[показать] Subject: [GS_DISC:] David M. Henkin on Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century (Representations)
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2006 01:02:41 -0400
Representations
Number: 93 winter 2006

...Frequently, The Jewish Century validates stereotypical
characterizations of Jews with the favored instrument of social-scientific
scholarship—the statistical survey. Long stretches of beautiful prose are routinely punctuated by quantitative substantiation of common perceptions of
Jewish vocational preference, wealth, overachievement, success, and power in
every time and place covered by this book. There is something indescribably
(and deliberately, I imagine) obscene in these statistics, so much so that
the book is difficult to read in public. One is tempted to admonish one’s
neighbor on the train not to read out of context sentences confirming
that, yes, 62 percent of the lawyers in fin-de-sie´cle Vienna were Jewish;
that Jews supplied 69.4 percent of the dentists in Leningrad in 1939; that
‘‘as much as 90 percent of all industry [in interwar Hungary] was controlled
by a few closely related Jewish banking families’’; or that Jews were
outrageously overrepresented in various elite European school systems,
among American campus radicals in the 1960s, and in the Soviet secret
police—an admonition I cannot now resist flouting. But in fact such
decontextualization is in no way misleading. Slezkine’s book
unapologetically grounds cultural generalizations in the precise
language of statistical representation in order to force readers to take those
stereotypes seriously...

DAVID M. HENKIN

Opening Up the Iron Door: Jews, Culture, and The Jewish Century

During the 1970s, Jews living in the Soviet Union became objects
of earnest symbolic interest in the United States. To an inchoate
American human rights movement focusing much of its attention on communist
regimes, Jews who had been refused exit visas by Moscow offered a compelling
cause for action. They also provided a powerful exhibit in a ColdWar campaign for
personal freedom that would win support in both major parties. A young
congressional staffer named Richard Perle cut his political teeth on the
Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which famously made Jews living in the U.S.S.R. the poster children for the right to expatriate.

Not surprisingly, the fate of Jews behind the Iron Curtain loomed even
larger among their American coreligionists. For the traditionally observant
New York Jewish community in and around which I came of age, the 1970s saw the
emergence of Soviet Jewry—an issue that allowed Jews to tap into recent
traditions of protest while simultaneously appearing patriotic. The plight of our
brothers and sisters in Leningrad or Moscow presented an irresistible opportunity, in effect, to agitate publicly as Jews (and, not incidentally, as Zionists, since Israel was often presumed to be the intended destination of the refuseniks) without being accused of dual loyalty. Orthodox rabbis chained themselves to consulates and young activists adapted slogans from antiwar rallies (‘‘one, two, three, four, open up the iron door!’’
we were urged to chant collectively at school-sponsored demonstrations,
‘‘five, six, seven, eight, let my people emigrate!’’) in what appears in retrospect to have been a pivotal moment in the political mobilization of a certain kind of American Jew.
Between the Cold War discourse of individual emigration rights and the
rhetorical plea to ‘‘let my people emigrate’’ lay, of course, a crucial divide.
The American Jewish campaign conjured a collective migration and cast the would-be migrants as latter-day Hebrew slaves, forcibly alienated from their own national consciousness but still awaiting redemption and exodus. Even the Soviet regime acceded to some essential features of this narrative, granting visas to Jews (actual and pretended) in the name of national repatriation. The Jews of the Soviet Union, on this view, did not wish to leave home as autonomous subjects; they wished to return (as a distinct ethnic group) from a kind of exile.

Within a couple of decades, the collective migration imagined at Soviet
Jewry rallies largely materialized. Between 1968 and 1994, the Jews of the
Soviet Union moved en masse, mostly to the United States and Israel. This enormous exodus of some 1.2 million people, which rivals in sheer volume the more famous (parallel) demographic shifts of a century earlier, has made it even harder than it was during the 1970s to think of the Jews of the Soviet Union as having lived somewhere other than in exile. But what if one were to reverse the image and construe the departure of Jews from the ruins of the Soviet empire not as their belated return to mainstream Jewish experience but rather as the final disintegration of one of the central stages of Jewish modernity?

