The other day I chanced upon Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century and decided to reread it.
It describes the important role of the Jews in the founding and first generation of the USSR, followed by the departure of most of them, before and especially after its breakup, for either the US or Israel. Published originally in 2004, and from what I could tell, virtually unrevised in the 2019 second edition, it is indeed very much a tale of a single century.
Were it to be revised today, the role of the Jews in the current century would have to be described very differently. In particular, Slezkine’s typology that opposes the “Mercurian” Jews to the “Apollonian” Europeans, particularly the Russians, would have to make room for a more specific characterization of both the former and the latter. And particularly since October 7, 2023, to characterize antisemitism simply as the hostility of the “rooted” peoples to the “nomadic” Jews has been clearly shown to be insufficient.
That Slezkine could tell the story of the 20th century as that of the Jews as the ultimate Mercurians outpacing the sluggish Apollonians is of interest in itself. It demonstrates that our understanding of even the most fundamental human categories cannot remain fixed, that history always holds new surprises that reveal the ephemerality of the relations that had previously appeared fundamental and the undreamt-of importance of others that had been hidden or buried.
Thus it is not to make a damning criticism of Slezkine to remark that the book’s understanding of the role of the Jews in the modern world—from their “emancipation” at the time of the French and American Revolutions until the end of the 20th century—is no longer compatible with today’s configuration. The past quarter-century has demonstrated that antisemitism is by no means a thing of the past. The Islamists’ long-prepared October 7 pogrom, far from repelling the majority of the Western population by its barbarism, inspired sympathy throughout the West as a cry for help by a “colonized” people against the society of “settlers” that had enslaved them. And throughout the subsequent course of the Gaza war, it was the Jews of Israel, not the Islamist authors of the slaughter, who were obsessively accused of “genocide.”
The Jewish century had become a distant memory.
To speak of the Jews as “Mercurians” was to acknowledge that, by associating them with a “trickster” God, they had already been dispossessed of their rightful share of worldly property, driven from the land they once occupied, and condemned to work as intermediaries between those who retained their primordial “Apollonian” rights to their share of real property in both the literal and the figurative sense.
In a word, it was to accept as permanent the Jews’ expulsion from their homeland that was the originary effect of the resentment of Jewish firstness. That the Jews as the creators/discoverers of the One God considered their land as his gift provided an incentive to their potential rivals to seek to deprive them of it. It was the Jews’ own valuation of Jerusalem and Israel generally that made it mimetically attractive to everyone else. And their rivals being vastly more numerous than they, they could not expect to hold on to it.
At first, the Russian Revolution that abolished “Apollonian” private property empowered the Jews as uniquely able to maintain their “transactional” function, giving the society the product of their labor without accumulating it as “property” save on a personal level. Whence the very high percentage of Jews in the Soviet leadership in its first generations. As Slezkine points out, even Stalin’s purges in the 1930s did not greatly reduce the Jews’ proportional advantage over the other peoples of the Soviet Union in embodying socialist production divorced from Apollonian capital accumulation. Thus, having been prevented over the centuries by antisemitic resentment from accumulating property in the pre-socialist economy, the Jews became via the Revolution the models, and to a large extent the masters, of Soviet communism: this was the story of the “Jewish century.”
But if even despite the disaster of the Holocaust, the twentieth century could arguably be called the Jewish Century, the obvious—and ominous—question that has arisen is whether the twenty-first—whose first year was marked on 9/11 with history’s most devastating demonstration of the destructive energy available to a religious faith whose adepts are willing to love death while their enemies cannot fully renounce their love of life—might deserve the title of the Islamic Century.
At first it had seemed that Bin Laden’s project, despite its near-total symbolic success, had served only to provoke the West to attempt to stamp out Islamism once and for all. And even the ultimate failure of the American efforts, even when aided by its allies, to defeat it in Afghanistan and Iraq or to reverse the result of the Islamic revolution in Iran, could hardly be said to demonstrate the ultimate viability of the Islamic dream—the conversion of the human race in its entirety into a single Muslim Umma.
And no doubt still today, this viability still remains far from having been demonstrated. Yet since October 7, 2023, its partisans can no longer be said to lack reasons to hope.
