In “The Jewish Century” are woven two intertwined narratives: the one a standard though tremendously insightful historical narrative, the other an idiosyncratic rumination on the meaning of modernity. Both are thought-provoking, and both are problematic.
One of the most compelling facets of the historical narrative (for there are many) is Slezkine’s “big-picture” explication of modern Jewish history, in the course of which he manages to demonstrate those furtive connections between the various Jewish cultures in the three homelands that he discusses. Having felt and ruminated upon the sometimes eerie parallels between the Jewish experience in the U.S., Israel, and the (former) Soviet Union, I am grateful to Slezkine for making some of those similarities clear. The journeys that Jewish migrants to these countries undertook led them to remarkably similar destinations. And the transformation of the “Mercurian” Jew into “Apollonian” native does indeed seem to have the same roots, whether it is as a Sabra in Mandatory Palestine, a commissar in Soviet Russia, or a hale baseball player in an American suburb. Moreover, Slezkine knits together the historical experiences of Soviet, American, and Israeli Jews into a conceptual unity in a manner that is not only intellectually convincing but that also feels accurate to those of us familiar with all three contexts who always sensed the correspondences among them but could never quite put our collective finger on them.
But as Marina Mogilner indicates, however suggestive this picture, it is drawn with too wide a brush. From afar the portrait is exquisite and at times even breathtaking in its breadth, its analytical dexterity, and its rich hues (thanks especially to the imaginative use of fiction and poetry); but when viewed more closely, it is clearly overly schematized, especially those portions attempting to place American and Palestinian/Israeli Jewry into the same historiosophical framework as Soviet Jews. Yes, there were young Jews in the interwar United States who rebelled against their parents by becoming Communists, but then again, many did not. Yes, Judaism took a new turn in the U.S., but what does it mean to say that this “strategy” was “to retain the Jewishness, recover it if it seemed lost, and possibly reform it by means of a peculiarly American procedure… called the ‘Protestantization’ of Judaism” (P. 263)? Wonderfully pithy, but without much historical meaning. Indeed, the schema of Mercurianism versus Apollonianism that pervades the entire book seems to lose its usefulness by virtue of its ubiquity. The terms are fascinating in the first chapter, valuable as an analytical tool in the second (especially in the discussion of nationalism), but a little tired by the third, when Slezkine starts to talk about real people.
And that is one of the primary flaws of the book; for all of its rich detail when discussing individuals, both real and fictional, one senses that they must in the end sacrifice their individuality for the greater good of the author’s systematization of the modernity that defined and gave meaning to their lives (is it coincidental that they sacrificed that individuality – for the first time – on the altars of the very ideologies that Slezkine is analyzing here?). Even if we concede that Jews were “the main representatives of modernity and secularism,” we cannot stop there. For Jews did not only represent, they also were – they lived lives worthy of consideration apart from the whirlwind to which they devoted their lives (or found themselves caught up in). Over and over again we hear that “Most X were not Jews, and most Jews were not X – but Jews had a higher proportion of X than any other group;” and we are treated to many statistics showing how many professors of Marxism-Leninism were Jewish, how many Chekists were Jewish, how many American journalists and politicians are Jewish (for example, P. 236 and P. 368). Thus the subject here is indeed the Jew as carrier of modernity – and brilliantly expressed it is, too – but the Jew as Jew, or as human, is somehow lost. What of those Russian Jews who did not devote themselves wholeheartedly to the Bolshevik cause? What of the young Sabras who found themselves indifferent to the propaganda of Zionism? What of American Jews who did not succeed in the Golden Land?
This, I think, points up a recent, and to my mind troubling, phenomenon in Jewish Studies: taking the Jews as an “emblem” – of modernity, of hybridity, of liminality, of empire and imperial practices. This approach may (and sometimes does) yield interesting results, but does it not in some way replicate the millennial European attitude towards Jews? To put it crudely: use the Jews for what they are useful for. To say that the Jewish story is the European story – fine, good. But to say that you’re telling the Jewish story when really you are using that story to talk about something else entirely – that is indeed problematic.
So much for the individual Jew. But as it turns out, even “Jewishness” itself – though it is referred to throughout the work and explicated again and again – gets short shrift. As Slezkine ponders contemporary Jewish existence in Russia, he notes that “in the age of universal Mercurianism (the Jewish Age), the main question is whether the Russians will learn how to become Jews.” Given the thrust of the book’s argument, this question makes a good deal of sense. But stepping back for a moment, I cannot help but wonder, if Jews = Mercurians = consummate moderns = Russians, then has not the very word “Jew” been stripped of its original meaning, or indeed any real meaning at all? Perhaps the real problem here is the book’s failure adequately to define “Jewishness,” or conversely, that the concept is so overdetermined as to be meaningless. For even if Freudianism, Zionism, Marxism, and Nazism were all based on or centered around Jewishness in some way, we are still no closer to understanding what “Jewishness” means, because each one of those ideologies defined it in a different and idiosyncratic way.
It is in that light that we might interpret Tevye’s plaintive question cited by Slezkine in his last paragraph: “What did being a Jew or not a Jew matter? Why did God have to create both?” (P. 371). What, indeed, does being a Jew matter if one is only instrumental, symbolic, illustrative, paradigmatic? And what does Jewishness matter if it can mean anything, or nothing at all?