JCPS Machiela, Daniel A. Late Ancient and Medieval Population. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, Safrai, Samuel. Stern, — Religion Posted on Author : W. History Posted on Author : John A. Author : Louis H. Author : William R. Reference Posted on Cooking Posted on Author : Douglas E. Author : John M.
The Mercurians are important enough when they are serving a landed society, but they become even more important when, in the course of modernity, Apollonian societies are forced to transform themselves into Mercurian ones: experience, talents and education then give the Jews a headstart in such societies.
To these "clever" conceits, Slezkine adds a brilliant capacity to coin striking phrases of a kind of which the following, on page , is just one example: "From being the Jewish God's Chosen People, the Jews had become the Nazis' chosen people, and by becoming the Nazis' chosen people, they became the Chosen People of the postwar Western world. Some of these are devoted to the descendants of Beilke and Chava, but the bulk of the book refers to Hodl's descendants, the Jews in the Soviet Union; and I want to confine my comments to the new perspectives on Soviet Jews which this book has opened up to me.
First there is the emphasis on the emigration from the Pale into the interior of Russia and in particular into the great cities: by 1.
I had not realized that even after the Tsarist pogroms and the vicious discrimination of the May Laws, the Jews were still hugely over-represented in the professions.
With such educational advantages they would have done extremely well anyway once the Soviets had given them civil equality, and their natural advantage was further boosted by the Soviets getting rid as fast as they could of "bourgeois experts" in the administration, by the exclusion of their children from universities, and by filling the resulting vacuum with the only people capable of filling it: the educated Jews.
So the enthusiasm of secular Jews for the Soviet Union in the s and s is very comprehensible. Slezkine argues that the large number of Jews who suffered in the Great Terror suffered not because they were Jews, but because Stalin was purging the upper echelons for his own political and paranoid reasons, and since so many of the upper echelons were Jews, they naturally made up a high proportion of his victims.
Slezkine therefore takes seriously Stalin's condemnation of antisemitism in his speech to the 15th Party Congress in , and shows that between and articles against antisemitism "appeared in the Moscow and Leningrad newspapers almost daily.
Of course Slezkine does not disguise the overt antisemitism which Stalin did display after the war. He explains it by Stalin's realization that even the most ardent Jewish communists, who used in the early days to separate themselves from all things Jewish, had had their "Jewish blood" stirred first by the antisemitism of the Nazis and then by identification with Israel.
He now suspected especially the "passport Jews" - that is those Jews who, when compulsory passports were introduced for the whole population in , had chosen to describe their nationality as Evrei rather than as Russian, Ukrainian etc. After Stalin's death, the most vicious antisemitism eased off; but the government continued to exclude Jews from the government and from the upper echelons of the Party.
It also imposed quotas on Jews at the universities, though Slezkine argued that these were also applied to Georgians and Armenians who, like the Jews, were disproportionately represented at universities. The quotas were at least in part due to "positive discrimination" being applied to Uzbeks, Tatars and Azerbajanis. Besides, by then the Soviet educational system had produced 2. Even now, however, Jews continued to be over-represented in the professions and remained "light years ahead" of Uzbeks, Tatars etc.
As in the time of the Tsars, many of them now figured among the most prominent dissidents, and many others wanted to emigrate. So when Gorbachev at last opened the gates, the exodus was massive. Yet those who remained continued to be over-represented in the market economy in Russia that was introduced when the Soviet Union collapsed: of the seven wealthiest 'oligarchs', six were Jews. And when the bar excluding them from government positions was raised, they swiftly produced two of Yeltsin's prime ministers: Sergei Kiriyenko and Yevgeni Primakov.
Soviet Jews had for long backed and actively participated in a regime which, though progressive in some respects, had committed terrible crimes against real or supposed opponents. Historians like Vaksberg focus on the Jews as victims of Stalin's antisemitism; but Solzhenistyn raises the question: should not the notion of collective guilt be as applicable to those Soviet Jews as it is to the Germans? Slezkine writes that both these approaches are "quite marginal" - an odd evasion, it seems to me, in an otherwise brave book.
Gold mine of hard-to-find data By Luther This is a remarkable book in many ways and difficult to summarize. If the author wasn't a Russian, a professor at Berkeley, half Jewish, and the book wasn't published by a major university press, I think somebody would be yelling "anti-Semitism. He even refers to Communist Jews as "Stalin's willing executioners" p.
His purpose in the book is to show the role of Jews in shaping the modern world, and especially 20th Century Russian and East European history. My quarrel with this book is that I think he exaggerates the Jewish role in the life of everyday America. Furthermore, he ignores Kevin MacDonald's magnificent analysis of the role of Jews in modern American life.
There's not one mention of Kevin MacDonald's three volumes. He is very convincing on what he knows well: the Jewish experience and influence on Russian and Eastern European history.
But when he gets to Jewish influence on American life, he is much less convincing. He writes as though everyone lived in New York City. Freud most definitely did not have the influence on American life that he claims. There is an Anglo-Saxon, Christian substratum to American life which Slezkine seems to know little about. Broadly, the "red" states in the recent election continue with their way of living that originated with the original settlers from England.
See Fischer's Albion's Seed for the history of how England's folkways and mores were transported to America. By the way, the word "Jew" does not occur once in this page book. So much for deep-seated Jewish influence. Americans still live by these folkways and beliefs that were brought over by the early settlers. But the truth, in my opinion, is a lot more complicated, and his thesis needs a lot of qualifications. Posting Komentar. Kamis, 01 Januari [B See all 47 customer reviews Given the dual authority they In The Jewish Century , Yuri Slezkine says that Marx was, in fact, revolting against his own father, a merchant, a member of the petite bourgeoisie.
With his shaggy beard and blue eyes, his musty books and far-fetched theories, Skip to content. Author : Richard I. Author : Peter Y. Author : M.
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