Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Kindle edition, 2019.

Great books, like great teachers, are those which make you reexamine your assumptions. By that standard, there can be little doubt that Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century is a very great book. To help you understand why, let me start with a brief description of the way we in Israel have been taught Jewish history for so long.

Once upon a time—no one knows just when—there was a man called Abraham. Born in Ur, modern Mesopotamia, he was 75 years old when God revealed Himself to him and told him to move to Canaan, aka the Land of Israel, aka (much later) Palestine. Which country, He solemnly promised, would forever belong to him and his offspring. A relative handful of converts apart, it was from Abraham’s loins that all subsequent Jews were and are descended. Their history is like that of no other people; after many twists and turns, they were finally driven (almost all of them) from Canaan by the wicked Romans. Scattered in all directions, but held together by their unique religion, for close to two thousand years they lived without a homeland of their own. Now tolerated and exploited, now subject to pogroms and/or driven away from one country into another, always at the mercy of their non-Jewish neighbors, they somehow succeeded in retaining their identity like no other people on earth. Something not even Adolf Hitler, who set out to exterminate them and killed one third of their number, was able to change.

In comes Yuri Slezkine, a Russian born (1956- ) Jew who currently lives in the United States. The Jews, he explains in the first chapter of the book, are not unique at all. Instead they are one among a great many nations whom he groups together under the rubric, “Mercurian.” Including, to mention but a few, the Gypsies of Europe, the Persians and the Jain of India, the Copts of Egypt, the Fuga of southern Ethiopia, the Ibo of modern Nigeria, the Eta of traditional Japan, the Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, the Nestorians in the Middle East, the Mormons in the U.S—an example Slezkine does not mention–and, above all, the overseas Chinese.

“Mercurian” peoples were and are distinguished from the rest—Apollonians, is what Slezkine calls them—in two principal ways. First, they regard themselves as a people chosen by God. Not just any God, but specifically their own tribal one. To retain that status they develop and maintain a different religion, a different language, a different culture, different mores—as, for example, in wearing turbans (the Sikh community of India) and eating only kosher food—as well as an often strictly enforced endogamy. Second, whether out of their own will or because of the restrictions under which they live, they tend to avoid production—first agriculture, later industry—in favor of other, specifically urban, professions. Including money changers, bankers, peddlers, traders, physicians, pharmacists (both in my family and that of my wife there were several of those), scribes, writers, musicians, actors, fortune tellers, matchmakers, agents, lawyers, and middlemen of every kind. The sort of people who, compared with their mostly rural neighbors, tended to be well ahead in terms of literacy and modernity in general.

Thus, contrary to what I and countless Israelis have been taught, we Jews are not unique. True, Jews have tended to be more successful, were often persecuted more intensively, and survived longer than practically any other “Mercurians.” But that does not mean they are, in principle, different; let alone that their continued existence and the elevated socio-economic status they have achieved in many countries cannot be explained by history but is due to some special kind of divine favor.

That essential point having been made, Slezkine goes on to trace the history of his own “Mercurian” ancestors in Russia. Under the Czars Jews were discriminated against in any number of ways, though arguably not much more so than a great many other non-Russian peoples such as Poles, Greeks, Tatars, Armenians, and Turks. Their response was to leave, which was what between 1883 and 1924 well over a million of them did. Starting with Marx, who though not a Russian was the son of a converted Jew, others joined the forces that were even then preparing to launch the Revolution. Jews were attracted to socialism/communism because it promised them something the existing Russian state did not; namely, a life based on equality and brotherhood in which Jews could find their place without any regard to their ethnicity or religion.

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Yet Jewish vulnerability, due to their minority status over centuries on end, did not automatically vanish just because the change in regime. That is probably one reason why first Lenin—whose own paternal grandfather was Jewish—and then Stalin recruited many of their henchmen from among them. I use the term “henchmen” advisedly; in both the GPU and the NKVD between 1917 and 1945 it was often assimilated Jewish officers, completed with black cars, leather coats, and handguns, who arrested, interrogated, tortured, prosecuted, and executed the state’s prisoners by shooting them in the back of the neck. Jewish commissars also took a prominent part in some of the greatest atrocities of all, such as the destruction of the kulaks and causing millions of Ukrainians to die by starvation.

