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The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine Princeton Univ. Press, 2004 438 pp., $29.95 |
Trapped within Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century, struggling to free itself from Slezkine's ideological thesis, is a poignant history of Russia's Jews. It is a history of desire—of 19th-century Jews seeking to free themselves of the Jewishness of the Pale of Settlement by exulting in the Russia of Tolstoy and Chekov; of zealous Jewish commitment to and success within the early Soviet Revolution; of the shock of betrayal under Stalin, as Jews were persecuted for their ethnic Jewishness; and finally, of Soviet Jews' spasmodic, discomfiting, but at times passionate rediscovery of their Jewish identity. The emblazoning image Slezkine leaves us with is of thousands of Russian Jews, most of whom "had probably never been to a synagogue before," coming to meet Golda Meir in 1948 on Yom Kippur at the Moscow synagogue, chanting in the streets, "Next year in Jerusalem."
Unfortunately, Slezkine surrounds and ultimately overwhelms the promise of this narrative with a thick and loathsome typological shell. Instead of dealing fully with actual Jews, Slezkine mythologizes all Jews as the descendents of Mercury (Hermes), "the god of all those who did not herd animals, till the soil, or live by the sword." As Mercurians, Jews work with their minds and by their wit. They value language, they value ideas, they value talent and merit. Even when they dwell in a land for centuries, they are essentially nomads, eschewing any permanent connection to place and nation: "A Jewish house in the Ukraine did not resemble the peasant hut next door, not because it was Jewish in architecture (there was no such thing) but because it was never painted, mended or decorated. It did not belong to the landscape; it was a dry husk that contained the real treasure—the children of Israel and their memory." Sure of their divine exceptionalism, Jews think their neighbors dim-witted: "Their world is larger and more varied" than those of the poor or the princely, both of whom lack a Mercurian intellect. These non-Jews, in Slezkine's typology, are Apollonians, committed to arcane structures of nobility and caste that run according to values such as manliness and honor, but not merit and ingenuity. Jews think they are better than the Apollonians, lord and plebe, because Jews think better than both: "[Jews] would all take a justifiably dim view of Ivan," for "[i]f one values mobility, mental agility, negotiation, wealth, curiosity, one has little reason to respect either prince or peasant."
Slezkine's grand and, one can only say, facile thesis consists of the great modern victory of the Mercurians over the Apollonians. It is an account breathtaking in its reductionism: "[F]or much of human history, it seemed quite obvious who had the upper hand. … Then things began to change: Zeus was beheaded, repeatedly, or made a fool of; Apollo lost his cool; and Hermes bluffed his way to the top." Modernity emerges on the heels of the Jewish Mercury: "Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds." In a nifty syllogism, to become modern is to become Mercurian, which is to say, to become Jewish: "only the Jews—the scriptural Mercurians of Europe—came to represent Mercurianism and modernity everywhere." Indeed, it appears that Slezkine is either being modest or inexact in referring only to the 20th century as "the Jewish century."
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