Customer Reviews

The Jewish Century

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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.

This is a remarkable book in many ways and difficult to summarize. If the author wasn't a Russian, a professor at Berkeley, half Jewish, and the book wasn't published by a major university press, I think somebody would be yelling "anti-Semitism." It is loaded with hard-to-obtain data (about one-third of his sources are in Russian) on the very active but less well known Jewish participation in all aspects of Russian life, especially from the time of the revolutions to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, including their roles in the gulag, the NKVD and spying on the US. He even refers to Communist Jews as "Stalin's willing executioners" (p. 103).

His purpose in the book is to show the role of Jews in shaping the modern world, and especially 20th Century Russian and East European history. As he says, "The Modern Age is the Jewish Age . . ." To the extent that we are urban, mobile, literate, and occupationally flexible, we are all Jewish. "Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish."

(See other customer reviews for more on this and on the Jewish role in Bolshevism.)

My quarrel with this book is that I think he exaggerates the Jewish role in the life of everyday America. Furthermore, he ignores Kevin MacDonald's magnificent analysis of the role of Jews in modern American life. There's not one mention of Kevin MacDonald's three volumes.

He is very convincing on what he knows well: the Jewish experience and influence on Russian and Eastern European history. But when he gets to Jewish influence on American life, he is much less convincing. He writes as though everyone lived in New York City. Freud most definitely did not have the influence on American life that he claims.

There is an Anglo-Saxon, Christian substratum to American life which Slezkine seems to know little about. Broadly, the "red" states in the recent election continue with their way of living that originated with the original settlers from England. See Fischer's Albion's Seed for the history of how England's folkways and mores were transported to America. By the way, the word "Jew" does not occur once in this 800-page book. So much for deep-seated Jewish influence.

Americans still live by these folkways and beliefs that were brought over by the early settlers. If, like Slezkine, you think the United States ends at the Hudson River, then maybe we are all Jews. But the truth, in my opinion, is a lot more complicated, and his thesis needs a lot of qualifications.

This is a truly compelling, exceptional book. It covers a lot of ground, starting with the evolution of the Jewish people into the world's most successful "moderns," "cosmopolitans," and capitalists (or pre-current equivalents of). The author thus illustrates why the 20th century is "the Jewish century." I believe, however, that the most fasinating subject matter covered in the book is the unmistakeable and undeniable Jewish imprint on the USSR. Being both Jewish and native to the former Soviet Union, I found the story told by Yuri Slezkine to be refreshing, explosive, truthful, terrible, and empowering all at once. This is not a history of Soviet Jewry from the (typically) Zionist perspective of perpetual victomhood, nor is it, of course, an anti-semitic fairy-tale about the rape of Russia by the usual suspects. It is, rather, a full account of extensive Jewish participation in the Communist revolutionary underground, post-revolutionary Soviet government, the Soviet military, the police state, the propaganda machine, the cultural life, the massive assimilation, the loyalty and patriotism, the unparalleled achievements, the resentment, the disallusionment, the anti-Communist opposition, the agitation, and the bitter divorce. Slezkine shows that more then any other group, Jews were the true Soviets, most loyal, most integrated, most assimilated, and, eventually, among the most bitter, and arguably, most betrayed. The extremely well written narative includes numorous statistics, great quotations, and the Babel-esque emotion of the stuggle between the Russian and the Jewish identities. Having read this book, I believe that it is the best source for serious students of the Russian-Jewish legacy, and an absolute must-read for Soviet Jewish emigres like myself - this is a history of our people, and our country. The legacy of our forefathers is too rich and too important to ever forget, or be ignorant of.

Russian author Yuri Slezkine - a Berkeley professor who is half Jewish - has written a superb book about the life of the Jews during the 20th century. He calls the 20th century a Jewish century, since many of the needed attributes to triumph in contemporary society - brains more than brawn, to put it succinctly - have for centuries been the province of the Jews. He calls the Jews Mercurians - people dealing in urban professions, like commerce, medicine, teaching, later science - who live along side the Apollonians, who mostly live off the land. In many parts of the world Mercurians have lived with Apollonians, who usually viewed them suspiciously, says Slezkine, but in Europe, the only Mercurians were the Jews, and therefore they soon become the Other (add to that that in the Apollonian's sacred book Jews are considered to be the murderers of their God, and the issue of anti-Semitism can be understood better). By the 19th century, after Jews became emancipated, it was clear that Jews have few choices: assimilation to Christian society (many did that, even converting to Christianity), fight for the establishment of a revolutionary government that would make religion obsolete (also the choice of many Jews, especially in the first half of the 20th century), or seek a national homeland for the Jews, preferably in their ancestral territory, where they would became Apollonians. The later choice was Zionism, which originally seem the most eccentric of choices, the least likely to succeed, but which after the Holocaust became the triumphant one. A very fine book that does not shy away from some very controversial topics (like the role of Jews in the Russian Revolution and their prominent presence in the early Soviet government, until Stalin became mistrustful of them, once the State of Israel was founded, and their loyalty to the Soviet Union became doubtful to the dictator).

This is a book for Jews and Gentiles alike. Most of us non-jews have probably thought we had heard everything there is to know about Jewry in the 20th century from the numerous accounts of the Holocaust, the founding of Israel etc.

Not so!

