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The Jewish Century First Edition

4.1 out of 5 stars 45 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0691119953
ISBN-10: 0691119953
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 344 pages
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press; First edition (September 12, 2004)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0691119953
  • ISBN-13: 978-0691119953
  • Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,147,151 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

Format: Hardcover
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.
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Format: Hardcover
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.
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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
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.
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