‘Many, too many of us, children of the Jewish intelligentsia, are madly, shamefully in love with Russian culture,’ the Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky lamented in 1903. Paradoxically, their eager embrace of ‘the Pushkin faith’ (as Slezkine calls it) made Jewish intellectuals co-creators of the icons of cultural nationalism that emerged in most Central and East European states and would-be states at the turn of the century: it wasn’t a matter just of Pushkin in Russia but of Goethe and Schiller in Germany, Petöfi in Hungary, and Mickiewicz in Polish lands.

Sheila Fitzpatrick on The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine, LRB 17-03-05

Their world was very firmly divided between Jews and goyim. If there was a plane crash and fifty people were killed, my Aunt Rose, the most conservative voice in my family, would scan the newspaper list of victims for Jewish names and exclaim: ‘What an unglick; six Jews died.’

...

why then did they let Yiddish, the beating heart of that culture, go? It is possible that the answer lies in the Holocaust. If the Germans and their friends had not so successfully exterminated the Yiddish-speaking populations of Eastern Europe, then those communities might have continued to be a vital cultural force to this day, producing exciting music, theatre, literature and art. This cultural dynamism, the argument would continue, might have drawn the American-born children and grandchildren of immigrants back into their orbit. The problem is that there has been no comparable drawing power among groups whose European populations were not sent to the gas chambers. That is, the descendents of Swedish, Italian, French, Russian, German, Greek, Polish, Korean, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, all present in huge numbers in the United States, also fairly quickly lost their languages. (The only great exceptions here are the immigrants from Latin America, who have tenaciously clung to Spanish, though at a high economic cost, and have succeeded in making it the country’s all but official second language.) There was, in other words, nothing particularly unique about the pattern of culture loss and assimilation in Eastern European Jewish families; the erosion of primordial loyalty in two to three generations has been more or less typical of most immigrant groups to the United States.

...

In assimilating to the culture of the New World, immigrants like my grandparents did not submit to the traditional rituals and stories of another, dominant group: no one made them set foot in a church, bow down to graven images, recite the mythic creation stories of alien peoples, erect a Christmas tree in their living room or eat tref. But the material world in which they participated was a national culture whose immense transforming power over their lives derived precisely from its refusal of the local and the particular. This refusal was, of course, hugely to the advantage of the new arrivals, because in effect it made everyone an immigrant

...

From the perspective of the United States, it sometimes seems as if life in the old country remained fixed in its customs, only coming to an end in the catastrophe of the Final Solution, but I know that this stillness, this existence somehow outside history, is an illusion. Yet I am confident that, whatever changes might have occurred in their lives in the 1920s and 1930s, one thing would not have happened: my grandparents would never have thought of themselves or their children as Lithuanians or Poles, in the way that they came to think of themselves and their children as Americans.

...

My English professor, seeing the intensity of my engagement in the class, asked me if I would be interested in assisting him with a book he was completing. I accepted at once and made an appointment at the financial aids office, where these student positions were funded. I assumed that the appointment would be routine – a matter of filling out a form – but a minute into the conversation, just after I explained why I was there, the official, Mr Spaulding, looked up at me and said: ‘Greenblatt, that’s a Jewish name, isn’t it?’ Yes, I replied.

‘Frankly,’ he continued, ‘we’re sick and tired at the number of Jews who are coming into our office trying to wheedle money out of Yale University.’

[Never too clear on these things, but pretty sure I am pushing the boundaries and quoting TOO MUCH. This piece isn't behind a paywall, but it is the kind of piece that makes me subscribe to the LRB so I can login ad lib. Would I be happier traversing North America, persuading small town diners and coffee shops and what have you to stock the LRB, rather than fruitlessly shadowboxing the publishing biz? Probably.]

[Funnily. Until I met my ex, David, at Oxford, I didn't realise there were Jewish names. I just thought Cohen was a common name. Seriously.]

Stephen Greenblatt, LRB 21-09-00

sadly for simple piety

Various prominent members of German churches are extremely annoyed. German shopping hours have gradually been relaxed over the years (it was once the case that shops were open 9-6 Monday-Friday, 9-1 on Saturday). Sunday trading was the sticking point. More recently, though, the decision was made to leave this up to the individual Länder. Berlin has been especially aggressive in taking advantage of this, passing a law permitting shops to remain open 17 Sundays a year. Needless to say a large number of merchants have picked the Sundays in the run-up to Christmas as the most profitable. One churchman complained: When it comes to staying open on Sunday during ADVENT it's simply the last straw.

Meanwhile I've been reading the manuscript of THE SKEPTICAL SYNAGOGUE-GOER'S GUIDE TO JEWISH HISTORY, by David Levene of the NYU Classics Department. It is a book offering ammunition for the sort of person who goes to synagogue, sits through a sermon in growing indignation at the ludicrous stories passed off as historical fact, thinks "This is absolute bollocks" and wants to share this point of view with the rabbi later over a thimbleful of kosher wine - but doesn't have the evidence to back him (or, of course, her) to back it up. While aimed primarily at a Jewish audience, the book is obviously of interest to anyone who has ever wondered vaguely, as it might be, Did the Assyrian really come down like a wolf on the fold?

The book sets out the accounts of various supposedly historical events as presented in the Tanach and Midrash, then looks at these in the light of historical evidence and considers the question of how far the evidence bears out the traditional version. In some cases, the answer is, not terribly far. The reasoning by which the Seder Olam Rabbah concluded that there were only four Persian kings, and that the Persian Empire lasted 52 years (as opposed to the span of 539-331 BCE favoured by most historians) has a charm all its own. In other cases the traditional version holds up surprisingly well.

To come clean, I tend to steer clear of the type of place where people bundle up moral arguments and historical fabrications. I converted to Judaism in 1987, but I seldom go to a service. Before conversion I was an Episcopalian who avoided services with the same assiduity.
Nothing I have seen of Islam makes me think it would have more to offer than the competition. It's still a pleasure to have the evidence in one place for anecdotes dimly remembered from religious texts; it's a pleasure to see how the chronology of Persian kings can be worked out from Babylonian astronomical calendars showing lunar eclipses, confirmed by legal documents of the time and other sources. Books aimed at a general audience tend to skimp on quotations and references, so that the interested reader has no way of following up something that sounds interesting; it's a pleasure to read one that's an exception to the rule.

DSL is currently looking for a publisher for the book (it is under consideration by an editor as I write); I trust he will find one soon.