AS HISTORIAN YURI SLEZKINE WROTE, Jews at the start of the twentieth century had three great “destinations”—the metropolises of America, the great cities of the Soviet Union, and the arid rough of Palestine—each representing “alternative ways of being modern.” Even before Nazis had destroyed most of Europe’s Jews, these three destinations had become capitals of Jewish life. Well before mid-century, most Jews called one or the other of them home.1
In each of these places, as we have seen, science played a large role in the lives and livelihoods of Jews, and not only that—science played a similarly large role. In New York, Moscow, and Jerusalem, Jews extolled the virtues of science in different languages but in like terms. In all three destinations, Jews of substance praised science as a means to create a more perfect society, to better defend their adoptive homeland, and to more surely advance all of humanity. There were those, too, who said that science might help to demonstrate once and for all that Jews had finally earned a place in the society in which they lived, in their homeland, in the family of humanity.
This similar affinity for science that one finds among Jews in the United States, the USSR, and mandatory Palestine is a puzzling historical fact. What accounts for it? The three great Jewish destinations differed in large ways and small; indeed, they could hardly have been more diverse. As Slezkine observed, each had its own ism: liberalism in the United States, Communism in the Soviet Union, and Zionism in Palestine. The impacts of these broad ideologies on the lives of those who lived in their light and shadows were complicated and variegated, but they were never negligible. The material challenges facing Jewish immigrants in each of the three destinations differed greatly. Just as Jewish pushcarts were appearing on New York’s Lower East Side, they were disappearing in Moscow’s Otrendoe neighborhood, banned as an ugly vestige of an outmoded social economy—the same reasons for which they were disparaged in the Hadar quarter of Haifa. The cultural challenges facing Jewish immigrants in each destination differed greatly, too. What it meant to be a Jew, or to cease to be a Jew, was largely a function of geography, leaving Americans a set of options—Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist, Ethical Culture, atheist, and more—that differed greatly from the choices faced by Soviet Jews and, in turn, by Jews in Palestine. At the same time, the institutions in which sciences were taught and practiced differed enormously from place to place.
That these three very different places produced among Jews attitudes toward science that were not so very different—and in some aspects were quite similar—is a curious fact that demands an explanation. It is like the scenario in a sci-fi movie when a crew from earth settles on a distant planet and discovers creatures who breathe air and speak English. At first this seems natural enough; upon reflection, it comes to seem impossibly, laughably, weird. It defies reason and begs explanation.
When explanations have been given in the past, the similar pull that science had for Jews in the United States, the USSR, and Palestine has usually been attributed to traits of mind putatively shared by these distant Jews, to their similar yiddisher-kupfitude. Sometimes these explanations take a biological slant (generations bred Jews to be clever, endowing them with naturally selected brains that excel equally under capitalism, Communism, and Zionist collectivism) and sometimes a cultural slant (because of generations of venerating learning, Jews were trained to hit the books with enthusiasm, be they Talmudic tractates or physics monographs). Whether biology or culture, these explanations posit that Jews are Jews and that something in their character accounts for the alacrity with which they take to science, whether they are in Chicago, Kharkov or Kfar Saba.
As I wrote in this book’s introduction, explanations of this sort do not survive scrutiny. For one thing, they offer no account of why, with only a few exceptions, Jews were mostly indifferent to science and displayed no special talents for it until the first decades of the twentieth century. For another, the notion that natural selection endowed Jews with special genius in the short span (by evolutionary standards, anyway) that they have been around is a biological implausibility. And while it may be true that learning held a place of honor among many Jews in the generations prior to the twentieth century, it is equally true that relatively few Jews at the beginning of that century had benefited from sustained and nourishing educations, religious or secular. Many, probably most, of the Jewish PhDs and professors described in this book came from homes with few books and even fewer framed diplomas hanging on the wall. The world of letters is in desperate need of a good book about Jewish benightedness; in its absence, we overestimate time and again the bookish cultivation of Jews.
But if Jewish brains and Jewish habits of mind are not enough to explain why Jews in the three very different places described in this book shared a similar affinity to science, what is? What thread was common to the three destinations?
At the simplest level, the common thread was a web of common threads. Although the three destinations lay at great distances (both physical and ideological) from one another, and though transcontinental travel in the first decades of the twentieth century was exhausting and expensive, links between the communities were durable, enduring, and spirited. An urgent paradox of Jewish history in the first half of the twentieth century is that while it cannot be accurately described outside of national contexts (American Jewish history is ineluctably American Jewish history), at the same time it cannot be accurately described within national borders alone (American Jewish history makes no sense except in light of European Jewish history and Zionist history).
