Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, by Melvin Konner

Reviewed by Allan Gould

History can be exciting, yet so many classic histories of the Jews are rather dry and dispassionate—surprising, when one considers how dynamic and passionate are the Jewish people, and the outrageously vicious (and often deeply-loving) response they draw out of others. I love recent books such as Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews (written by a committed Catholic, and a right-winger, to boot), but the Jewish histories I once were enthralled by—such as Max Dimont’s Jews, God, and History, were later discovered to be often wrong-headed and factually flawed.

What a thrill then, to discover Unsettled (with the intriguing sub-title, An Anthropology of the Jews), by medical doctor and Professor of Anthropology at Emory University Melvin Konner. The book is both highly personal (he was a practising, Orthodox Jew until he was 17, and only recently has returned—at least culturally—to the faith) and dynamically, reliably historical.

And what an interesting concept, to begin with: to look at the Jews from an anthropological viewpoint, studying them from the mountains of Ethiopia to villages in Afghanistan, India and China. As he notes, a quarter-way through this 450-page book, although Jewish history "seems a trail of tears. . . .the real history is not that of wars and kings, slaughter and exile, but that of the moment-to-moment lives of ordinary people." Then, as he often does, he quotes a phrase from the TRUE basis of the Jewish people over the past two millennia—far more than the Torah—the Talmud: "Every place where Israel was exiled, the Divine Presence was with them/ They were exiled to Egypt, the Presence was with them/ They were exiled to Babylon, the Presence was with them. . . .and when they shall return, the Presence will be with them."

From his very introduction, Professor Konner grabs us by our intellectual and moral eyes, ears and throat with his beautiful prose. He lists "some of the main points" that he hopes to make in the book, and many will challenge even the most educated student of Jewish history: "Contrary to some claims—peoplehood—something quite different from religion—has been a part of Jewish identity from the beginning. . . . The notion of the Jews as a studious, mild, ethical people who do not fight is a myth. Ancient Israel was born in violence, as were both Temple and Torah Judaism. . . . The great Jewish gifts to the world—monotheism, the Ten Commandments, resistance against tyranny—were born in weakness in a group of tribes, then a kingdom, buffeted between great empires. . . . At least four times ancient Israel was devastated because of Jewish factionalism, splinter cults, extreme religious zealotry, and military overreach. This may happen again. . . ."

I was so enthralled by the book's daring, its insights, its strikingly New Way of approaching thirty-plus centuries of Jewish existence. The author is capable of great wit and irony, as he notes that, long before Rome, Greece, even Babylon, a Pharaoh by the name of Merneptah gave the world the very first archeological use of the word "Israel" in a list of nations which had been vanquished, and were no more. "The first mention of Israel is meant to be its last," Konner almost chuckles, referring to an Egyptian column which dates back to over 1200 years before the Common Era.

What makes Unsettled (what an inspired title!!) so special? The fact that the author has been "an insider" helps; the fact that he longs to see the Jews continue as a people, a nation, a religion also helps—even if many might be ware of such empathy and closeness to a scientist’s subject. While never chauvinistic, he makes claims which I’ve rarely seen before, but are probably irrefutable: "Why did Jewish thinkers play a strong role in laying the intellectual foundations of the modern world? [Einstein, Freud, Marx, etc.] First, their ancient tradition of creating and studying texts was one of the oldest on the planet. When other cultures’ identities depended on territory, the Jews had to rely on texts. There were always Jews who restricted themselves to holy texts and Jews—Philo, Josephus, the Jewish thinkers of Islam, even Maimonides—who straddled Jewish and secular civilization. Renaissance Europe was no exception, and the Jewish printing presses spreading throughout the Continent and beyond mass-produced sacred texts as well as new secular ones. For centuries Jews had literacy rates several times as high as those of the people around them."

Konner sees the insanity, even absurdity, of Jew-hatred with a clearer eye than I have even encountered, such as this paragraph in his closing chapter: "The Jews were killed for keeping their own ways, and they were killed for trying to pass as Greek. They were killed for rejecting Christianity, and when they accepted it they were killed for not embracing it strongly enough. They were killed for being in charge of world capitalism, and they were killed for trying to overthrow it. . . . They were killed because they were weak, pathetic, and defenseless, and now they are killed because they are strong, proud, and protected. . . ."
Unsettled was first published in the last days of 2003, and recently came out in a reasonably-priced paperback, but it’s also easily available in remaindered hardcover in many Jewish bookstores or available online for less than ten dollars. It is money well-spent, and will give you strength to survive—and oodles of good cocktail conversation—for the next millennia, if they let us live that long. Bravo, Dr. Konner.

