The Jewish Century [ペーパーバック]

Slezkine, a professor of history at Berkeley who came to America from the Soviet Union in 1982, restores the dignity of Jews, after decades of being portrayed solely as passive victims of history, by showing how Jews, qua Jews, were among the most dynamic actors in the central events of the 20th Century. You simply cannot understand the main events of European history of the last century without reading Slezkine' brilliant book.

Slezkine's interest is in the tragic ironies of history and he empathetically allows us to enter into the mindsets of hundreds of individuals as they made decisions that, well, seemed like a good idea at the time.

We've all read enormous amounts about two Jewish migrations -- one to America and one to the Holy Land -- but Slezkine vividly documents the forgotten third Jewish great migration, the one his grandmother made, from the towns of the Pale of Settlement in the Polish and Ukrainian lands to Moscow and the other great cities of Russia/Soviet Union. For at least two decades after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, this migration appeared to the more worldly Jews around the globe as the most successful of the three migrations. Jews, untainted by any association with the Czarist regime and showing the most enthusiasm for the new Bolshevik regime of any ethnic group, flourished in the Soviet Union even more than in America, where anti-Semitism channeled most of the Jewish immigrants' genius into meritocratic fields like entrepreneurial business and science, rather than into politics, the military, or the more comfortable parts of the corporate world.

In 19th Century Europe, secularizing Jews believed they were hated because of nationalism and capitalism. Nationalism proposed that every nation should have a territorial state, an idea the small minority of Jews who were active Zionists embraced. But most of the new Jewish intelligentsia of Eastern Europe felt that the solution to the Jews' lack of a nation-state in a world obsessed with nationalism was the elimination of nationalism and its replacement by internationalism, which communism promised. Moreover, Jewish intellectuals also believed they were hated because of the Jews' tremendous talent for capitalism, which communism likewise promised to abolish. Finally, many young secular Jews were in rebellion against their capitalist, religious, and particularist parents or grandparents, and communism promised them a final victory over their ancestors and all they stood for.

By no means was the Bolshevik Revolution a Jewish plot, but under the new anti-anti-Semitic Bolshevik regime, Jews rapidly became important military leaders, commissars, factory managers, propagandists, secret policemen, and Gulag wardens. Jews did better under the Bolsheviks than the members of any other ethnic group. This success helps explain the otherwise inexplicable loyalty of so many American Jews to Stalin's regime even through the Stalin-Hitler pact and Stalin's anti-Semitic purges after WWII. And, as Slezkine documents, their children retained their faith in radicalism, coming to dominate the student radical movements of the Sixties.

It all turned out badly, of course. The Soviet side of this embarrassing story has largely been shoved down the memory hole, but the ramifications of these huge events are still with us.

For example, after a couple of decades of haphazard anti-Semitism under the decaying post-Stalin regimes, eventually Jews in the Soviet Union came to the forefront of the anti-regime dissident movement, which helped inspire the development of neoconservatism in the U.S., especially in Sen. Henry Jackson's campaign to free Soviet Jews (spearheaded by his chief of staff Richard Perle), which is still having ramifications today in Iraq. But I can't begin to describe all the historical threads that Dr. Slezkine pulls together. When you are done reading this book, you will understand far more about the 20th Century.

Of the daughters of Tevye the Milkman (the Fiddler on the Roof), Hodl married a revolutionary who would come into his own when the Bolsheviks came to power; Beilke and her husband emigrated to America; and, for symmetry's sake, Slezkine imagines that Chava emigrated to Israel. As Slezkine admits, Sholem Aleichem's book says no such thing about Chava; but then Slezkine loves this conceit, since he wants to deal in his book with their "descendants", the three strands of Jewish emigration from the Pale into the three areas whose histories they subsequently play such a disproportionate role to shape.

To this conceit he adds another one, as irritating, repetitive, and forced. It is to divide the world into Mercurians and Apollonians. Mercurians are "service nomads" like the Jews: outsiders, originally mostly traders and then professionals, who service the needs of the resident Apollonians, mostly landed folk. The Mercurians are important enough when they are serving a landed society, but they become even more important when, in the course of modernity, Apollonian societies are forced to transform themselves into Mercurian ones: experience, talents and education then give the Jews a headstart in such societies.

To these "clever" conceits, Slezkine adds a brilliant capacity to coin striking phrases of a kind of which the following, on page 366, is just one example:

"From being the Jewish God's Chosen People, the Jews had become the Nazis' chosen people, and by becoming the Nazis' chosen people, they became the Chosen People of the postwar Western world."

Leaving these characteristics of the book aside, it is full of illuminating and sometimes controversial reflections. Some of these are devoted to the descendants of Beilke and Chava, but the bulk of the book refers to Hodl's descendants, the Jews in the Soviet Union; and I want to confine my comments to the new perspectives on Soviet Jews which this book has opened up to me.

