The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

The timing of Jewish emancipation had been terrible for its beneficiaries, albeit not of their choosing. For it came about exactly when Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the universal brotherhood, that short-lived little flame, had burnt out. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, resistance to the dominion of the machine took the form of a militant cult of history, religion, nature and nation, against which the Jews seemed to personify the opposite: a people – a dynasty like the Rothschilds – indifferent to borders, a race who were everywhere and nowhere since now they could not be reliably identified by marks on their clothing, not at any rate until Wagnerian ears picked up their ugly, comical wheezing, croaking and snuffling. Now they had mastered the perpetuation of their ancient viciousness by disguising it as modern practice. Leroux saw banking as a latter-day form of crucifixion. And in the railways they had found the perfect instrument of their dominion. For the railways were, after all, against nature. They murdered space; turned the serene contemplation of landscape into a mad whirl, a ‘kaleidoscope’. Travel, said Ruskin, dulled in exact proportion to its velocity, and the railways did nothing except turn humans into ‘living parcels’. By contracting time and killing distance, they scrambled a sense of being somewhere. When Heine famously described his being able, courtesy of the railways, to smell the Berlin lindens while still in Paris and sense the North...