Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century takes as its motif the fates of Tevye the Dairyman's daughters. It is a European history, and a Jewish history, largely about ‘non-Jewish Jews’. As such, it is part of an emerging trend in Jewish historiography: the beginning of the end of an era in which Jewish history and European history were considered two discrete entities, and ‘non-Jewish Jews’ often occupied an uneasy space in between.Footnote ¹ In his new book, Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning, Michael Stanislawski writes that ‘the all but canonical boundary between Jewish and a presumptive “general” history is a fictive artifact that obscures sound historical analysis’ (p. 176). Over a decade earlier, Benjamin Harshav, whose chapter ‘A Jewish Century’ in Language in the Time of Revolution was among the inspirations for Slezkine's book, wrote that ‘The study of modern Jewish history should not be reduced to Jews who participate in Jewish institutions . . . while the rest are included only when they are exterminated’.Footnote ² In a sublime and somehow ethereal memoir, the Romanian Jewish émigré Norman Manea engages in imaginary dialogues – some with himself, some with the ghosts of Freud and Kafka – on the same question. ‘When Dr. Sigmund Freud asked, what remains Jewish in a Jew who is neither religious nor a nationalist and who is ignorant of the Bible's tongue’, Manea writes, ‘you managed to utter the answer he had himself given: Much’.Footnote ³ Slezkine agrees. ‘The central subjects of this story’, he writes in the first pages of The Jewish Century, ‘are those of Tevye's children who abandoned him and his faith and were, for a time and for that reason, forgotten by the rest of the family’ (p. 3).

The story of Tevye's children who abandoned the good, long-suffering Tevye is a story about modernity – for Slezkine, it is the central story about modernity. And modernity is about nothing if not trauma – and not only for Sholem Aleichem's most beloved character. In Tevye's case (one could say, if one were to push the story still further than Slezkine does) the trauma begins innocently enough: it begins with love. Tevye's oldest daughter, Tsaytl, rejects a wealthy butcher as her groom in order to marry a poor tailor. Why? Because she loves him. She loves the poor tailor. Love – romantic love – is the first trauma of modernity to fall down on Tevye.

What Tevye could not know then was that things were to become much worse. His daughter Hodl falls in love with Pertchik the Marxist. Hodl's sister Chava falls in love with a gentile. And thus all spirals downhill as one after another things fall from the sky on to Tevye's head: romantic love, revolutionary Marxism, assimilation, pogroms, expulsion, homelessness. . .All in all, modernity is one great trauma for Tevye the Dairyman.

The dialectic of modernity

And not only for Tevye. That temporal rupture called modernity and all it entailed – the break with tradition, the end of the ancien régime, the shift from cyclical to progressive time, the transformation of identities, the rise of nation and class, the death of God, the seduction of teleology – was traumatic for many. Many are those who have attempted to fathom the causes of the trauma; and Marx is not the only theorist who has turned to Hegelian dialectics as a hermeneutic device. Historians from Marshall Berman to Omer Bartov have described modernity as a time of inversions, in which – following Marx's observation – ‘everything is pregnant with its contradiction’. Fragmention becomes totality; scientific rationalism becomes Romanticism; glory becomes destruction; radical negation becomes radical utopianism.Footnote ⁴

Slezkine's model is a variation on this theme, a new dialectic of modernity involving two groups: the Apollonians and the Mercurians. The Apollonians are the descendents of the sun-tanned and muscular Apollo, god of livestock and agriculture. The paler but craftier Mercurians, in contrast, are the descendents of Mercury, ‘the god of all those who did not herd animals, till the soil, or live by the sword; the patron of rule breakers, border crossers, and go-betweens; the protector of people who lived by their wit, craft, and art’ (pp. 7–8). And it was the Jews, among all the world's many service nomads (a dizzyingly diverse group including, inter alia, Roma, overseas Indians, Irish Travellers, Sheikh Mohammadi, Armenians and Lebanese), who were Mercurians par excellence. For Slezkine the dialectic of modernity is that of Apollonians becoming Mercurians and Mercurians trying to become Apollonians, peasants becoming like Jews and Jews emulating peasants. ‘Modernity’, Slezkine writes, ‘meant universal Mercurianism under the nationalist banner of a return to local Apollonianism’ (p. 136).

