'Genius & Anxiety' Review: Lights That Shone Brightly a book review
Nationalists to the right of us, socialists to the left, thugs in the streets and mobs on Twitter: The “Jewish Question” has returned on a resentful tide of lies and violence. It is now, Norman Lebrecht observes in this thrilling and tragic history, “cool to be cruel about Jews (though not about other minorities).” Frightening for Jews, this should alarm all Americans. The fever of Jew-hatred is an inerrant symptom of moral rot and civilizational crisis.
Mr. Lebrecht’s “Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947” describes the century from the opening of the ghettos to the closing of the camps and the start of a new era in Jewish history with the creation of the state of Israel. In the 19th century Europe’s Jews, freed from centuries of legal discrimination, finally had a chance to join non-Jewish society. First in Britain, France and Germany, and then in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, they entered schools, libraries, laboratories, salons and assemblies. Many recognized that they were only conditional members of Europe’s nation states. Some, Mr. Lebrecht writes, “changed the way we see the world.”
These big names are synonymous with modernity: Marx, Disraeli, Herzl, Trotsky and Ben-Gurion in politics; Mahler, Schoenberg and Gershwin in music; Heine, Proust and Kafka in literature; Einstein in science; Wittgenstein in philosophy—and, somewhere between literature and science, Sigmund Freud, the Socrates of the modern soul. There is no Jewish gene, Mr. Lebrecht argues, only Jewish genius; no “Jewish exceptionalism,” only an exceptional situation. Jews’ minds were sharpened by the hermeneutical whetstone of the Talmud, their lives perpetually threatened. They were conditional insiders and eternal outsiders, “driven by a need to justify their existence in a hostile environment and to do it quickly.”
This account begins in the 1840s, with the torments of assimilation. In a German magazine, Richard Wagner calls for the eminent German composer Felix Mendelssohn, the grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, to be expunged as a “foreign element.” In Britain, Benjamin Disraeli turns from novelist to politician and “turns England’s stupid party into One Nation conservatives.” In France exile Karl Marx, the future author of “On the Jewish Question,” introduces himself to the German poet Heinrich Heine as a distant cousin. Mendelssohn was the son of a convert to Christianity, Disraeli and Marx were converted as children by their fathers’ apostasies. Heine converted, famously, for a “passport to European civilization.” Disraeli and Heine flaunted their Jewishness as a career asset, but Marx and Mendelssohn hated “the Jew within” and hid it, Marx with historical theories and Mendelssohn with Christian music.
Mr. Lebrecht, a music critic and novelist who studied at a yeshiva in Jerusalem, expertly explores the Jewishness of Marx and Mendelssohn. When Marx derides Judaism as a “polytheism of the many needs” that “makes even the lavatory an object of divine law,” he betrays “deep personal intimacy with Jewish life.” How else could Marx have known that religious Jews recite a “quiet blessing after each visit to the toilet”? And how else could Mendelssohn have acquired the opening of the third movement of his “ultra-Christian” Reformation Symphony, the “Romanian Hasidic ditty” better known these days as the ultra-Zionist ditty “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem” ?
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