“The time has come …
To talk of many things:
Of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax
Of cabbages – and kings
And why the sea is boiling hot
And whether pigs have wings.”

Lewis Carroll.
Alice through the Looking Glass

Having opened this large, emotionally charged, and imaginatively written book with its respectable bibliography, the unbiased reader will first of all be intrigued by the crisp title that obviously requires a clarifying subtitle. What exactly is the “Jewish century” and how does it correspond to other “titular” versions of the 20th century, which have been the subject of so many books: The German Century (London, 1999), The Russian Century (New York, 1994), The Chinese Century (the Library of Congress has three different books of that title) or The American Century (at least a dozen of works)? What can these 438 pages of small print contain?
There appears to be no direct and simple answer to these questions. Yuri Slezkine himself, a master of the narrative, warns his reader right away that the book cannot be read quickly from the introduction to the conclusion, and that each chapter is in fact a separate book distinct from other chapters in method and perspective. This is certainly warranted. The first chapter bewilders the reader by its somewhat old fashioned structuralism, when the hypothetical universal “Otherness” (Mercurianism)^[1] is constructed from structurally similar elements of the social conduct of Roma, Jews, the Chinese, African tribes and Indian castes. The “Mercurian” concept is lively peppered with quotes from V. Rozanov as well as with the author’s own visions.^[2] The following chapters refer to epos (Tevie had five daughters…), while the last chapter is almost free from the metaphoric Mercurian-Apollonian^[3] language and is distinguished by rational judgment and a realistic view of the always observant and honest person who reflects upon his personal existential experience. In addition, the book has no formal conclusion which would have solved the reader’s doubts…
Even the chronological framework of the “Jewish century” is hard to establish – apparently it has not yet come to an end. Slezkine describes the Soviet scenario of the 1920s and 1930s, when the Jews, as the “most Soviet” nation, became the most “political” and “cultural” and therefore successful “elite” within the nation. This scenario is being repeated now in the United States because the country is “Mercurian” by definition and the “Jewish century” is projected to last here forever. This, at least, follows logically from the author argument since the “postmodern condition” is not reflected in the book from the point of view of the “Jewish Mercurianism”’ evolution.
It is also not quite clear who the Jews discussed in the book are exactly. The difference between a Jew and a non-Jew is equally left open given that such a Jewish/non-Jewish difference has lost its meaning against the background of global metaphors of “Mercurianism” and “Apollonianism”.^[4] It is not accidental that the book ends with an artistic metaphor, characteristic of the author who prefers the symbolism of metaphors and out-of-context quotations to decisive analytical conclusions:

“For better or for worse? Tevye was not sure. Why raise Jewish daughters if they were going “to break away in the end like the leaves that fall from a tree and are carried off by the wind?” But then again, “what did being a Jew or not a Jew matter? Why did God have to create both?”” (P. 371).