The Pity of it All

The Pity of it All
by Amos Elon
Picador Publishing

Reviewed by Allan Gould

Sometimes just a title gives one a hint of the beauty and power of the style and subject of a book: The Pity of it All is the great Israeli historian Amos Elon's superlative work of five years ago, now in a reasonably-priced paperback. Its sub-title lays out its goal: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch. With his much earlier Israelis: Founders and Son, Elon showed that he could write and analyze with the best, but rarely has any book of history moved me to tears so often. Shaped like a great novel, the book opens with the teenaged Moses Mendelssohn entering Berlin in 1743 on foot, through the only gate in the city wall through which Jews (and cattle) were allowed to pass; 400 pages and two centuries later, another future German-Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt, escapes by train from the Nazi-run city. In between, one meets an amazing array of Jewish men and women who molded German culture and history in an unforgettable flow of remarkable, world-changing history and eventual devastation.

It is so easy to name drop: to list Heine and Kafka in literature, Ehrlich, Einstein and Freud in the sciences, Mahler, Weill, Schoenberg and Mendelssohn's own grandson Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in music. The fine author cannot but admit in his introduction that "[g]iven the Jews' late entry into European civilization, the wealth and variety of their contribution to the arts and sciences was startling." But only a few paragraphs earlier, Elon also notes that, with less than 1% of the population by the eve of the Nazi takeover, it is just as stunning to note the vast enmity which the now-influential Jewish community had attracted. The astonishingly influential Franz Kafka (surely the Einstein of literature in terms of his impact on his field) noted, both Jews and Germans have a lot in common. They are ambitious, able, diligent, and thoroughly hated by others. Both are pariahs.

Of course, the Jews of Germany, even when numbering but a few thousand in the late 18th century, were much like their co-religionists across Europe at various times over the years: an economic resource to be tapped when needed and evicted when not. But the eventual rise of Hitler which hangs like a dark shadow over every page of this extraordinary book of history underlines the pity of the title: Mendelssohn translates the Bible into German and becomes the patron saint to his people; the Jews begin to assimilate, even convert in great numbers including the parents of Karl Marx and Heinrich Heine himself (whose popularity as arguably Germany's greatest poet was impossible for even the Nazis to uproot, so they described his most famous poem about the Lorelei as a folk song by an unknown author); the rise of a new kind of scientific Jew-hatred which even the great Mendelssohn sensed before his death; the name changes (Itziks changed their name to Hitzig, Cohens to Kahn, Levis to Lau); the Jews become Germany's greatest art collectors, film makers, music conductors, performers and composers. One is shaken, but somehow not surprised, to discover that Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx and Heinrich Heine were actually distant cousins.

Inevitably, ironies abound like one's tears: Abraham Geiger, one of the founders of Reform Judaism, loved his German culture so deeply that he wrote, Jerusalem is a noble memory from the past and the cradle of our religion; but it holds no hope for the future. No new life can begin there. Let us not disturb its rest. Of course, irony is one thing, agony quite another: Geiger's son Ludwig, the leading scholar of Goethe in his beloved German homeland, objected to helping Russian Jews settle in Palestine, insisting that he felt no greater sympathy for them than for famished German day laborers. (Has there ever been a more horrific irony in history than the fact that it was a German-Jewish chemist, Fritz Haber, an associate of Einstein, who perfected the poison gas used during World War I, and, later, developed the killing gas used in the death camps, Zyklon B?)

The Pity of it All is not all about pain, as it is joyous to read that a Jew drafted the Weimar Constitution, and that Weimar Germany became the centre of a Hebrew revival (!) in the 1920s. But anyone with a drop of feeling for the Jewish people might find him/herself putting down this book countless times in horror, such as when the countless suicides of Jews who cannot cope with the rise of Nazi hatred in their beloved native land spread across the nation. How beloved was that country to its Jews over their two centuries of glory? Erich Maria Remarque, author of what is probably the greatest anti-war novel of all time and, naturally, banned and burned by the Nazis was asked, in his American exile, whether he missed Germany. "Why should I?" he answered. "I'm not Jewish."

This is a history book for the ages, and one which I highly recommend to all.