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Featured Review
| Yuri Slezkine. The Jewish Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 438. $29.95.
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| This book by Yuri Slezkine eludes ready summary. Erudite, erratic, savage, and capacious, it has garnered much praise and also criticism, and it has won several awards. It is the rare academic book to make its importance felt, solidly, beyond the university world. It seeks to speak with authority, and also definitive judgment about matters rarely spoken about so concretely: the nature of Jewish singularity, the origin of Jewish genius, the Jewish communist romance. It manages to give the impression that it unsettles regnant Jewish notions of specialness while also, quite dexterously, massaging them. It is a curiously hermetic academic exercise that, on the whole, looks past what has previously been done by Jewish historians, culling from it data but rarely insights. And it is a book too acutely aware of its own audacity: it seeks, for example, to tease readers, to excite them by calling the most catastrophic of all Jewish centuries the best of all times; even those with a passing acquaintance with the recent Jewish past easily acknowledge that it was, arguably, both. |
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The book is made of four chapters: the first seeks to provide an overall theory for minority/majority relations throughout the ages; the second offers an explanation for Jewish mobility in modern Europe since the eighteenth century; the last two, by far the longest and most original, concentrate on revolutionary and post-1917 Russia. |
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At its core, however, Slezkine's book is something of a knotted love letter to one much-misunderstood pocket of Soviet life, one that its author (as he tells us repeatedly) knows intimately. By this I mean those Russian Jews whose hunger for a larger, more compelling, and more just world meshed, in time, with their gratitude to Joseph Stalin, and whom the author sees as among Soviet society's first, fiercest partisans. |
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Slezkine was born in the Soviet Union, and he is now a distinguished historian of twentieth-century Russia. He loathes the Soviet regime but also feels an admiration for the beliefs or, better said, the impulses of its Jewish defenders. (This is, unabashedly, elitist history, and it concentrates only on the most upwardly mobile, the most professionally adept Soviet Jews.) They, as he sees them, were far superior to those in contestation with it: the millions who because of mostly economic preoccupations poured into the United States, and also those so moved by parochialism as to embrace "the most eccentric of nationalisms," which is what he calls Zionism (pp. 2, 102). True, the Jews who remained behind to build Soviet Russia lost in the end, but when compared with the fate of their coddled American cousins or their Spartan-like colonial relatives in the Middle East, who, asks Slezkine, is to say their choice was the wrong one? |
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Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this book is its juridical voice, one engaged in a declamatory scholarship fixed on a discrete cluster of central points, uninhibited by equivocation, free from the tics that tend to paralyze academics, especially historians in the face of statements too large, too unsupportable, too global. ("The principal ... religion of the Modern Age is nationalism ... The Age of Nationalism, in other words, is about every nation becoming Jewish"; p. 1.) One enters this book in much the same way that one stumbles into the midst of a prolonged familial argument, one whose basic contour need not be defined because it is so familiar to all those most concerned with it. This self-avowed assault on parochialism is itself an emphatic expression of its hold. |
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