yasha | To continue some thoughts on the politics of printed word technology… Evgenia and I went to a bar mitzvah for the twin sons of my old friend, a Soviet immigrant from Odessa. It was in a synagogue in Foster City. Sitting there in the pews watching the service — the rabbi and the rest of the congregation rocking back and forth as they read their prayers, the Torah paraded around the room in adoration, with people kissing it as it passed them by — we got a nice glimpse at one reason why the Jews, always a marginal religious group, have been so successful in the modern world: We the Jews have long been people of the book — obsessed with text. And the modern world is all about worshipping the written word. So “we” were ahead of the game.
The printed word today is maybe what the natural world was to pagans and animists — something bigger than us, something to read into and revere, something full of secret knowledge. Just look at the people on the street, glued to their devices. Or better yet look at my own journalistic work — obsessed as it is with digging up forgotten (textual) histories. The Jews were into text, studying it, venerating it long before it was cool.
Yeah, I know, it’s not a very original insight. There’s a great book (again that reverence for a text) by Yuri Slezkine called the The Jewish Century that expands on this in big and detailed way. It’s really is a sharp book, and I’ve referenced it before when writing about Jews in Ukraine — here and here. Its main thesis is that European Jews were basically the first modern people. He lays it out in his introduction.
The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century. 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.
Some peasants and princes have done better than others, but no one is better at being Jewish than the Jews themselves. In the age of capital, they are the most creative entrepreneurs; in the age of alienation, they are the most experienced exiles; and in the age of expertise, they are the most proficient professionals. Some of the oldest Jewish specialties—commerce, law, medicine, textual interpretation, and cultural mediation—have become the most fundamental (and the most Jewish) of all modern pursuits. It is by being exemplary ancients that the Jews have become model moderns. The principal religion of the Modern Age is nationalism, a faith that represents the new society as the old community and allows newly urbanized princes and peasants to feel at home abroad. Every state must be a tribe; every tribe must have a state. Every land is promised, every language Adamic, every capital Jerusalem, and every people chosen (and ancient). The Age of Nationalism, in other words, is about every nation becoming Jewish.
