Book review: The Jewish Century

Kevin MacDonald:

While the greater part of The Jewish Century is an exposition of the Russian experience, Slezkine provides what are in effect sidebars (comparatively flimsy) recounting the Jewish experience in America and the Middle East. Together, these phenomena can in fact be seen as the three great Jewish migrations of the 20th century, since within Russia millions of Jews left the shtetl towns of the Pale of Settlement, migrating to Moscow and the other cities to man elite positions in the Soviet state.

Slezkine attempts to understand Jewish history and the rise of Jews to elite status in the 20th century by developing the thesis that the peoples of the world can be classified into two groups.

The successful peoples of the modern world, termed Mercurians, are urban, mobile, literate, articulate, and intellectually sophisticated.

The second group, termed Apollonians, is rooted to the land with traditional agrarian cultures, valuing physical strength and warrior virtues.

Since Slezkine sees Jews as the quintessential Mercurians, modernization is essentially a process of everyone becoming Jewish. Indeed, Slezkine regards both European individualism and the European nation state as imitations of pre-existing Jewish accomplishments—both deeply problematic views, in my opinion.

There are problems with the Mercurian/Apollonian distinction as well. The Gypsies whom he offers as an example of another Mercurian people, are basically the opposite of Jews: having a low-investment, low-IQ reproductive style characterized by higher fertility, earlier onset of reproduction, more unstable pair bonds, and more single parenting.

The Overseas Chinese, another proposed parallel, are indeed highly intelligent and entrepreneurial, like the Jews. But I would argue the aggressiveness of the Jews, compared to the relative political passivity of the Overseas Chinese, invalidates the comparison.

We do not read of Chinese cultural movements dominating the major local universities and media outlets, subjecting the traditional culture of Southeast Asians and anti-Chinese sentiment to radical critique —or of Chinese organizations campaigning for the removal of native cultural and religious symbols from public places.

Moreover, the vast majority of Jews in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were hardly the modern Mercurians that Slezkine portrays.

Well into the 20th century, as Slezkine himself notes, most Eastern European Jews could not speak the languages of the non-Jews living around them. Slezkine also ignores their medieval outlook on life, their obsession with the Kabbala—the writings of Jewish mystics—their superstition and anti-rationalism, and their belief in magical remedies and exorcisms.

And these supposedly modern Mercurians had an attitude of absolute faith in the person of the tsadik, their rebbe, who was a charismatic figure seen by his followers literally as the personification of God in the world.

Slezkine devotes one line to the fact that Jewish populations in Eastern Europe had the highest rate of natural increase of any European population in the nineteenth century. The grinding poverty that this produced caused an upsurge of fundamentalist extremism that coalesced in the Hasidic movement and, later in the nineteenth century, into political radicalism and Zionism as solutions to Jewish problems.

By proposing the basically spurious Mercurian/Apollonian contrast, Slezkine obscures the plain fact that Jewish history in the period he discusses constitutes a spectacularly, arguably uniquely, successful case of what I have described as an ethnocentric group competitive strategy in action.

Slezkine conceptualizes Mercurianism as a worldview and therefore a matter of psychological choice rather than a set of psychological mechanisms, notably general intelligence and ethnocentrism. He appears to be aware of the biological reality of kinship and ethnicity, but he steadfastly pursues a cultural determinism model. As a result of this false premise, he understates the power of ethnocentrism and group competitiveness as unifying factors in Jewish history.

A long review of Slezkine's "The Jewish Century"

Efron on Slezkine's "The Jewish Century"