The collapse of the Soviet Union precipitated an archival revolution in the history and culture of Jews in the Russian and Soviet Empires. The newly available materials have allowed a new generation of scholars to fill in many of the blank spaces of the social, cultural, and religious dimensions of the Russian-Jewish experience. These previously unavailable documents have also led to a variety of new approaches and to a number of fundamental revisions of traditional analytical paradigms. The archival revolution and the burgeoning interest in the Jews of Russia paralleled two other important developments that shaped the field in the past decade: the emergence of Jewish Studies as a respected, well-funded, and highly visible area studies concentration in the American academy, and the reconstitution of Russian and Soviet history in light of broader global histories of empires and imperialist politics. Suddenly, the largest community of Jews in the world began to matter not only to scholars trained in Jewish Studies programs, but to Russian and East European historians as well. In other words, just as Russian historians have realized that Russian imperial history cannot be written without the Jews, Jewish historians have concluded that Russian-Jewish history needs to be firmly contextualized within the broader narratives of Russian imperial culture and politics.^[1]
Unlike the highly focused post-Soviet works that have appeared in the past decade, Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century is a bold, imaginative, and sweeping interpretative synthesis that relies on much of the new archive-based studies in Russian imperial and Jewish history and incorporates a wealth of published primary sources. The Jewish Century examines one of the most fundamental and important questions in modern Jewish history – the transformation of the Jewish people from a world of corporate autonomy and rabbinic Judaism to their participation as individuals in a modern, secular world. Although the bulk of the book concentrates on Russian and especially Soviet Jewry, Slezkine should not be italicized across traditional geographic boundaries by analyzing the modernization process within a truly global context. Yet The Jewish Century is not only about the history of the Jews in the modern world; it is also about the modern world itself and the many visible and prominent roles that Jews played in its development and transformation.
Slezkine uses literary metaphors to divide the world into two distinct groups: the Mercurians who represented the entrepreneurial service nomads, and the Apollonians who represented the food-producing laborers. Since Jews were the quintessential Mercurians, they quickly became the “model moderns” and epitomized Western civilization because they were more urban, mobile, articulate and occupationally flexible than everyone else. Although Jews “did not launch the Modern Age,” Slezkine argues, they “adjusted better than most” and “reshaped the modern world as a consequence.” Jews became more visible in professional and cultural spheres and enjoyed more economic prosperity at precisely the same time that they became more anonymous and more invisible in everyday life, that is, when Jewishness ceased to be a clearly defined and visually recognized public identity. In Germany, America, imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union, Slezkine documents the meteoric rise of Jews in all those traditional Jewish pursuits that dealt with money, learning and cleverness, pursuits that Slezkine associates with their so-called Mercurianism. In institutions of learning, liberal professions, entrepreneurial occupations, as well in music, film and the arts, Jews quickly gained prominence as many of their well-known and visible members. Yet, at the same time, Jews also stood at the very center of the European crisis in the fin de siècle – they symbolized both the discontents as well as the accomplishments of modernity. And it is precisely this tension between Jewish exclusion and liberation that Slezkine explores so masterfully.
The boundaries, however, between Mercurianism and Apollonianism (or Jewish and non-Jewish “types”) were never as neatly constituted as Slezkine would like his readers to believe. In fact, these divisions remind me so much of the myriad debates that took place during the age of Enlightenment and later during the age of race science that dealt with the meanings of Jewishness and Jewish exceptionalism. To the author’s credit, “Jews” are never clearly and concisely defined in the book, even if their cultural, religious and occupational transformations seem far too linear, straightforward and, in the end, unproblematic. As a number of Jewish social historians have demonstrated in the past two decades, the “long” Jewish century constituted a fierce contest (or a series of debates) among Jews of all cultural, religious and ideological persuasions over the very meaning of what it meant to be Jewish in the modern age. To put it slightly differently, modernity may have redefined the relatively stable, autonomous structures and worldviews of Jewish communities, but not all Jews embraced social integration and not all Jews readapted their views, behaviors and occupations to fit a single all-embracing model. From this perspective, then, it may make more sense to speak about the diversity of Jewish responses to modernity and the variety of different frameworks that shaped the process of assimilation.^[2]
It may be true that (male) Jews in Western and Central Europe took advantage of the unprecedented educational and professional opportunities and as a result discarded ritual observance with abandon. But recent studies of gender and assimilation have shown that women retained and preserved religious piety and observance at precisely the time that modern Jewish men created, consumed and participated in middle-class culture. “The conservative role of maternal keeper of the domestic flame of Judaism,” the historian Paula Hyman writes, “became a fundamental aspect of the project of assimilation.”^[3] By working in philanthropic societies, women’s clubs and educational institutions, women reshaped, renegotiated and preserved the boundaries of Jewish identity. The assimilation process, in other words, had its limits: Jewish learning and observance may have declined with each succeeding generation, yet women continued to impart a sense of Jewishness to their family and community not only in the domestic sphere, but through their work in social and educational institutions as well.^[4]
To be sure, the contradictions of Jewish daily life – the tensions between social integration and group prejudices, on the one hand, and secularization and religiosity, on the other – have been analyzed in a far more sophisticated and compelling manner for Western and Central European Jewry than for their eastern counterparts.^[5] Yet even if a social history of Jewish daily life has yet to be written for imperial Russia (or the Soviet Union), we should not equate modernization with complete secularization. Religion continued to play a powerful, if still misunderstood, role in everyday life long after the Revolution of 1917. Something similar can be said about the sense of alienation that Slezkine suggests prevailed among the Jewish people in the imperial period: that everyone (Jews and non-Jews alike) considered Jews nonnative and foreign. In fact, as Gershon Hundert has argued recently, at the end of the eighteenth century both Jews and their neighbors “felt that the Jewish community was a rooted and permanent one.”^[6] Moshe Rosman has similarly shown for the same period that, despite linguistic, religious, and even social distancing, Jews participated in a wide spectrum of economic activities and were also influenced by, and shared in, Polish culture.^[7]The parting of the ways (or the tensions between vertical integration and Jewish radicalism) that began to transpire in the late imperial period thus needs to be explained rather than assumed. For most Russian and early Soviet Jews, the Jewish century meant not so much a conversion to the “Pushkin faith” or participation in revolutionary movements, but rather the reconciliation of the world of “tradition” with the challenges, opportunities and temptations of contemporary life.
However, as Jews confronted these challenges (at first in Western Europe and later in the east), their stable and clearly defined ways of life began to transform. Their visibility in professional and associational spheres took place as Jewishness began to be fragmented, destabilized, and made invisible to their host societies. And as the tensions between Jewish visibility and invisibility increased, so did the modern Jewish predicament.^[8] Ultimately, Jews were excluded from bourgeois Europe because, as Yuri Slezkine argues, “they were the only ones without the cover of state nationalism.” In an age of national belonging (or “tribalism,” to use Slezkine’s felicitous term), Jews stood abandoned “as a ghostly tribe of powerful strangers.” The Jewish century is therefore a story of three pilgrimages, or “a story of one Hell [Germany] and three promised Lands [America, Palestine and the Soviet Union].” It is this powerful thesis that will undoubtedly make an important and lasting contribution to modern Jewish historiography.