Jews and Kultur

Slezkine believes that the Jews were better than anyone else at being Soviet – just as, one might add, during the times of the Habsburg empire they were better than anyone else at being Austrian. Only the Jews, A. J. P. Taylor writes, were ‘Austrians without reserve’.Footnote ¹¹ In writing about the Viennese Jewish author Stefan Zweig, Stanislawski quotes from Zweig's autobiography Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers (The world of yesterday):

Harshav, too, makes the observation that ‘Most of the writers of the “Young Vienna” literary movement at the beginning of the twentieth century were born Jews or half Jews, and their identity crisis was part of a whole cluster of identity crises they embodied’.Footnote ¹²

This identity crisis embedded in the Kulturdrang of Jewish Vienna is the theme of literary scholar Marjorie Perloff's memoir The Vienna Paradox. In Perloff's story, Austrian Jewishness was predicated on a denial of Judaism and a rejection of the Ostjuden. Perloff's grandfather was a high-ranking diplomat for the interwar Austrian government; he was on friendly terms with Mussolini. For Perloff's family, as for their entire milieu, Jewishness was a workshop of German art; and the true motif of Perloff's story is the cult of Kultur among Viennese Jews.

On 13 March 1938, the six-and-a-half-year-old Gabriele Mintz became a refugee fleeing the Anschluss. That night of leaving Vienna for Zurich by train defined her life. Eventually resettled in New York, Perloff's family insisted that she retain German Kultur, even as their young daughter changed her name from Gabriele to Marjorie as part of her acculturation into her new world. Her story is one of cultural elitism, of art and kitsch, of the clash between European high culture and American low culture.Footnote ¹³ It is also a story of the peculiar ‘double bind’: alienated from both Aryan Austria and traditional Judaism, those in her family's milieu had a home only in ‘Viennese Jewish High Culture’ (pp. 237–8). The Vienna Paradox is the author's attempt to capture in writing, and from afar, ‘the world of [her] parents, a world so self-contradictory one can never quite describe it’ (p. 71). In Perloff's own relationship to German Kultur the tension is one between deep attachment and deep resentment. When she writes of Walter Benjamin's ‘[knowing] Goethe's work inside out the way a devout Christian might know the Bible’ (pp. 80–1), one senses a subtext at once embittered and empathetic.Footnote ¹⁴ Like the German language and her own past, Perloff's writing is heavy – too heavy and self-conscious, perhaps, to drift into nostalgia.

Perloff shares a certain resistance to nostalgia with another author who writes of Jewish women's embrace of German culture. Barbara Hahn's The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity takes its title from the lines in Paul Celan's ‘Wenn Ich Nicht Weiss, Nicht Weiss’: ‘der Jüdin/Pallas/Athene’. ‘In Greek mythology’, Hahn explains, ‘Pallas Athena with her double name wears a helmet upon her head and a shield across her breast. Ovaries, however, she does not have. She was neither born of a mother nor can become one’ (p. 5). The strangely androgynous Pallas Athena becomes a metaphor for the particularity of Jewesses’ role in German culture; Hahn's interest is the gendered aspect of German-Jewish modernity. In many ways her understanding of Jews and modernity is a traditional one: modernity meant both nationalisation and assimilation. The distinction between Christians and Jews was replaced by the distinction between Germans and Jews. Assimilation required that ‘something else had to be forgotten, without remainder or trace’ (p. 20). German Jewesses, in a way unlike their male counterparts, came to occupy an indeterminate, liminal position between two worlds. Their domain was the salon, the site of idyllic mixing, legendary for its accessibility, heterogeneity. To Hahn this openness is a myth, masking ‘the full extent of the exclusions and defamations [which] remained hidden’ (p. 52).

Like The Jewish Century, Hahn's book is not a monograph. It is rather a collection of sixteen somewhat self-contained essays, arranged by the protagonists in chronological order. The essays begin with Rahel Levin and the salons of 1800 and continue through the quite different salons of the following fin-de-siècle. The fundamental connection, creating a temporal arc, is the one between Arendt and Rahel Levin, ‘whom Arendt once called her best friend who unfortunately had died a century earlier’ (p. 120). A final essay about the friendship between Margarete Susman and the much younger Paul Celan serves as an epilogue.Footnote ¹⁵ The disparate pieces are held together by the motif of Pallas Athena and the shifting identity of the German Jewish woman.

