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

by Simon Schama

If anyone had reason to assume that his Jewish and Russian identities were unproblematically twinned, it was Pinsker; yet the pogroms and the tepid attitude of authority to both prevention and correction taught him this was not so. He also came to the shocking realisation that the optimism of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among Odessa Jews was all idle piety. The truism that hatred would dissipate with education, and with easy social familiarity between Jews and non-Jews, was a vain comfort. Anti-Semitism was not an anachronism destined to disappear with the conquest of modernity; it was modernity, as up-to-date and future-friendly as electricity and the railway. This was because it was a psychic disease, one capable of infinite mutation. Pinsker the diagnostician observed a moral metastasis eating through the body of modernity. Better than almost any other Jewish commentator on anti-Semitism, he understood how ancient phantasies cohabited with modern habits; and the particular madness, ‘a demonopathy’, he identified was the fear of ghosts, zombies. The Jews walked through the fears of the non-Jewish mind as alien beings, neither wholly alive nor satisfyingly dead; both there and not there; mercurial, slippery, immune to exorcism through banishment, conversion or any number of brutal bashings. Worse, they kept coming back as successes, masters of the modern world; hobgoblins of capitalism. The Jews themselves were not without responsibility for this phobia...