Tevye's children

The Jewish Century, a new book by Yuri Slezkine, argues that the 20th Century was the Jewish century. The book traces the lives of Tevye's children, the descendants of the hero of Sholom Aleichim's stories and Broadway and Hollywood's Fiddler on the Roof. Orlando Figes reviews the book and likes it, with some reservations.

Imagining the destinies of Tevye's children, Slezkine charts the three main paths of Jewish emigration—geographical and intellectual—from the shtetl and its traditions. Many Jews followed Beilke to America, a journey Slezkine links to their adoption of liberal and capitalist views (as well as to the spread of Freudianism). A much smaller number emigrated to Palestine (less than half of 1 percent, even at the height of Jewish immigration to the Holy Land).[1] But Slezkine contrives to send Chava there (on the fanciful assumption that her repentant return to her Jewish home at the end of Tevye the Dairyman "stands for her emigration to the Land of Israel"); this allows him to place the emigration to Palestine in the context of a nationalism—Zionism—which developed from the persecution of the Jews. Finally, there were Jews like Hodl, the main subjects of The Jewish Century, who migrated from the Pale of Settlement to the major cities of Russia, where they aligned themselves, for the most part, with the socialist movement, and became prominent in the Soviet government and intelligentsia.

In this way, Slezkine links the emigration of the Jews with the dissemination of the twentieth century's three main ideologies: liberalism, nationalism, and communism. But this is only part of Slezkine's reasoning for calling the twentieth century the "Jewish century"—a provocative description that is bound to cause offense to those for whom the Jewish Holocaust was the defining event of the century. Slezkine argues that "the modern age is the Jewish age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century," because

modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds. It is about pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake. It is about transforming peasants and princes into merchants and priests, replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling social estates for the benefit of individuals, nuclear families, and book-reading tribes (nations). Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.

Modern life, for Slezkine, is all about the transformation of settled agricultural ("Apollonian") societies into mobile urban ("Mercurian") societies, where everyone becomes a stranger and the most successful people are the followers of Hermes, above all the Jews, who get on through their cleverness and their ability to act as go-betweens.