The Jewess Pallas Athena is eclectically composed, its fragmented style reminiscent of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. Hahn makes evocative use of sentence fragments and rhetorical questions. Her writing is often quite beautiful. There is no unifying conclusion, and in this sense, too – the author's refusal to bestow an overarching meaning – one senses the influence of the French poststructuralists. Despite its aesthetic postmodernism, Hahn's book retains a modernist subtext of teleology: the reader is moving forward, inexorably, towards Nazism. The spectre of the Holocaust to come is felt beneath every line. Thus does the book conclude where it must: with Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, an illicit affair intriguing like no other. The Second World War was, in Hahn's reading, an insurmountable rupture.

Hahn, albeit more delicately, shares with Perloff an understanding of Kultur among Jews as both ersatz God and pathology. It was a God whose impotence was revealed to the young Gabriele Mintz in March 1938. It had been revealed to Stefan Zweig four and a half years earlier, when the Nazis came to power in Germany. Stanislawski cites a speech that Zweig gave in November 1933: ‘“We had thought that in Germany, as everywhere else in the world, we had brought our release from the reproach of inferiority by taking part in all fields of cultural life, in poetry, painting, music, science, philosophy . . . And now . . .”’ (p. 132). This was true not only in Germany and Austria. In Bucharest, as Jews were being deported to camps in Transnistra, the young Romanian Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian clung to art. On 19 October 1941 he wrote in his diary, ‘Hundreds of Jewish families from Bukovina are right now in forced exile! Thousands of Jews are in labor camps – including Benu! Each day, each hour, fresh horrors and humiliations press down on us – and I go to the Philharmonic!’Footnote ¹⁶

Stanislawski, in analysing Osip Mandelstam's autobiography Shum vremeni (The noise of time), argues that Mandelstam's ‘self-consciously literary fashionings’ – and in particular his ‘tortuous meditations’ on the ‘“Judaic [iudeiskii] chaos”’ of his childhood – must be understood within the context of the ‘century-long engagement of Russian Jews, and specifically upper-middle-class Russian Jews like the Mandelstams, with the Russian language, Russian culture, and Christianity’ (p. 71). This was true as well of Isaiah Berlin, who left Russia as an adolescent but whose engagement with Russian culture lasted his entire life. In 1932, over a decade after his immigration to England, he wrote to his friend Stephen Spender, ‘I have suddenly begun reading Turgenev in Russian and am now reading him wildly in a sort of intoxication’ (p. 42).

Emasculation and its discontents

‘In any case’, Slezkine writes, ‘the Jewish problem with national canons was not that the Jews loved Pushkin too much (it is impossible to live in Russia and love Pushkin too much) but that they were too good at it’ (p. 70). For a time being ‘too good at it’ had its rewards. ‘More of Hodl's children than just about anybody else's’, Slezkine acknowledges, ‘had the proverbial Soviet “happy childhoods”’ (p. 257). But why? The crux of The Jewish Century lies in its assertion that yes, there was a special relationship between Jews and communism. For those – Jewish and non-Jewish (Nazis and their acolytes excluded) – who in the past have been willing (albeit cautiously) to countenance this, the answer to ‘why?’ tended to be: in an age of racial hatred and virulent antisemitism, communism promised racial blindness, equality and justice for all.

Slezkine takes this perhaps as a given. More interesting – and more piquant, as likewise somewhat cavalier – is his idea that an inherent part of the social role Jews traditionally played was an ‘absence of dignified manliness’. Slezkine is not the first to notice. At the very least in the case of Mandelstam, Stanislawski concurs that there was something womanish about Jewishness: ‘So it seems that it is not, in fact, the sweetish (female?) smell of Judaism that the adult Mandelstam recalls from his parental home, but, on the contrary, the heavy (one must suppose, defiantly male) odors of tobacco, leather, and oak’ (pp. 92–3). Stanislawski further notes that the Haskalah autobiography Aviezer by Mordecai Aaron Gunzburg has as its theme the ‘inescapable impotence – literal and metaphoric – of men reared in traditional Jewish homes that deny boys the right to be children rather than shorter versions of adult males, force them into early marriage before they are sexually mature, feminize them (and masculinize their wives)’. (p. 57).

