ABSTRACT
To come across a daring, original work of history of great sweep based on great erudition in this age of ever-growing narrow specialization is not just a welcome event. It is almost a sensation. Professor Yuri Slezkine who teaches Russian history at Berkeley has reached the conclusion on the basis of his studies that the twentieth century is the Jewish Century; modernization is about everyone becoming Jewish. The Jews were the most creative entrepreneurs in the socioeconomic as well as the cultural field. Marxism was Jewish so was psychoanalysis and even nationalism; one could have added the theory of relativity and much of modern medicine but the author, wisely perhaps, refrains from mentioning it. For all one knows anti-Semitism too should be added to this list.
In the beginning the author shows how the Jews came to play this role; he moves easily from Greek mythology to the Hwach’ok chaein in medieval Korea, from Proust to the Burakumin and the Kooroko of Wasulu (a tribe in Africa) as well as the Kanjar in Pakistan, he quotes in Chinese, Malay, Tuareg, various Gypsy and Ladino dialects, a mind boggling performance of which Toynbee and Spengler might have been envious. He proves that traveling ethnic groups (“Mercurians”) have been doing consistently better adjusting to modern times than peasants and other primary producers (whom he calls Apollonians). He also shows that the Chinese and Indian diaspora but also Syrians and Lebanese, Parsi and Armenians have been doing very well outside their homeland.
To call Mr. Slezkine a widely read man would be an understatement; this is an awe inspiring, virtuoso performance. But what about his central arguments? They remind one vaguely of two German sociologists of a hundred years ago—Georg Simmel (who wrote about the role of the Jew as a stranger) and Werner Sombart; Sombart well before World War I argued that America owes entirely what it is to the Jews—its American nature. Slezkine goes much further asserting the Judaization of Europe (“the painful transformation of Europeans into Jews”) and the whole world.
