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This masterwork of interpretative historical past starts with a daring announcement: the fashionable Age is the Jewish Age--and we're all, to various levels, Jews.

The statement is, in fact, metaphorical. however it underscores Yuri Slezkine's provocative thesis. not just have Jews tailored larger than many different teams to dwelling within the smooth global, they've got turn into the ideal image and traditional of recent lifestyles everywhere.

Slezkine argues that the Jews have been, in impact, one of the world's first loose brokers. They commonly belonged to a social and anthropological class often called "service nomads," an intruder workforce focusing on the supply of products and prone. Their function, Slezkine argues, used to be a part of a broader department of human exertions among what he calls Mercurians-entrepreneurial minorities--and Apollonians--food-producing majorities.

because the dawning of the fashionable Age, Mercurians have taken heart level. in reality, Slezkine argues, modernity is all approximately Apollonians turning into Mercurians--urban, cellular, literate, articulate, intellectually complicated, bodily fastidious, and occupationally versatile. seeing that no staff has been more proficient at Mercurianism than the Jews, he contends, those exemplary ancients are actually version moderns.

The publication concentrates at the drama of the Russian Jews, together with émigrés and their offspring in the USA, Palestine, and the Soviet Union. yet Slezkine has as a lot to claim in regards to the many faces of modernity--nationalism, socialism, capitalism, and liberalism--as he does approximately Jewry. Marxism and Freudianism, for instance, sprang mostly from the Jewish crisis, Slezkine notes, and either Soviet Bolshevism and American liberalism have been affected in primary methods by way of the Jewish exodus from the light of Settlement.

wealthy in its perception, sweeping in its chronology, and fearless in its research, this sure-to-be-controversial paintings is a vital contribution not just to Jewish and Russian background yet to the heritage of Europe and the US as well.