In these ways, ‘The “Jewish problem”’, in Slezkine's words, ‘was not just the problem that various (former) Christians had with the Jews; it was also the problem that various (former) Jews had with their Jewishness’ (p. 73). This may have been even an understatement. Likewise, Slezkine continues, ‘Most Jewish rebels did not fight the state in order to become free Jews; they fought the state in order to become free from Jewishness – and thus Free’ (p. 152). The point was to transcend not only Otherness, but also weakness, inadequacy. Slezkine's most radical metaphor is one he takes from Isaac Babel: embracing communism, becoming Soviet, was a way for the ‘always already’ emasculated little Jew to become fully human. It was a way for him to become fully a man. That is to say, it was a way for him finally to be able to satisfy a Russian woman in bed.

Yet what if inferiority and superiority were but another dialectic of modernity? Gershon Hundert, in his Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity, inverts Slezkine's attribution of an inferiority complex – or at least posits that it was predated by its opposite. In the eighteenth century, Hundert argues, east European Jews harboured a ‘conviction of cultural superiority’ (p. 9). (One might argue, of course, that feelings of superiority and feelings of inferiority could be experienced simultaneously as well as consecutively. Marxist intellectuals, for instance, famously suffered from simultaneous superiority and inferiority complexes vis-à-vis the proletariat.) Aspects of such a dialectic were present in Zionism as well. Isaiah Berlin, writing to his parents from Jerusalem the year of the Nuremberg Laws, tells them of the then Palestine: ‘Everyone is charming, the Jewish officials are the rudest people on earth. A mixture of Chutzpa and inferiority complex’ (p. 95).

Writing with the aim of revising our understanding of Jewish modernity, Hundert endeavours to shift focus from the Enlightenment and secular ideologies to a remarkable continuity and cohesion that lasted at least until the end of the eighteenth century – that is, to shift focus to ‘Jewish Jews’. His book presents a multidimensional history of Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest states in early modern Europe, reaching from the Prussian empire in the west to the Habsburg empire in the south and the Russian empire in the east, and encompassing present-day Poland, Lithuania and Belarus, much of present-day Ukraine and Latvia, and the westernmost parts of present-day Russia – in other words, territory that by the nineteenth century would be part of the Pale of Settlement. In overviewing these various aspects of eighteenth-century Jewish life, Hundert constructs a mentalité of Jews in the commonwealth. At the centre of this mentalité Hundert sees the idea of ‘chosenness’ – that is, Jews’ conviction not only of their separateness, but also of their superiority vis-à-vis their gentile neighbours. This was in part made possible by their inhabiting a Jewish world; and Hundert argues that the perception of Jews as a ‘minority group’ is a distorted one in as far as most Jews lived not as a minority in the Polish world but rather as a majority in the Jewish world – that is, they lived in areas inhabited largely by Jews. In any case, as Hundert points out, there was no ‘majority’ at that time. The demographic concentration of Jews in the eastern parts of the commonwealth (which by the following century were the western parts of the Russian empire), in combination with the Jews’ integral economic role, allowed for a sense of security within a wholly Jewish cosmos. The overall picture of Jewish–gentile relations that emerges is, somewhat atypically, not so bleak: Jews and gentiles, Hundert maintains, lived in mutually desired separate worlds, worlds overlapping in circumscribed, quotidian ways.

Unlike Slezkine, who writes within the tradition of Russian history, Hundert writes within the tradition of Jewish history. Hundert's book is less about the role Jews played in modernity than it is about the role modernity played among the Jews. In fact, Hundert's ‘genealogy of modernity’ ends precisely when European modernity conventionally dated begins – that is, in the year of the French Revolution. Soon after Hundert's story leaves off, Slezkine's story begins.

In part Hundert's argument rests on the absence of what he terms a ‘beckoning bourgeoisie’ – in other words, for most of the eighteenth century there was no ‘tempting’ gentile culture into which to assimilate. Thus did Jewish life remain largely inward-looking. Hundert devotes much space to the Shabbatean Tsevi movement of the seventeenth century and the related popularisation of Kabbalah in the eighteenth century. Early ‘hasids’ and kabbalists were mystics and ascetics, some engaged in magical rites and exorcisms – and differed greatly from the later Hasidism, who turned against asceticism towards joy, immanence and the omnipresence of God. For Hundert a metonym of profound shift in spiritual subjectivity is the shift in attitudes towards keri, a Hebrew term for the sin of nocturnal emission. Keri, Hundert writes, became a preoccupation in the eighteenth century.