This book looks at how East European jewry in the post-Czarist period found itself drawn to three rival and sometimes contending spiritual homelands. In short Revolutionary Russia, Zionism and Israel and immigrant America. Slezkine illustrates the tensions and interactions between the "three homelands".

Slezkine reminds us that there is a lot more to the Jewish story than the most well known themes. A fascinating read that helps the reader better understand how the 20th century unfolded.

This is a provocative, infuriating, fact-filled book. Although Slezkine provides a fascinating global analysis of the role of the Jews as "Mercurians" who are of service to "Apollonians," his real interest, and the book's lasting value, is in the analysis of the complex history of the author's native land, Russia.

This book more than adequately explains (at least to me, an interested non-specialist) what seems like a paradox of history: that Jews played a very prominent role in all aspects of the Bolshevik Revolution, yet soon suffered under the Stalinist purges and were the out-and-out targets of anti-Semitism and murder after World War II. Slezkine, relying on a plethora of little-known Russian-language sources, sorts these facts out in a memorable way. The author also does a remarkable job of connecting the lives and beliefs of Jewish Communists in America in the 1920s and 1930s with the lives of Jewish Communists in Russia at the same time.

Slezkine emphasizes the three great migrations of Russian Jews in the early 20th century: to America to gain economic freedom and prosperity, to Israel to live out the dream of Jewish nationalism, and to the large cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg to become cosmopolitans and ultimately to participate in the Bolshevik Revolution. This third migration, he says, was less noticed than the other two but was equally important.

Possibly for reasons of intellectual neatness, Slezkine tries to argue that Freud exerted vast influence in the 20th-century United States. I believe that is misplaced as an explanation of the American character and explains only the behavior of the elites.

Still, this book is highly recommended to all readers. It will definitely induce you to think about some of the crucial issues of Western civilization.

Read the excerpt provided above by Amazon. I was hooked after only those few pages.
If you are at all curious about how the modern world has lurched into existence or how the Jews figured in that process, pick this up, as well as a copy of Modris Eckstein's The Rites of Spring.

I purchased this book months ago, and kept putting off reading it. The reason for this is that the early pages are very poorly written. I was reminded of John Gray's silly "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" by Slezkine's absurd and, sadly oft-repeated, assessment of Jews as "Mercurians", and Gentiles as "Appolonians". But, well fortified by several more Hilaire Belloc books, I finally completed Slezkine's book. And I am glad that I did.

Basically, Slezkine's thesis is that the 21st century was the Jewish century, in the sense that its major events were determined by three great Jewish movements of migration from the original Eastern European "Pale of Settlement". The first of these, which Americans are most familiar with, is the migration of Eastern European Jews to the United States. And certainly, this migration did take place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with a profound impact on American culture and politics. The second migration, known to much of the world as well, was the movement of Jews from the Talmudic areas of Eastern Europe to Palestine, as part of the Zionist experiment. And this movement also certainly took place in the same basic time period. But the third migration of Jews from the Pale of Settlement East into the great cities of Soviet Russia, following the Bolshevik Revolution is not well known by Westerners. And the reality of this migration and its impact on the Soviet state, its foreign policy, and subsequent history is the most valuable contribution of Slezkine's book.

Author Slezkine employs many unfortunate devices in his work. An example of this was earlier cited: Slezkine employs ancient mythology to explain the behavior of modern men. And he does so throughout the book. But worse than this misuse of mythology is his constant usage of fictional characters within his work of history. In fact, he describes the three migrations alluded to above in terms of the stories of the three daughters of Tevye, the Milkman, who theatre and film buffs will recall as the main character from "Fiddler on the Roof". Throughout the narrative, the names and stories of fictional and historical characters are interspersed. It is really terribly distracting, and has no place in a work of history. But what is truly most bothersome about the entire book is Slezkine's very evident racism. It is clear that he sees Jews and others as being inherently different creatures. And this overt racism is also an underlying theme of "The Jewish Century".

There are some startling revelations within the corpus of the book. On page 327, Slezkine avers that Israel today represents the last vestige of 1930's European fascism. Such words written by an author other than Slezkine, a Russian Jew, would have called down upon the author shouts of "anti-Semitism". But this book was given the National Jewish Book Award by the Jewish Book Council, or so it claims on the cover. Even more startling is Slezkine's admission on page 361 of the text, where he admits that former Soviet spy, "Hope" Ulanovakaia, was his grandmother. Esther Ulanovakaia, later named Nadya, or "Hope", was part of the Soviet spy ring that controlled the work of traitors Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. The last we hear of Ms. Ulanovakaia is that she had retired to Israel. And this, in a way, brings the story of the three migrations full circle. Jews from the Pale of Settlement played a huge role in the Soviet government. Many came to America as spies, there co-opting their previously landed extended family members. And, with the demise of their Soviet state, they finally settled in Israel.

Though difficult to read, due to the aforementioned unfortunate practices, Slezkine's book is nevertheless very important. Those who would truly understand Soviet, American, and Israeli politics in the 20th century would be well advised to read this book. Was the 20th century the "Jewish Century", as Slezkine avers? It witnessed two world wars, the creation of the Jewish states of the Soviet Union and Israel, murder on a scale previously unimagined, abortion in the United States on a vast scale, genocide, and much else. The question is: Is this a record of which Juri Slezkine really ought to be boasting?