The relativism evident in this concluding quotation from Sholom Aleichem bewilders the reader for it retrospectively relativizes the entire book’s theses, in which citations, plot lines and images are undoubtedly interesting, but owe their presence in the book to the author’s voluntary research and artistic logic. Yuri Slezkine’s encyclopedic knowledge and the riches of the book’s bibliography are hardly used to develop one argument or another. Nor do they form the basis for conclusions that are far from obvious. This is not accidental either: the ambivalent character of writing may reflect an unclear position with respect to the narrated material. Slezkine simultaneously selects the material and groups it “from outside” (as an “objective researcher”) and periodically demonstrates his personal involvement with and integration into the texts (including the biographical ones) with which he works. If we take this method to be anthropological, then we will have to admit that Slezkine is inconsistent in his anthropology because he refuses to explore the original web of meanings of the culture being studied. If this is “Jewish history”, then it is a secondary history constructed on interpretations of historiography. And if this is an attempt at historiosophy, then why does it contain a solid scholarly apparatus, numerous footnotes and interpretations of historiographic contexts? If it’s a form of autobiographic writing, which is hinted in the dedications at the beginning of the book, then how appropriate it is to use conventions of professional scholarly writing, appealing to the scholarly community and allowing the book’s data and conclusions to be verified? Which method allows metaphors to be given the status of analytical concepts (and for giving birth to monsters like “Mercurian Apollonians”)?
Numerous facts and works cited in the book can be compared to an enormous mosaic that needs to be perceived “aesthetically” as a whole (for it has many parts which make little sense on their own). The holistic vision of modernity/Mercurianism of this complex mosaic ignores properly Jewish tendencies of development, Jewish intellectual and political currents (for example, the Idishist ideologies in their Jewish and not Soviet “korenizatsia” contexts). It ignores practices of acculturation or retreat from the impact of universal values of the modern. The Holocaust, undoubtedly a modern phenomenon – is also pushed somewhat to the margins since, if we follow Slezkine’s metaphorical line, the Holocaust ought to mean the end of the “Jewish century”, literally “the final solution” in favor of the Apollonian principle (although, can there be limits to playing with metaphors? – why not proclaim the Nazis inspired by an idea to be Mercurians?). Zionism, an ideology of modern Jewish nationalism, is also relatively marginalized in the book, acquiring importance only in connection with the fact of the Zionist ideal being realized in the state of Israel. Slezkine proclaims Zionism to be a reaction to modernity, an anti-modern phenomenon because “Zionists were trying to transform Mercurians into Appolonians” (P. 269). At the end of the day, the principle boundaries between “modernity in general” and Jewish strategies of modernization, between “revolution” and Jewish participation in the revolution, between Marxism and Jewish contributions to Marxism vanish. This disappearance follows from a logic, according to which all of these are merely various incarnations of the general phenomenon of modernity (the universal Mercurianism) with the Jews being the Mercurians par exellence.
It is hard to assume that Yuri Slezkine, the author of one of the best works on the impact of korenizatsia on the history of smaller peoples of the North as well as an entire range of influential articles (suffice it to recall the famous metaphor of the communal apartment he used to describe Soviet nationalities policy), has consciously left so many specific episodes and important judgments in a book which aspires to be part of professional Jewish historiography to the mercy of pedantic critics and Jewish history experts. It is more likely that the author of the Jewish Century is not specifically interested in the Jews. The Jewish context simply appeared the most suitable way for him to capture and localize the truly boundless problem of modernity and, most importantly, of its subject. Analyzing Jewish self-consciousness, Slezkine is constructing a new myth, his own metaphor of the Jew as the inspired carrier of modernity. Thus, this strange text has a method and objective that reach far beyond the rewriting Jewish history in the 20th century.
The deliberately informal structure and ambivalent text reveal the main fear of the author (in comparison to which the fear of becoming the target of professional “Jewish” historians may appear as a minor evil or even a marketing tool). Analyzing modernity, Slezkine does not want to become dependent on the language of self-description of the modern. This fear, at times bordering on paranoia (see, for example, R. Barthes’ texts from the 1960s) in general accompanies traditions of post-structuralist and post-modernist thought. Yuri Slezkine offers his own recipe for disenchanting modernity. He positions the observer in a special, virtual space, expecting that she will therefore avoid dictates of language and the optics of “modernity”. Indeed, habitually modern categories and models of analysis are applied to pre-modern and modern phenomena alike, “primordialist” structures are interpreted in a constructivist vein, what had seemed unchangeable and eternal is treated as final and dynamically developing. In the case of the 20th century, this language of external description obviously fully coincides with the main elements of the era’s language of self-description. Modernity therefore becomes epistemologically impenetrable (similarly to the situation of imperial societies that lacked self-descriptive languages until the advent of nationalist discourse). Yuri. Slezkine turns traditional approaches upside down. In order to understand permanently changing modernity, he introduces quite “primordialist” categories of “Mercurianism” and “Apollonianism”, while the ancient and presumably unchanged community of “Jews” is proclaimed to be both a metaphor and simultaneously the quintessence of modernity.
Thus, a new meta-language is created which allows for analyzing the object not on its own terms. Constants are introduced into a world, which is presumably deprived of permanent and universal characteristics. In this sense, The Jewish Century is of great interest far beyond professional Jewish studies, for the problem of the interaction between language used for analytical description of the object and the object’s own languages of self-description (at times incredibly powerful) is one of the most profound in social sciences and the humanities. Here we encounter questions more intriguing than those posed by the superficial “Jewish” subject matter laid over the book. First of all, what does the author achieve, having paid the price of resurrecting “new essences” (Mercuarianism/Apollonianism) pushed out from the scholarly lexicon of the twentieth (“Jewish”) century by the “blade of Occam” and development of social sciences and humanities? What new things can we learn about modernity if we refute some of its logic? How does Slezkine’s modernity appear from the point of view of his chronology and geography?^[5]
A queston, which is no less important, concerns how far Yuri Slezkine’s constructions depend on the choice of the metaphor of the “Eternal Jew” as a key to understanding twentieth century Jewry and, therefore, modernity? In the classic debate on “the essence of Jewry” (Jews as pioneers of capitalism and modernity, or the archaic entrepreneurs in a rapidly changing world), Slezkine has actually accepted Sombart’s position.^[6] This allows the author to “freeze” modernity and quietly describe it as a timeless structure. What remains of this analysis if Sombart’s is convincingly discredited and what sense does this analysis make if Sombart’s position is accepted as having the right to exist (i.e., why study modernity if it is eternal as the “Eternal Jew”)?
Finally, to what extent did Slezkine solve the universal language problem, namely that of the mutual dependence of languages of self-description and languages of analysis? Using the anachronistic categories for his analysis of modernity, Slezkine reproduces the main epistemological problem of the New Imperial History: that is, the necessity to describe with the help of a contemporary language the situation of the archaic structures and practices “growing into” modern society, which in itself generated an entire range of meta-narratives: the archaic; the archaic with modern borrowings; the modern with archaic borrowings; and the completely modern. The question is to what extent the author consciously and successfully resolves the problem of interaction between anachronistic phenomena and analytical categories? Does he succeed in overcoming the temptation to resolve the above mentioned contradictions of total relativism in a myth?
These questions have direct relevance for the problems discussed in Ab Imperio and its annual thematic topic. Thus, Yuri Slezkine’s book is of special interest to our journal.