Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Jewish Century
    Unavailable
    The Jewish Century
    Unavailable
    The Jewish Century
    Ebook670 pages10 hours

    The Jewish Century

    By Yuri Slezkine

    1.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    This masterwork of interpretative history begins with a bold declaration: The Modern Age is the Jewish Age--and we are all, to varying degrees, Jews.


    The assertion is, of course, metaphorical. But it underscores Yuri Slezkine's provocative thesis. Not only have Jews adapted better than many other groups to living in the modern world, they have become the premiere symbol and standard of modern life everywhere.


    Slezkine argues that the Jews were, in effect, among the world's first free agents. They traditionally belonged to a social and anthropological category known as "service nomads," an outsider group specializing in the delivery of goods and services. Their role, Slezkine argues, was part of a broader division of human labor between what he calls Mercurians-entrepreneurial minorities--and Apollonians--food-producing majorities.


    Since the dawning of the Modern Age, Mercurians have taken center stage. In fact, Slezkine argues, modernity is all about Apollonians becoming Mercurians--urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. Since no group has been more adept at Mercurianism than the Jews, he contends, these exemplary ancients are now model moderns.


    The book concentrates on the drama of the Russian Jews, including émigrés and their offspring in America, Palestine, and the Soviet Union. But Slezkine has as much to say about the many faces of modernity--nationalism, socialism, capitalism, and liberalism--as he does about Jewry. Marxism and Freudianism, for example, sprang largely from the Jewish predicament, Slezkine notes, and both Soviet Bolshevism and American liberalism were affected in fundamental ways by the Jewish exodus from the Pale of Settlement.


    Rich in its insight, sweeping in its chronology, and fearless in its analysis, this sure-to-be-controversial work is an important contribution not only to Jewish and Russian history but to the history of Europe and America as well.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJun 27, 2011
    ISBN9781400828555
    Unavailable
    The Jewish Century

    Read more from Yuri Slezkine

    Related to The Jewish Century

    Related ebooks

    Modern History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      There Was A Time When China And The US Were Both Liberal

      Apr 28, 2022

      Liberalism is much in the news these days, but there is little agreement on what the term means. Joe Biden's Democracy Summit last December was widely criticised for its double standards, with several of the invited nations embracing some variety of

      6 min read

    • Article

      Remember Mao's Famine, Forget Churchill's Racism: How The West Colonised Asian Minds

      Aug 22, 2021

      In late June and early July, First Nations communities in Canada found over 1,000 unmarked graves of children in Indian residential schools, which were run by the Roman Catholic Church from 1899 to 1997. This has led to activists burning Catholic chu

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Nation Worth Fighting For

      Mar 22, 2022

      A Nation Worth Fighting For
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Sense Of Identity

      Mar 8, 2020

      A Sense Of Identity
      2 min read

    • Article

      Hitler’s Forgotten Victims

      May 11, 2023

      Hitler’s Forgotten Victims
      7 min read

    • Article

      Viennese Whirl

      Aug 23, 2023

      Viennese Whirl
      3 min read

    • Article

      On Solzhenitsyn’s shoulders

      Oct 28, 2021

      SPEAKING AT THE LONDON GUILDHALL upon receipt of the Templeton Prize in 1983, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dropped a heavy meme on the history of the twentieth century. When he was still a child, he said, he had heard older people saying that all the disas

      8 min read

    • Article

      Q&A

      May 13, 2021

      Q&A
      3 min read

    • Article

      The New Antisemitism

      Mar 1, 2024

      The New Antisemitism
      12 min read

    • Article

      The New Antisemitism

      Mar 2, 2024

      The New Antisemitism
      12 min read

    • Article

      Memoirs Of A Microaggressor

      Nov 26, 2020

      TO UNDERSTAND OUr current moment, start with public apologies. Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, surely thought he was on safe ground when he came out in favour of delaying a Philip Guston exhibition because it included depictions of t

