewishCentu?y. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2004. x + 438 pp. Notes. Index. Ci8.95. YURISLEZKINEhas alreadywon recognitionwith his monographArctic Mirrors: RussiaandtheSmallPeoples of theNorth(Ithaca, NY, I and two co-edited volumes. His latest book, TheJewishCentugy, immediatelystimulatedenergetic critical debate for its provocative thesis, sweeping narrative of twentiethcentury history, bold statements and controversial conclusions. The book was awardedprizes by the Associationof American Publishers(2004) and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (2005). In his introduction,Slezkineposits that the Modern Age is theJewish Age, while the twentieth century,as the culminationof modernity,is a particularly Jewish century. For Slezkine, Modernity entails, among other things, being 'urban,mobile, literate, articulate, [...] physicallyfastidious,and occupationally flexible' (p. I), all ostensiblytraditionalJewish qualities.The Jew, therefore , becomes the ideal prototype of modern man. Slezkine thus reversesthe conventional metaphor, expressed so eloquently particularlyby Tsvetaeva, casting Jews as eternal misfits, by highlighting the traits that make Jews strikinglyrepresentativeof contemporarysocieties. Many interpretive histories, especially those of Russia, have employed binary oppositions to flesh out the contrasting tendencies in the society they describe (e.g.James H. Billington's TheIconandtheAxe,London, I966). Slezkine drawsupon Greekmythology to illuminatehis viewpoint, classifying people as either Apollonians or Mercurians.As opposed to the conventional associationof Apollo with the Sun and the arts,it is thisdivinity'sarchaicfunction as the patron of agriculturethat is highlightedin his book. Apollonians, therefore, are settled, food-producing societies of farmers, herdsmen and warriors.Apollo is contrasted to Mercury, the god of trade and boundarycrossing ,while 'Mercurians'are entrepreneurialnomads who provide services for Apolloniansand engage in occupationsdeemed 'unclean',includingbanking and medicine. WhileJews clearlyfit the Mercurianprofile,theirnomadic, service-orientedlot is in no way unique, and Slezkine compares their social position to that ofJains, Gypsies, or overseasChinese. Having thus outlined his perspective,Slezkinenarrowshis focus to Russian Jews, whose story he traces from the Pale of Settlement through post-Soviet oligarchs. Here, Sholem-Alecheim's TevyetheMilkmanis brought to bear: just as Tevye's daughters break out of the traditional Pale environment to join revolutionarymovements or marry gentiles so, according to Slezkine's argument,did theJews leave the Pale of Settlement to embarkon one of the three 'messianicpilgrimages':to Palestine, to America, or, by embracing the Bolshevik Revolution, into Soviet urban life. Slezkine follows the imaginary descendents of Tevye's daughtersas they move through the Jewish century'. The most intriguingaccount in the book is that of the SovietJews. Slezkine presentsremarkabledata onJewish overrepresentationin the Revolution, the highest echelons of Soviet bureaucracy,and also in the secretpolice and gulag guards.Jewish allegiance to the Bolshevikcause is explained, predictably,by 'Mercurian'qualities, the fact that the Jews were not attached to the tsarist regime, and were keen to replace the Pale with a differentsociety. Another related issue thoroughly explored is the nature of Stalinist purges. Thus, 350 SEER, 84, 2, 2006 Slezkine convincingly argues that the Jews were in no way a target of the purgesof I937,and theirprominence among the repressedis simplya resultof the significantJewish contingent among the Bolshevik old guard. Slezkine traces the roots of state-sponsoredanti-Semitism to the immediate pre-war years, when Stalin sought to win over Hitler by imitating his racial politics. During World War Two, paradoxically, the Nazis's anti-Semitic ideology spilled over into the Soviet occupied areas, which preparedthe wide popular base for post-war anti-Jewishcampaigns. Slezkine sums up the Soviet period as the rise and fall of the Jews, whose new 'golden calf (the Revolution) propelled them to the heights of power and eventuallyalmost crushed them. The Russian-JewishRevolution aside, the twentieth century is proclaimed theJewish century for several additionalreasons:this is the age of Marxism, Freudianism, capitalism, anti-Semitism (or, shall we add, the culmination thereof in the Holocaust), and American Liberalism, and Slezkine rightly seesJews at the inception or at the centre of all of these diversephenomena. This is the Jewish century also because of the rebirth, after a hiatus of two millennia, of theJewish state, and Slezkine does in fact turn his attention to Israel toward the end of the book. His attention is cursorythough, ignoring any specifics or complexities of the Middle Eastern context and repeating a few unflatteringbut 'politicallycorrect' opinions encountered frequentlyin the Westernpress...