First there is the emphasis on the emigration from the Pale into the interior of Russia and in particular into the great cities: by 1939 1.3 million Jews were living in areas that had been closed to them in Tsarist times. I had not realized that even after the Tsarist pogroms and the vicious discrimination of the May Laws, the Jews were still hugely over-represented in the professions. In 1910, for example, in Odessa the Jews still administered 70% of its banks, provided 70% of its doctors, and 56% of its lawyers. With such educational advantages they would have done extremely well anyway once the Soviets had given them civil equality, and their natural advantage was further boosted by the Soviets getting rid as fast as they could of "bourgeois experts" in the administration, by the exclusion of their children from universities, and by filling the resulting vacuum with the only people capable of filling it: the educated Jews. So the enthusiasm of secular Jews for the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s is very comprehensible.

Slezkine argues that the large number of Jews who suffered in the Great Terror suffered not because they were Jews, but because Stalin was purging the upper echelons for his own political and paranoid reasons, and since so many of the upper echelons were Jews, they naturally made up a high proportion of his victims. In fact, Slezkine shows that when you move away from the élites, Jews were under-represented among those arrested for political crimes: 1% of Jews, compared with 16% of Poles and 30% of Latvians; and in the Gulags the proportion of Jews was 15.7% below the proportion of Jews in the Soviet Union. Slezkine therefore takes seriously Stalin's condemnation of antisemitism in his speech to the 15th Party Congress in 1927, and shows that between 1927 and 1932 articles against antisemitism "appeared in the Moscow and Leningrad newspapers almost daily." Slezkine therefore differs from Arkady Vaksberg's thesis in Stalin Against the Jews (1994) that Stalin cunningly disguised his antisemitism by occasionally bringing antisemites to trial and by promoting or favouring individual Jews.

Of course Slezkine does not disguise the overt antisemitism which Stalin did display after the war. He explains it by Stalin's realization that even the most ardent Jewish communists, who used in the early days to separate themselves from all things Jewish, had had their "Jewish blood" stirred first by the antisemitism of the Nazis and then by identification with Israel. He now suspected especially the "passport Jews" - that is those Jews who, when compulsory passports were introduced for the whole population in 1930, had chosen to describe their nationality as Evrei rather than as Russian, Ukrainian etc.

After Stalin's death, the most vicious antisemitism eased off; but the government continued to exclude Jews from the government and from the upper echelons of the Party. It also imposed quotas on Jews at the universities, though Slezkine argued that these were also applied to Georgians and Armenians who, like the Jews, were disproportionately represented at universities. The quotas were at least in part due to "positive discrimination" being applied to Uzbeks, Tatars and Azerbajanis. Besides, by then the Soviet educational system had produced 2.4 million college students against whom Jews now had to compete, compared with only 177,000 in 1928.

Even now, however, Jews continued to be over-represented in the professions and remained "light years ahead" of Uzbeks, Tatars etc.; but discrimination against them, for whatever reason, had now thoroughly disenchanted them with the Soviet system which they had helped so much to create. As in the time of the Tsars, many of them now figured among the most prominent dissidents, and many others wanted to emigrate. So when Gorbachev at last opened the gates, the exodus was massive. Yet those who remained continued to be over-represented in the market economy in Russia that was introduced when the Soviet Union collapsed: of the seven wealthiest 'oligarchs', six were Jews. And when the bar excluding them from government positions was raised, they swiftly produced two of Yeltsin's prime ministers: Sergei Kiriyenko and Yevgeni Primakov.

Soviet Jews had for long backed and actively participated in a regime which, though progressive in some respects, had committed terrible crimes against real or supposed opponents. Historians like Vaksberg focus on the Jews as victims of Stalin's antisemitism; but Solzhenistyn raises the question: should not the notion of collective guilt be as applicable to those Soviet Jews as it is to the Germans? Slezkine writes that both these approaches are "quite marginal" - an odd evasion, it seems to me, in an otherwise brave book.

There are many serious flaws in this book, not the least that Slezkine does not mention the larger intellectual context which non-Jews created. Marx was influenced by Hegel and Ricardo, and his domatism was not Talmudist but a characteristic of all true believers. Slezkine does not confront the romantic wanderfogel concepts which were so important to both fascism and Zionism. Etc. Moreover, Slezkine's use of literary symbolism and analogies is confusing, and he does not confront the fact that Yiddish literature was clawingly sentimental and mediocre.

Still, faults notwithstanding, this is a superb book, indispensable on Marxism and the entire Soviet experience and valuable on the Jews in the U.S. and the nature of Israel. It is surely the most interesting book have read in ages, and there is so much that is right withit that its flaws do not detract from its value.