      5 min read

    • Article

      Liberalism, More or Less

      Jul 11, 2022

      Liberalism, More or Less
      6 min read

    Reviews for The Jewish Century

    1.5/5

    2 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      Yuri Slezkine is a professor of history at the University of California who in this book looks for the place of Jews in the modern world, or at least in the modern world of the last 100 years.His thesis is that the modern world values abilities and attitudes that have a closer match to traditional Jewish activities which he terms "Mercurian" (transient, wanderer, trader, resident alien) rather than more settled national populations which he terms "Apollonian" (land, tradition, social obligations). He sees nationalism as an outdated concept with the Jews as the natural leaders of a new frontierless Mercurian world where "We are all Jews" and Gentiles could learn and follow the leading Jewish role.He interestingly contrasts the three major migrations of Jews in the modern world and their very different sociological characteristics; the early 20th century and post WW2 emigration to the United States, the abandonment of the shtetl for the cities of Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire and Russia, and the Zionist emigration to the new state of Israel. However, I see a basic problem of the book in Slezkine´s equating Mercurial Jewishness with modernity. Tribalism clearly predates civilization and he surely identifies Jews as a tribal group. He actually analyses how tribal minorities survive as outsiders in societies as different as Sierra Leone (Lebanese commercials) and Malaysia (Chinese commercials) but he doesn´t deal with the obvious question of how minority tribalism works in the modern world of democracy and equality before the law.Tribalism is presented as a route to security and power based on inter-group loyalty and trust in an uncertain world, in fact rather like traditional Middle Eastern power relationships (eg. Assad with his Alawites or Saddam Hussein with his Tikritis) seeking positions of power for tribal followers or family members. The book could have shown the fundamental incompatibility of minority tribalism and democracy (all citizens with equal rights and obligations) but the author chooses instead to simply list the high percentages of Jews in influential positions in for example pre WW2 Germany or the United States. Also he doesn´t persue at all the interesting way in which the founding American (British derived) concept of individual liberty has morphed into minority (group) rights which is a completely different "special interest" concept that downgrades a primary national loyalty. He goes along with protected special interests, suggesting that national loyalty is out of date saying that, "... in America, where nationwide tribal metaphors could not rely on theories of biological descent.", which surprisingly ignores the Anglo (English - Scots) foundations of modern American society shown for example in Fischer´s book, "Albion´s Seed'; Four British Folkways in America". The argument that nationality is out of date also doesn't fit even a cursory examination of the evidence. Holland and Germany are modern societies but the Dutch and Germans are strongly aware of differing national identities (despite being racial cousins). The same would go for the Japanese and Chinese, Israelis and Syrians or Poles and Russians. Also, it is not clear how Germans can be Mercurians in pre WW1 Russia and Apollonians when they live in Germany. Furthermore, why are Germans the most commercially successful country in Europe when the author presents them as classic (non-commercial) Apollonians? Equally how does one explain the great industrial and commercial success of the Japanese who have always resisted resident (Mercurian) alien groups?The main body of the book deals with the Jewish experience in Russia, mostly after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and highlights the leading role of Jews in the revolution itself and in the top echelons of the Communist government. In fact they had an explicitly protected status until the final years of the Stalin dictatorship and the author shows that they were the most enthusiastic revolutionary activists. An evaluation of their "work" is missing from the book but it actually involved supervising the murder of the Russian royal family, arranging the liquidation or transportation to work/death camps of all educated Russians, the murder of 50% or more of national minorities and organizing the killing of 3 million+ Ukrainian farmers in the winter of 1932-1933. The later atrocity was planned and executed by Lazar Kaganovich who astonishingly only gets a sympathetic page with regard to his childhood education. Furthermore, the slaughter of the Russian and Ukrainian Slavic population was accompanied by the establishment of a new Jewish "revolutionary" bourgeoise which Slezkine documents in some detail as they enjoy their new country dachas, worship Pushkin and attend elite educational academies (the inspiration behind Orwell´s "Animal Farm").Finally, getting back to Homer, Slezkine portrays Odysseus as a Mercurian due to his wandering and use of subterfuge and trickery (doesn't modern business try to avoid these tactics) while Homer says that he was a Greek general who wanted to return to his island estate of Ithaca. He did use used cunning to defeat the Trojans and later the suitors who were laying waste to his land, so he would seem to be an Apollonian who behaved Mercurially when obliged to, and notably he killed all the suitors with Apollo's own weapon (the bow).Overall a troubling attempt to claim a leading role for undemocratic minority tribalism and blank out large sections of European and American history.