Nothing in Slezkine’s book could have even begun to hint at the torrent of antisemitism unleashed by the October 7 pogrom. The preponderant reaction throughout Europe and the world to the vicious slaughter of 1200 Jewish civilians made it clear that traditional Jew-hatred, which everyone had assumed had been struck a mortal blow by the horrors of the Holocaust, was on the contrary potentially more powerful than at any time since the beginning of the modern era. The surprising breadth and strength of this reaction, strongly encouraged by the “liberal” press in both the US and Europe, revealed the subsistence of a reserve of antisemitic hostility that needed not even the stimulus of a first Israeli act of retaliation to unleash. (See Chronicle 785.)
The readiness to accuse Israel of “genocide” on the basis of Hamas’ own statistics of the civilian deaths attributed to its response to this unprovoked aggression revealed the depth of the resentment of the Jews that the Holocaust had forced the so-called civilized world to repress for nearly eighty years. It was as though everyone had been waiting for an excuse to throw in the Jews’ face this term of ultimate condemnation that they had been forced to recognize with the liberation of the camps in 1945.
All of a sudden the “progressive” vision of history as the continual replacement of old relations and attitudes by new, more efficient ones—the vision that The Jewish Century had shared—was suddenly cast into doubt, as the supposedly civilized world of Western-style nations instinctively sympathized, not with the Israeli victims of the barbarous pogrom, but with the Palestinian sufferings that had presumably provoked it. Jews everywhere were forced to realize that the slaughter of Israeli citizens, rather than making them objects of sympathy, had only served to demonstrate in the eyes of the majority of the nations of the world that the raping, torturing, and murdering “Palestinians” were in fact the innocent natives of the Holy Land striking back in justified frustration at their Jewish settler-oppressors—the new century’s Nazis. Every action of the IDF in response to this unprovoked invasion was viewed not as a response to prior violence but as an unprovoked act of genocide against the Palestinian people, the true natives of the land that the Israelis had sought to usurp.
It might have been predicted that the 20th-century accession of the Jews to real political power and possession of their own nation would revive the old desire to turn the first into the last. Rather than their redemption from exile making the Jews “just like everyone else,” it made their newly-confirmed firstness scandalous and intolerable. How gladly the Europeans would have believed with Mahmoud Abbas that Al-Aqsa was the original temple in Jerusalem! If any nationality was susceptible to being hated for its victories, it was certainly the Jews.
And thus Slezkine’s Jewish century was fated to end, along with the illusion of socialism as the final realization of the just society, with the accession of the third and last Abrahamic religion to exemplary status. Islam had built a social system on a faith founded, not like that of the Hebrews, on the firstness of their minimalist theology, nor that of the Christians, on the miracle of a new beginning of history, but on its believers’ self-denial for the sake of the Muslim Umma’s ultimate accession, not merely to exemplarity, but universality.
Islam’s place at the end of the Abrahamic continuum self-evidently explains why it has been able to inspire in the nations under its sway a level of sociopolitical organization beyond all comparison with the world’s other organized religions. The reader is referred to Maral Salmassi’s December 5 post on Substack, entitled “The United Nations of Sharia” for a straightforward explanation of how Islam has come to dominate the United Nations Organization, dating from the formation of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 1969, by nature of its existence as not simply a religion but an integrated religio-political system.
Yet need this development be fatal to the freedoms evolved within the Judeo-Christian world? The new status of Syria under Ahmed al-Sharaa, still far from clearly resolved, offers an opportunity for the world to observe whether a reduction of the tension among the three Abrahamic religions over the next decades is possible.
To the extent that Islam might be able to reconcile itself to coexisting with the norms of the West rather than continuing to play the long game with which Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah et al. have sought to beguile it into renewing its ageless antisemitism, the common Hillelian-humanistic root of all three religions should be able to assert itself.
Seen in this light, Sharaa’s jihadist past is a qualification rather than an obstacle to a possible first step toward Abrahamic reconciliation. There is still room for hope that the three religions are secretly more ready to work together than the events of the last few years have suggested.