Among the many provocative challenges presented by Yuri Slezkine’s
recent book The Jewish Century, this might be the most intriguing—and the most
fundamental.
To be sure, the book has caused waves for numerous reasons that seem
remote from the subject of Soviet Jewry. It is impossible to catalog
all of the forms of discomfort and irritation that Slezkine has triggered in his readers and colleagues, but the most obvious are worth noting. He has encountered resistance for undermining a basic assumption about Jewish exceptionalism and offering a fairly crude functionalist interpretation of anti-Semitism as just one of many historical expressions of hostility between what he calls Apollonians (people who engage in primary production and are at home on the lands they cultivate and conquer) and Mercurians (nomadic service peoples who engage in such pursuits as trade, trickery, and textual interpretation and live as distinct groups of foreigners amidst dominant Apollonian populations). There is nothing extraordinary, then, about European stereotypes of the Jew, and nothing peculiar about the forms of political discrimination and violent assault to which Jews were subject in the Russian Empire—and elsewhere. In a book that dwells in compelling detail on the specificity of the Jewish experience, the ordinary grounds for explaining that specificity (especially those having to do with theology) are rather brusquely dismissed at the outset, making way for the book’s elusive insistence that the history of the modern age is best understood as a drama in which most people in the world have come to live like Jews.
Other brows have furrowed at Slezkine’s evident comfort with stereotypical
images of Jews and gentiles. As pagan symbols go, Mercury/Hermes is not an
especially surprising figure for the Jew, in part because of his obvious
affinities to Christianimages of the wandering Jew and to other postpagan
stereotypes of Diaspora Jews as mercantile (or mercenary) urbanites who are alienated, in multiple senses, from the land. In naming Jews Mercurians, Slezkine is attempting not to transcend the stereotypes but rather to reinforce them, and much of the book’s effect follows from this fact. Frequently, The Jewish Century validates stereotypical characterizations of Jews with the favored instrument of social-scientific scholarship—the statistical survey. Long stretches of beautiful prose are routinely punctuated by quantitative substantiation of common perceptions of Jewish vocational preference, wealth, overachievement, success, and power in every time and place covered by this book.
There is something indescribably (and deliberately, I imagine) obscene in
these statistics, so much so that the book is difficult to read in public.
One is tempted to admonish one’s neighbor on the train not to read out of
context sentences confirming that, yes, 62 percent of the lawyers in fin-de-sie´cle Vienna were Jewish; that Jews supplied 69.4 percent of the dentists in Leningrad in 1939; that ‘‘as much as 90 percent of all industry [in interwar Hungary] was controlled by a few closely related Jewish banking families’’; or that Jews were outrageously overrepresented in various elite European school systems, among American campus radicals in the 1960s, and in the Soviet secret police—an admonition I cannot now resist flouting. But in fact such decontextualization is in no way misleading. Slezkine’s book unapologetically grounds cultural generalizations in the precise language of statistical
representation in order to force readers to take those stereotypes seriously.

Finally, a couple of prominent reviews have taken the book to task for an
overly capacious definition of a Jew and for insufficient attention to the
religious or cultural content of that designation. Traditional Jewish texts and religious practices play a minimal role in Slezkine’s account, except insofar as they typify the kinds of instruments and symbols that secure the border between service nomads and their armed, landed hosts. Food taboos, punctilious attention to ritual purity, elaborate mappings of the calendar, genital marking, endogamous marriage, and a textual canon preserved in a sacred language (in other words the core of what many Jews identify as their religious legacy) all help to make Jews usefully conspicuous as a nomadic minority group fit to perform suspect social and economic services, but they don’t define the Jew. And those who embrace or engage or acknowledge the traditional markers of Jewish difference are no more Jewish than those who do not. Slezkine’s book boldly forgoes the Jewish legal/textual tradition as the historical anchor of distinctive Jewish cultural experience and substitutes in its place the recurrent patterns of disproportionate Jewish presence as charted by the demographic survey.

Taken together, of course, all of these controversies gather around the
question of who or what exactly is a Jew. But what strikes me as lost upon some
of the book’s Anglo-American critics is the point that The Jewish Century’s seemingly perverse approach to Jewish identity is entirely consonant with its impulse to shift the center of Jewish history in the twentieth century from North America (or the Middle East, or Nazi-occupied Central Europe) to the Soviet Union. For Slezkine, the most characteristically Jewish men and women of the modern age were the large number who emigrated (often with considerable optimism and ideological fervor) from shtetls in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine to Soviet cities between the two world wars.
These men and women had by and large rejected traditional religious
observances and internalized anti-Semitic conceptions of Jewish culture as barren, shallow, acquisitive, artificial, scholastic, tribal, effete, hydrophobic, or antiquated. But none of this made them any less Jewish, in part because they prided themselves on the Mercurian skills and dispositions that could make their migration from Anatevka to Pushkin Street to curate Russian cultural resources or to Red Square to wage war against the chimera of nationality seem natural—and so it would seem in retrospect to Slezkine, raised in Moscow two generations later as the grandson of one of these migrants.