And apparently not only in the eighteenth century. The same motif appears in Stanislawski's discussion about the seventeenth-century Alsatian Jew Asher of Reichshofen: Asher is distraught when he fears that a nocturnal emission on the night of Kol Nidre will prevent him from the leading the services the following day:

Stanislawski's Autobiographical Jews begins with Josephus's Vita written at the end of the first century and concludes with Sarah Kofman's Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, published in Paris in 1994. Of the seven Jewish autobiographies Stanislawski discusses, a full two include confessions of Kol Nidre night nocturnal emissions – the second being the autobiography of the Russian Jew Moshe Leib Lilienblum (1843–1910), Hebrew Enlightenment author and leader of the ‘Love of Zion’ movement (p. 63). Like Slezkine and Hundert, Stanislawski, quite impressively, declines to be prudish.

Freudianism and patricide

Stanislawski is particularly interested in the ‘shifting and culturally specific boundary between the private and public realms’ (p. 57). While agreeing that memory distorts and autobiographical texts can never reveal ‘objective’ historical truth, Stanislawski rejects the notion that autobiographies are therefore of no use to historians. For Stanislawski autobiography is ‘self-fashioning’. It reveals how selves are constructed.Footnote ¹⁷ Stanislawski is sceptical of claims that subjectivity belongs exclusively to modernity and that, moreover, in Jewish communities there has traditionally been no space for individual subjectivity. The ‘drive for selfhood’, he insists, is both fundamental and timeless.

The subjects of two of Stanislawski's case studies – Stefan Zweig and Sarah Kofman (whose writing shares some aesthetic inclinations with that of Barbara Hahn) – were writers very much influenced by Sigmund Freud. This is also true of Stanislawski himself, albeit more subtly: he presupposes, at the very least, the centrality of sexuality and conflicts between fathers and sons. Mandelstam struggled with many things, among them his relationship with his father. In Stanislawski's reading, the Russian poet's feelings towards his own Jewishness were inextricably entangled with this relationship. Lilienblum experienced something similar: ‘both Lilienblum's and Mandelstam's lives were determined (or one might be tempted to say, ‘overdetermined’) by their struggles with their fathers, each of whom was a perfect representative of successive cohorts of Russian-Jewish patresfamilias in the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries as they moved from traditionalism to modernity’ (p. 55).

‘Secularized Jewish fathers – stern or indulgent, bankers (like Lukács's father) or haberdashers (like Kafka's) –', Slezkine writes, ‘did their best to bring up free, cosmopolitan Men: men without fathers. They were remarkably successful: indeed, few generations of patriarchs were as good at raising patricides and grave diggers as first-generation Jewish liberals. And no one understood it better than Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx’ (p. 63). Slezkine's own Soviet milieu was one composed of the children of Jewish communists, who in their own turn became Soviet dissidents. A parallel generation came of age in Poland: children of Jewish Stalinists were among the leaders of the opposition movement Solidarity.Footnote ¹⁸ Many of these children – in a further act of rebellion? – turned not only away from communism, but also towards religion, be it Judaism or Catholicism.

Among the most famous generations of Jewish children rebelling against their fathers and escaping from their Jewishness is that of the Frankfurt School. In writing of this stunningly brilliant group of Marxist-sympathising intellectuals, historian Martin Jay points to the Jewishness of most of the major figures, as well as to their insistence that this had no meaning. Jay himself is reluctant to engage with the question. He only gently notes, ‘And yet, for all their claims to total assimilation and assertion about the lack of discrimination in Weimar, one cannot avoid a sense of their protesting too much’.Footnote ¹⁹ Of course this dialectic of Jews fleeing from Jewishness, of the unbearable burden of one's own subjectivity, is at the heart of the modern experience – and of the central tension in modernity between subjectivity and teleology. For not only did Marxism alleviate the burden of Jewishness, it also eliminated the burden of subjectivity – in favour of (a potentially) blissful submission to the ‘iron laws of History’.

