In nineteenth-century Europe (the birthplace of the Age of Nationalism), the greatest exception was the Jews themselves. The most successful of all modern tribes, they were also the most vulnerable. The greatest beneficiaries of the Age of Capitalism, they would become the greatest victims of the Age of Nationalism. More desperate than any other European nation for state protection, they were the least likely to receive it because no European nation-state could possibly claim to be the embodiment of the Jewish nation. Most European nation-states, in other words, contained citizens who combined spectacular success with irredeemable tribal foreignness. The Jewish Age was also the Age of anti-Semitism.
All the main modern (antimodern) prophecies were also solutions to the Jewish predicament. Freudianism, which was predominantly Jewish, proclaimed the beleaguered loneliness of the newly “emancipated” to be a universal human condition and proposed a course of treatment that applied liberal checks and balances (managed imperfection) to the individual human soul. Zionism, the most eccentric of all nationalisms, argued that the proper way to overcome Jewish vulnerability was not for everyone else to become like the Jews but for the Jews to become like everyone else. Marx’s own Marxism began with the proposition that the world’s final emancipation from Jewishness was possible only through a complete destruction of capitalism (because capitalism was naked Jewishness). And of course Nazism, the most brutally consistent of all nationalisms, believed that the creation of a seamless national community was possible only through a complete destruction of the Jews (because Jewishness was naked cosmopolitanism).
One reason the twentieth century became the Jewish Century is that Hitler’s attempt to put his vision into practice led to the canonization of the Nazis as absolute evil and the reemergence of the Jews as universal victims. The other reasons have to do with the collapse of the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement and the three messianic pilgrimages that followed: the Jewish migration to the United States, the most consistent version of liberalism; the Jewish migration to Palestine, the Promised Land of secularized Jewishness; and the Jewish migration to the cities of the Soviet Union, a world free of both capitalism and tribalism (or so it seemed).
This book is an attempt to tell the story of the Jewish Age and explain its origins and implications. Chapter 1 discusses diaspora Jewish life in a comparative perspective; chapter 2 describes the transformation of peasants into Jews and Jews into Frenchmen, Germans, and others; chapter 3 focuses on the Jewish Revolution within the Russian Revolution; and chapter 4 follows the daughters of Tevye the Milkman to the United States, Palestine, and—most particularly—Moscow. The book ends at the end of the Jewish Century—but not at the end of the Jewish Age.
The individual chapters are quite different in genre, style, and size (growing progressively by a factor of two but stopping mercifully at four altogether). The reader who does not like chapter 1 may like chapter 2 (and the other way around). The reader who does not like chapters 1 and 2 may like chapter 3. The reader who does not like chapters 1, 2, and 3 may not benefit from trying to carry on.
Finally, this book is about Jews as much as it is about the Jewish Century. “Jews,” for the purposes of this story, are the members of traditional Jewish communities (Jews by birth, faith, name, language, occupation, self-description, and formal ascription) and their children and grandchildren (whatever their faith, name, language, occupation, self-description, or formal ascription). The main purpose of the story is to describe what happened to Tevye’s children, no matter what they thought of Tevye and his faith. The central subjects of the story 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.
Chapter 1
MERCURY’S SANDALS: THE JEWS AND OTHER NOMADS
Let Ares doze, that other war
Is instantly declared once more
’Twixt those who follow
Precocious Hermes all the way
And those who without qualms obey
Pompous Apollo.
—W. H. Auden, “Under Which Lyre”
There was nothing particularly unusual about the social and economic position of the Jews in medieval and early modern Europe. Many agrarian and pastoral societies contained groups of permanent strangers who performed tasks that the natives were unable or unwilling to perform. Death, trade, magic, wilderness, money, disease, and internal violence were often handled by people who claimed—or were assigned to—different gods, tongues, and origins. Such specialized foreigners could be procured sporadically as individual slaves, scribes, merchants, or mercenaries, or they could be permanently available as demographically complete endogamous descent groups. They might have been allowed or forced to specialize in certain jobs because they were ethnic strangers, or they might have become ethnic strangers because they specialized in certain jobs—either way, they combined renewable ethnicity with a dangerous occupation. In India, such self-reproducing but not self-sufficient communities formed a complex symbolic and economic hierarchy; elsewhere, they led a precarious and sometimes ghostly existence as outcasts without a religiously sanctioned caste system.
In medieval Korea, the Koli such’ok and Hwach’ok-chaein peoples were employed as basket weavers, shoemakers, hunters, butchers, sorcerers, torturers, border guards, buffoons, dancers, and pup-peteers. In Ashikaga and Tokugawa Japan, the Eta specialized in animal slaughter, public executions, and mortuary services, and the Hinin monopolized begging, prostitution, juggling, dog training, and snake charming. In early twentieth-century Africa, the Yibir practiced magic, surgery, and leatherwork among the Somalis; the Fuga of southern Ethiopia were ritual experts and entertainers as well as wood-carvers and potters; and throughout the Sahel, Sahara, and Sudan, traveling blacksmiths often doubled as cattle dealers, grave diggers, circumcisers, peddlers, jewelers, musicians, and conflict mediators. In Europe, various “Gypsy” and “Traveler” groups specialized in tinsmithing, knife sharpening, chimney sweeping, horse dealing, fortune-telling, jewelry making, itinerant trading, entertainment, and scavenging (including begging, stealing, and the collection of scrap metal and used clothing for resale).
Most itinerant occupations were accompanied by exchange, and some “stranger” minorities became professional merchants. The Sheikh Mohammadi of eastern Afghanistan followed seasonal migration routes to trade manufactured goods for agricultural produce; the Humli-Khyampa of far western Nepal bartered Tibetan salt for Nepalese rice; the Yao from the Lake Malawi area opened up an important segment of the Indian Ocean trade network; and the Kooroko of Wasulu (in present-day Mali) went from being pariah blacksmiths to Wasulu-wide barterers to urban merchants to large-scale commercial kola nut distributors.1
Outcast-to-capitalist careers were not uncommon elsewhere in Africa and in much of Eurasia. Jewish, Armenian, and Nestorian (Assyrian) entrepreneurs parlayed their transgressor expertise into successful commercial activities even as the majority of their service-oriented kinsmen continued to ply traditional low-status trades as peddlers, cobblers, barbers, butchers, porters, blacksmiths, and moneylenders. Most of the world’s long-distance trade was dominated by politically and militarily sponsored diasporas—Hellene, Phoenician, Muslim, Venetian, Genoese, Portuguese, Dutch, and British, among others—but there was always room for unprotected and presumably neutral strangers. Just as an itinerant Sheikh Mohammadi peddler could sell a bracelet to a secluded Pashtun woman or mediate between two warriors without jeopardizing their honor, the Jewish entrepreneur could cross the Christian-Muslim divide, serve as an army contractor, or engage in tabooed but much-needed “usury.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Armenian merchants presided over a dense commercial network that connected the competing Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Russian, and Dutch empires by making use of professionally trained agents, standardized contracts, and detailed manuals on international weights, measures, tariffs, and prices. In the eighteenth century, the clashing interests of the Russian and Ottoman empires were ably represented by Baltic German and Phanariot Greek diplomats.2