To both Jews and non-Jews in the United States, the evisceration of Judaism
that takes place in this story is perplexing. But our common supposition that for
someone to count meaningfully as a Jew he or she ought to subscribe to Jewish
values, perform Jewish rites, or conscientiously embrace something called Judaism
might strike someone raised in a different Jewish world as a symptom of what
Slezkine refers to as the Protestantization of American Judaism, in other words,
the transformation of Jewish identity into a matter of extranational volitional
allegiance to an organized sect. In the American context, counting Jewish bankers
or Jewish professors, apart from being impolite or incendiary, can seem a bit
technical and irrelevant (here I can’t suppress echoes of Adam Sandler’s ‘‘Hanukah Song,’’ with its dubious reckonings of the Jewish presence in show business: ‘‘Paul Newman’s half-Jewish / Goldie Hawn’s half too / Put them together / What a fine lookin’ Jew’’). But Slezkine’s conception of Jews as certifiable members of a particular minority group in a multinational society, members whose achievements, status, and activities can be counted, is perhaps not so arbitrary within the context of a narrative in which Jewish history reaches its apotheosis in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s.

During the first two decades following the Revolution, more than a million
Jews moved from the Pale to Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, and a handful of
other large Soviet cities, assuming leading social, economic, and political
roles in the creation of a state in which the relative achievements of different national groups were scrupulously measured and monitored. The extraordinary success of Jews in this system was threatened early on by the systematic discovery of Jewish overrepresentation,and the legal and political responses that ensued during the rise of Russian nationalism under Stalin helped to ensure, Slezkine shows, that Jews would be overrepresented among the critics of the
regime during its final decades. The Soviet passport system (instituted in
1932), under which citizens declared their national identity (though by no means freely) to the state bureaucracy, offers an interesting model for Jewish affiliation—an alternative, of course, to confessional definitions or to those administered internally by communal authority or halachic dictum, but also at odds with familiar understandings of Judaism as a culture. The complex of
rituals, beliefs, speech acts, and communal fetes around which historians
often locate culture are less important in this story than one might expect. While other scholars and critics have seen in Mercury a figure for the kinds of
boundary crossing, networking, and symbolic manipulation that helps to define culture as a fertile subject of historical inquiry, The Jewish Century evokes an
older and surprisingly essentialist conception of culture—however anchored and democratized through the mechanism of the statistic. Even as their Mercurian traits become the shared property of an age, Jews remain identifiable as a distinct descent group. And definitions of Jewishness that rely on genealogy, whether in the hands of rabbis, Jewish chauvinists, Nazis, Soviet bureaucrats, or distinguished historians, have a way of affirming some irreducible Jewish exceptionalism even in the face of structuralist explanations of ethnic and cultural difference.

But the methodological issues that haunt these debates about the location of
culture are also implicated in the different historical experiences of Jews
in the United States and the U.S.S.R. American Jews, however heterodox or
nonconformist, nonetheless expect one another to perform their Jewishness—linguistically, sacramentally, or through some visible observable form of communal participation or identification, albeit ironic or antagonistic. Jews in the American academy, many of whom are deeply alienated from religious practice and/or Zionist politics, tend (in my experience) to share this expectation. Many of these Jews have also been instrumental in pioneering the forms of cultural analysis in the humanities according to which ethnic identities are understood as performative, labile, or contested.

But those who grew up in a society where Jews affirmed their national origins under a kind of state-administered oath and where Jews could not conceal from their own view (or anyone else’s) the affinity between their ethnic identity and
their status as professional-intellectual critics of the regime might see
matters in a different light. A historical work in which Jews remain, at core, a
cohesive descent group, even as they dispense with traditional practices of
self-definition and self designation (including, paradoxically, endogamy) reflects, among many more idiosyncratic things, a perspective of Soviet Jewry, who, we are reminded, were a people and not (only) a cause.
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