Self-hatred is perhaps a crude oversimplification for what Slezkine has rather fearlessly captured. Freud, after all, understood well that most tormenting was the battle of the self against the self, the battle against and within – the battle to transcend – one's own subjectivity. ‘I find the letter K offensive, it almost disgusts me, and yet I use it; this must be very characteristic of me’, wrote Franz Kafka in his diary in May 1914. The following April he wrote, ‘Complete sinking into myself, thinking about myself. Blunt, unreflecting, anxious’.Footnote ²⁰ Self-absorption – as Kafka knew – can torment.

‘Freudianism’, Slezkine writes,

That is to say, in psychoanalysis, in contrast to Marxism, there is no ultimate solution. Freud himself sees no escape: civilisation is built on repression, there is no other way. Psychoanalysis might perhaps alleviate some symptoms, but success can only ever be partial. The self is doomed to perpetual struggle, to self-disgust. Yet what if there were a way out? Slezkine cites Isaac Babel's character Arye-Leib, who assists us in visualising the appeal:

The end of the affair

A night is but a night. And all good and bad things must come to an end. So, too, the romance between the Jews and the Bolshevik Revolution. Slezkine follows Amir Weiner, among others, in arguing that at a certain moment a distinct shift took place within the Soviet regime: ascription of identity ceased to be sociological and became instead biological – that is, ethnic. It was a shift that occurred with and through the Second World War. By the time the Nazis arrived, Slezkine argues, the Soviets already understood their language. Moreover, this was true for both Jews and non-Jews; for Jews, too, Slezkine believes, felt more Jewish during the Great Patriotic War. They began to desire to fight the Nazis as Jews; they began to feel the ‘subterranean call’ of their Jewish roots (p. 292). Whether this was due to the Nazis’ ideological influence which preceded their physical arrival or whether to a parallel, indigenously generated development within the Soviet Union, Slezkine does not say. Either way, ‘The Nazis’, Slezkine writes, ‘lost the war (to their messianic twin and nemesis, the Soviet Union) but they won the battle of concepts’ (pp. 365–6).Footnote ²¹

Slezkine says very little else about the Holocaust in The Jewish Century. This is, in fact, a book about Jews and European modernity in which the Holocaust is conspicuous for its minor role. A similarly conspicuous absence of the Holocaust characterises Isaiah Berlin's voluminous wartime correspondence. Berlin, who spent much of the war working for the British Information Service in the United States, says nothing in his letters about Auschwitz or Treblinka, nothing about the Warsaw ghetto uprising, nothing about the suicide of Szmul Zygielbojm, Bundist representative to the Polish government-in-exile in London, who took his own life as a gesture of protest against the world's passivity.

The motif of Berlin's wartime letters is rather that of balancing his British loyalties with his Zionist sympathies. Berlin remains throughout the war a centrist Zionist, a friend and admirer of Chaim Weizmann, an Anglophile, a devoted British subject. In his letters there frequently appears the word ‘flourish’. He is ‘flourishing’, he assures his parents, who remained in Britain while he was in the United States during the war. Of despair Berlin writes little; in his letters there is only the occasional allusion. Yet his decision to leave Oxford in order to work for the British government was motivated by a moral imperative to engage. In January 1941 he wrote to a friend, ‘the misery of doing nothing in Oxford in mid-July was becoming too much and I passionately wanted to be identified in some way with this war’ (p. 355).

Berlin, himself a Russian Jew who was, according to Henry Harding, ‘consciously but not self-consciously Jewish’ was not among those engaged in a romance with Bolshevism (p. xxxix). (Parenthetically, notable throughout this entire volume of letters spanning nearly two decades is Berlin's seeming asexuality.) Berlin did write a book – neither hagiographic nor demonising – about Marx, whom he understood well. Of Marx's Jewishness Berlin wrote to his mother in July 1935, ‘Marx is a very Jewish character. His bad early poems, his satire of society, his sentimentality snobbery and learning, all so like Jacob Schapiro, as I wrote you before. Even the antisemitism of both’ (p. 129). For Berlin, Marx himself had to be understood philosophically, in the context of Enlightenment rationality and Hegelian determinism.Footnote ²² In a letter to the master of Balliol written just after the outbreak of the Second World War, Berlin writes of Marx, ‘Knowledge was a means to an end, disinterested pursuit of the truth was, in any case, a bourgeois illusion’ (pp. 296–7). Morality as such was abdicated in favour of an immutable ‘cosmic process’. Berlin adds, ‘Marx seems to me to have suffered bitterly himself from the stupidity, disorder and smugness of the world, and to have generalised his condition to cover the human race, or at any rate the working class, which became a kind of projection of himself seen as a potentially free and powerful being held down and humiliated by miserable little Lilliputians’ (p. 297).