As the establishment of the “autonomous” Jewish province (oblast) in Birobidzhan shows, starting at the time he was serving as “Commissar for Nationalities” Stalin himself took an interest in the problem. The common fight against the invading Germans further reinforced the Russian Jews’ willingness, even eagerness, to assimilate, by which they meant abandoning circumcision and yarmulkes in favor of Pushkin on one hand and communism on the other.

When the time came for the state of Israel to be established it found looked for, and found, support in the Kremlin. Almost to a man, Israel’s founders were immigrants from Russia whose views on society and the economy were not too different from Stalin’s own—one Mandatory British police officer who interrogated Yitzhak Ben Tzvi, later Israel’s second president, called him “a perfect Bolshevik.” For that reason, but also because the dictator saw Israel as a lever with which to force the British to evacuate the Middle East, he supported it. By way of Czechoslovakia he even supplied it with arms; but for which the nascent Jewish State, laboring as it did under a U.N embargo, might not have survived.

What finally terminated Soviet support for Israel was the outbreak of the Korean War. As Slezkine does not say, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion worried least it might lead to a world war and thus to the severance of the country’s lifeline in the Mediterranean. This caused him to put his support, for whatever it was worth, firmly on the American/Western side. Much worse from Stalin’s point of view, Israel provided the Jews of the Soviet Union with an alternative homeland such as they had never had before. When Israel’s ambassador to Moscow, subsequent Prime Minister Golda Meir, took up her post she was absolutely mobbed by hysterically happy local Jews. No wonder the dictator changed course.

After Stalin died in 1953 his successors did not repeat anything as extreme as the notorious “doctors’ plot.” They did, however, put pressure on the Jews, subjecting them to various forms of discrimination in education and appointments to leading positions. The Jews on their part started resisting. Assisted by their co-religionists in the US, especially from 1967 on they demanded the right to leave. Once their demands were granted the newly-arrived Jews in the U.S quickly became as successful as their parents in Russia had been during the interwar years in particular. Such were their achievements in education, business, the law, the sciences, and the arts that they were even able to enter politics and make their mark there. It would be too much to say that “let my people go” (the Biblical slogan under which the fight for free emigration was waged) played the cardinal role in the success of that fight, let alone in causing the Soviet Union’s collapse; but a certain role it definitely did.

America’s gain was Russia’s loss; today fewer than a million Jews still live in the latter, as opposed to three million at the turn of the twentieth century. The other country which, following the collapse in question, became the goal of Russian-Jewish emigrants was Israel itself. In pointing out that many if not most of those Jews did not really want to go there and only started doing so in any numbers after no other option was left to them Slezkine is perfectly correct. He errs, however, in underestimating both the contribution that newly arriving Russian Jews made to Israel and the exceptional dynamism of Israel itself. Not knowing the country nearly as well as he knows Russia and the U.S, he has missed its amazing development into a military and high-tech powerhouse. Not to mention its proud ownership of the shekel, currently the strongest currency on earth. The root of the problem is found in the fact that the book was written in the early 2000s. Or else surely Slezkine would have provided a better explanation as to why so many Russian Jews did reach Israel after all than he actually does.

The period in which the book was written also explains why, in describing the U.S (and the West in general) as the new Jewish paradise, Slezkine has totally missed the new Moslem-led, (often right- but sometimes left wing), kind of anti-Semitism that seems to be gaining force on both sides of the Atlantic. Still I must confess that, to me with my Israeli education, his insistence that the Jewish nation was not nearly as unique as I had been made to believe came as a revelation. Only a little less impressive were his endless lists of successful Russian Jews, the kind that would never have been possible if Stalin had been as consistently anti-Semitic as he is often supposed to have been. Those lists in turn form but one part of an enormous body of research that has gone into this formidable, but on the whole quite readable and occasionally witty, volume. For anyone with the slightest interest in the Jewish nation, its recent past, its present and its future, it is a must.