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.