Norman Lebrecht - Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947

Yom Kippur service for Jewish soldiers in the German Army during the Franco-Prussian War, outside Metz, October 1870.

B etween the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of men and women changed the way we see the world. Some of their names are on our lips for all time: Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from our collective memory, but their importance endures in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery; without Paul Ehrlich, no chemotherapy; without Siegfried Marcus, no motorcar; without Rosalind Franklin, no model of DNA; without Fritz Haber, not enough food to sustain life on Earth; without Genevive Halvy, no grand opera; without Emanuel Deutsch, no State of Israel.

What these transformers have in common is being Jewish, some by having Jewish parents, others by practicing the Jewish faith. All appear to think outside the box, and all of them think fast. Why, at this period, a handful of Jews managed to see what others could not is the subject of this book.

There is a reverse side to the proposition. If Jews remade the world between 1847 and 1947, did the world also change Jews, perhaps beyond recognition? (Short answer: yes.) No historian has, to my knowledge, addressed the story from both aspects. In a multicultural twenty-first century, there may be a wider relevance to these engagements as a template for cultural dialogue and symbiosis.

Folk wisdom has it that five Jews wrote the rules of society:

Moses said, The law is everything.

Jesus said, Love is everything.

Marx said, Money is everything.

Freud said, Sex is everything.

Einstein said, Everything is relative.

Ha-ha, but more than half true. And Jews have a half truism for most things. A century before Christ, a man demanded to be taught the whole of Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel the Elder said: Love your neighbour as yourself. The rest is commentary. Two millennia later, Albert Einstein, asked by a journalist to explain the theory of relativity, replies: Matter tells space how to curve. A Hillelian aphorism. When the hack still looks blank, Einstein tells a Jewish joke. That works (see ).

The Jewish mind-set behind the wave of genius has not been successfully explored. How much do Jewish elements in their background inform Mahler, Modigliani, Marcel Proust? How does Freud know that sex is the source of most unhappiness? What makes Marx hate Jews? How much do science and mass migration affect rabbinic thinking, not to mention the physical shape of Jews? When is being Jewish a virtue? Why cant the world see what, to one or two Jews, is blindingly obvious?

The tendency to take a different point of view is illustrated by an anecdoteapocryphalabout the head of a famous Lithuanian yeshiva (rabbinic college) who chides his students for playing football on their lunch break when they could be discussing pearls of Torah. But football is a beautiful game, kevod harav [honored rabbi], they protest. Let us show you. At the next weekday league match in Vilna, featuring the nations best players, the students and their rav take seats in the stands. At halftime, the young men ask the rav for his response.

I have solved your problem, he replies.

How, kevod harav?

Give one ball to each side, and they will have nothing to fight over.

The rosh yeshivas way of thinking is counterintuitive to the Western method, which starts with observing the facts on the groundtwenty-two men and a footballbefore seeking to understand them in a context of social interaction. The rav, unaware of the rules, sees the game from a fourth dimension, a world apart from the situation. He offers a solution which, while irrelevant to the game of football, has a certain angelic elegance and ethical rightness.

Aspects of the ravs solution can be sighted in Benjamin Disraelis deconstructive approach to British politics, in Sarah Bernhardts exploitation of fame, and, critical for the outcome of the Second World War, in Leo Szilards cracking of the atom: he saw a way to the future the shape of things to come. Time and space are flexible for Szilard, as they are for Einstein, Haber, Lise Meitner, and Kafka, because their grasp of time and space is not confined to white lines on green grass. Jews speak of Jewish time as a relative measurement; the Talmud establishes a relative hour, also known as a halakhic hour, which varies in length from one day to the next according to the suns position. Relative time is part of Einsteins genetic heritage long before he announces the discovery of relativity.

Sigmund Freud declares on several occasions that he was brought up in an irreligious home and that he knows nothing about Judaism. It will come as a shock to any researcher with a knowledge of Talmud to find that Freud uses no fewer than six of the thirteen rules of Talmudic exegesisunconsciously, no doubtin his analytic approach. It is no less eye-opening to find Marx exposing a profound familiarity with Jewish toilet manners or Trotsky being so sensitive to anti-Semitism that he denounces it in