Berlin understood Marxism in theory as distinct from communism in practice. He disagreed with if not most then many of Marx's ideas, yet in writing of them maintained a certain philosophical respect. Of the political practice, in contrast, he wrote to Stephen Spender in 1936, ‘Marxism is at present a movement with more nonsense attached to it than Fascism’ (p. 174). This was some decade and a half after he had left (what was becoming) the Soviet Union and nearly a decade before he was to return on secondment to the British embassy as a temporary first secretary. As an adult he was enthralled – but never enchanted – by Soviet Russia. In February 1946, shortly after his return to Washington, he wrote to Lord Beaverbrook, ‘I do not regret the four months which I spent in that remarkable country; every day had its own peculiar quality, and the conversations in trains and buses are unlike anything to be heard anywhere else on earth’ (pp. 617–18). A day later he wrote to a friend,

Berlin's personal rejection of Marxism had much less to do with questions of private property or economic order and much more to do with Marx's ‘contempt for compromise and gradualism’.Footnote ²³ Berlin himself was an anti-utopian in the sense that Harding writes of in his introduction: life involves difficult choices; one cannot have everything. Contradiction and compromise are the rule and not the exception. There can be no universal answer to the question of how men should live:

Even Zionism, an ideology in which Berlin did believe, shed its utopian inclinations in favour of a not unpleasant ambivalence. ‘Tel Aviv is dreadful’, Berlin wrote to his parents from Jerusalem in September 1934

Some concluding thoughts

Jewish history, as Slezkine is aware, has generally tended to omit selectively the ‘Jewish Revolution against Judaism’, and in particular what Slezkine calls the ‘unparalleled Jewish success within the Soviet establishment of the 1920s and 1930s’ (p. 360). The Jewish Century is perhaps the most unflinching thing ever written about Żydokomuna – and it is written without self-hatred, a work truly beyond condemnation or apologetics, neither defensive nor guilty. The style is distinctively Arendtian – broad, sweeping historical generalisations (the mass Jewish workers’ movement, the Bund, for instance, is somewhat casually dismissed) with some strikingly lucid moments of insight. The writing is idiosyncratic – and quite dazzling. The prose exudes a gentle irony not devoid of empathy, but the content itself is relentless – and the author's voice is fearless.

The Jewish Century captures something further that is deceptively difficult to articulate: the sheer enormity of the project – and the sheer enormity of the failure. Alongside enormity there is – there was – totality. ‘Soviet Russia’, Slezkine describes, ‘stood for the end of all distinctions and the eventual fusion of all things Mercurian and Apollonian . . . The Jewish question was to be solved along with all the questions that had ever been asked’ (pp. 208–9). For non-Jewish Jews like Georg Lukács, it was this totality that was the defining feature of Marxism: ‘the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts’, the premise that it is not possible to solve one problem without solving them all.Footnote ²⁴ In the end nothing was solved, and everyone suffered – on an unprecedented scale that suggests the phenomenon Hegel describes as a moment in which quantitative changes become so great as to become qualitative changes.

Slezkine quotes Esther Markish, who writes in her memoirs after her husband, the Yiddish poet Perets Markish, was purged,

It was not only that Esther and Perets Markish and their friends ‘had not minded’. For they had done far more than not mind. In July 1937, near the height of the Stalinist purges, Isaiah Berlin wrote to his friend Mary Fisher, ‘Why Jews love enormous bullying men, I don't know. But they do’ (p. 246). This speaks to Slezkine's most dauntless observation: that it was the NKVD that was the ‘the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions’.Footnote ²⁵ Given this, can Hodl's children be forgiven their happy childhoods? Can any of them be forgiven? Jews comprised the largest ethnic group in the NKVD in January 1937, on the eve of the Great Terror – and now Slezkine asks us to reflect: was this, perhaps, all part of a desperate aspiration to satisfy a Russian woman in bed?