“The Jewish Century” is an intriguing book to read, but a difficult one to review. It is a quintessentially Mercurian work, a tour de force which blends aphorisms with conundrums. The trickster-author appears to offer something for everyone: “the reader who does not like chapter 1 may like chapter 2… and the other way around…” It is, in fact, just what one would expect from a Mercurian, a Russian Jewish emigré to the United States, who is teaching history – that most slippery and disputatious of “disciplines” – to the fat-cheeked sons and daughters of the Golden State’s Apollonians. (The sons and daughters of the Asian Mercurians are in other classrooms studying maths and science.)
I count myself a wannabe Mercurian [qualifications: ex-Catholic, ex-German-Irish-ethnic, ex-American from Rust Belt US] who currently resides in London teaching Jewish History – that most slippery and disputatious of slippery and disputatious “disciplines” – to the elite sons and daughters of Mercurians who long to be British (and therefore Apollonians). As such, I particularly enjoyed chapter one, “Mercury’s Sandals”. It shows how easy it is to be a Mercurian by offering a Cook’s Tour through the world’s Mercurians, ranging from the Koli such’ok, to the Eta, the Yabir, the Fuga, and on and on to the modern European Gypsies/Travellers. Is it only by chance that, against the background of the 2005 British parliamentary elections, the latter are under attack for allegedly undermining the (Apollonian) property rights of the Great British Public? Their sneaky, devious crime is to buy land and move their caravans on to it without securing planning permission – Mercurians trying to become Apollonians. This “threat” has been identified, and opposed, by the Leader of the Opposition, the Right Honourable Michael Howard, MP, the son and grandson of Mercurians twice over: Romanian Jewish emigrants illegally resident in pre-war Britain.
Chapter one demonstrates the universality of the phenomenon of Mercurianism, both territorially and chronologically. Indeed, Slezkine’s world is very much a bi-polar one, filled with antipodes, where Yin (Mercurianism) and Yang (Apollonianism) are locked in an eternal embrace – as opposed to Thesis and Antithesis, which inevitably produce progeny. But if Mercurianism is such a universal phenomenon, why does just one set of its representatives, Jews, serve as its archetype? Why was there a “Jewish Century?”
The answer is to be found in the triumph of “Europe” (broadly defined) as the first modern, capitalist entity, which ushered in the “Age of Universal Mercurianism.” While there was nothing unusual about the social and economic position of the Jews in medieval and modern Europe, their situation as the “scriptural Mercurians of Europe” made them both the beneficiaries and scapegoats of modernity, its symbol throughout the world. “Modernity was about everybody becoming a service nomad: mobile, clever, articulate, occupationally flexible, and good at being a stranger” (P. 30). This was overtly recognized by a Chinese advocate of modernization at the turn of the 19th century. “Let us Chinese become the Jews of the twentieth century!” he exhorted.
I read chapters 1 and 2 for fun, but chapter 3 for work, since the study of Russian Jewry is how I earn my keep. Chapter 3 underlines one of the conceptual flaws of the work, which we might term the problem of metamorphosis. Slezkine continually invokes this phenomenon: at every turn, Apollonians turn into (or try to turn into) Mercurians, while Mercurians turn into (or try to turn into) Apollonians. But already in chapter 1 he notes that “there is no consensus on why some recently uprooted Apollonians seem able and willing to transform themselves into Mercurians” (P. 33). Despite an assortment of suggestions on this score, we never receive a satisfactory answer. In the situation of the Jews in the Russian Empire he suggests another problematical aspect of this phenomenon – that Jews are one group that never achieves a successful metamorphosis. Young Jews of the Pale, it seems, could move to “Pushkin Street,” where their “first love” was Russian culture. They could attempt to turn into Apollonians by pledging their loyalty to somebody else’s narod, the Russian peasantry. Yet they inevitably brought their Mercurian practices into the movement, improving it and making it better (i.e., more Mercurian). It is no surprise that Slezkine utilizes Eric Haberer’s undervalued study “Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia” (Cambridge, 1995), which demonstrates the crucial contribution of Jews to Russian Populism. Haberer shows the extent to which the success of the Populist movement depended on the organizational principles advocated by Mark Natanson. The Jews were good at revolution, but only by bringing into Populism values they had absorbed from the Haskalah, the Central and East European Jewish enlightenment movement. It is no surprise that Isaac Deutscher’s concept of the “non-Jewish Jew,” who brings a Jewish ethical sensibility to the movement, is also invoked.
Can Jews ever become Apollonians? Slezkine seems to answer “yes” in his observations on Israelis and American Jews. Yet at the same time they never seem to be very good at Apollonianism, even when they own suburban homes with manicured lawns and take their children to Little League practice. Witness how the children of Apollonian American Jews have a disturbing tendency to go off the reservation and become student radicals, at places like Berkeley. If Jews are fated always to be Mercurians, then Weber, Sombart, Freud, and a whole host of Antisemites are right – and Herzl and his Zionists are wrong: there must be something distinctive and eternal about the Jews. They apparently carry Mercurianism around with them in their portmanteaux.
Consider the figure that looms over this book like Hermes himself – the consummate representative of the modern, Mercurian revolutionary, Lev Bronstein/Trotsky. Why not take him at his word when he declares that “I am a Social Democrat, not a Jew!” The corollary, of course, is the immediate need to explain how he lost one identity and gained the other. What were Bronstein/Trotsky’s Jewish/Mercurian credentials except his blood? Son of an (Apollonian) farmer, never as clever in cheder as he was everywhere else, how did the non-Jewish Bronstein turn into the Jewish Trosky? (And let’s not get started on Marx!) To take one last example: contemporary Russian nationalists are not surprised to discover Lenin’s Jewish grandfather – blood will out! We modern Mercurians, on the other hand, must be more sceptical about how Mercurianism is genetically determined.
I don’t think that Slezkine means us to understand that, in the Jewish Century, everything is “Jewish” (i.e. Mercurian), but at times the book seems to imply exactly that. All Mercurians are Mercurians forever, however hard they try to escape, while Apollonians are just Mercurians who haven’t got there yet. The Mercurian/Apollonian dichotomy offers an interesting, thought-provoking and clever model; it ultimately fails to explain why modern Jews, of all Mercurians, are so modern.