In December 1906, by way of illustration, Dr. Shmaryahu Lewin came to Manhattan from Russia after a portentous summer. In May of that year, Lewin had been the first Jew elected in the first Russian Duma, and as a representative of the Constitutional Democratic Party, he put forth proposals for expanding the civil rights of Jews, eliminating Russia’s death penalty, and reducing the authority of the tsar. By July, Nicholas II had dissolved the Duma. The state of affairs in Russia and, especially, the status of the Jews who remained there was of intimate interest to the multitudes of émigrés building new lives for themselves in New York, and throughout his three-week visit to New York, Lewin was greeted by throngs eager to hear his report and assessment. Arriving at the Durland’s Riding Club on Central Park West, Lewin was met by “probably the largest gathering of Jews ever seen in the city”2 (well over ten thousand people, according to the Times, including “Jews from every quarter of the metropolis, poor Jews and rich Jews, laboring men and capitalists”).3 The banker and Jewish leader and philanthropist Jacob Schiff opened the evening, observing that the fate of Russia’s Jews “is a cause which makes our hearts beat higher and stronger” and “one with which the people of this city are in sympathy.”4 “Give the Jew the right of citizenship,” he continued, “and whereas today they call him a curse, they will then call him a blessing.”5
Then Lewin proceeded to speak, in German until the crowd chided him to switch to Yiddish. He spoke for eighty minutes to a hushed, rapt throng about the sorry state of Russia’s Jews, about the unsteady hope of the Duma, about the impressive successes of his countrymen who had moved to America, and, in conclusion, about the importance for Jews everywhere to devote themselves to building a Jewish homeland in Palestine. When he finished speaking, the crowd swelled toward the stage, buckling the rostrum and sending dozens tumbling. The New York Tribune reported that Golde Rabinowitz, wife of Sholem Aleichem, the acclaimed Russian Jewish writer who had immigrated to the city only a year before, “became hysterical when she thought her husband had gone down in the crash,” recovering when she learned he was unharmed.6 Lewin also spoke to rapturous crowds in Boston. Over the next years, he would return to Russia (thousands saw him off at Grand Central Plaza),7 move to Germany, and return to America, before finally moving to Palestine. Throughout these years, and in all these places, he gave much of his energy to raising money and gathering political support for the establishment of the Technicum in Haifa.8
Lewin was a remarkable figure, but in being at once a figure of importance in Russia, the United States, and Palestine he was hardly unique. Chaim Weizmann, of course, was Russian, English, and Palestinian (in time, Israeli), and a figure of adulation in the United States.9 Many other examples could be provided, but the point is a simple one: traffic between the newly emerging centers of Jewish life—in America, in the cities of Russia (and then the Soviet Union), and in mandatory Palestine—was constant and lively and filled with substance.10 It is hardly surprising that certain cultural patterns—among them, the affinity toward science that emerged in each center—would be part of this traffic.
But deeper forces were also at play. For one thing, it was not just Jews in America who had come to “the New World.” Jews leaving the Pale and settling in the cities of revolutionary Russia had come to their own new world. And Jews streaming to Palestine had come to a new world of their own. For most Jews in the first decades of the twentieth century, there were only new worlds. This was a fundamental commonality among a great many Jews, more fundamental than much of what divided them.
In the cases of Russia and Palestine, it was clear even to those of the most modest aspirations that momentous change could be at hand. In Russia, even in the years before the revolution—years of pogroms and of fitful, half-hearted, and ephemeral reforms—Jews had good reason to believe that their grandchildren would inhabit a society vastly different from that of their grandparents.11 After the revolution, this could hardly be doubted. On April 14, 1917, the Central Committee of the Russian Bund, the Jewish Communist Party in Russia, sent a cablegram from Petrograd to New York addressed to “all Jewish Workingmen of America”:
Today the Central Committee of the Bund congratulates the American proletariat and all American Jewish workmen upon the greatest victory the working classes have ever achieved. Great and invaluable is the international importance of the Russian revolution. Today Russian working-men enter the world’s democracy as equals. The time of the international is nearer, the world is free from gendarmes, and the revolutionary energy of the German proletariat is awakening. Peace will be made by really free nations. … The Russian Revolution opens new avenues to all Russian Socialists, to Jewish workingmen and the Bund.… The full realization of the social democratic program … is no more a dream, but a real possibility.… With one blow the Russian Revolution has conquered Czarism, abolished all restrictions, and opened a new page in Jewish history. The liberation of the Jewish nation is in the faithful hands of the revolutionary Russian nation.12
At their most hortatory and hopeful, Jews streaming to Palestine and those Zionists who supported them from distant shores were hardly less confident of the revolutionary importance of their undertakings. From Mendes’ prediction that a Jewish state would visit upon the world “universal peace, universal brotherhood, universal happiness,”13 to Herzl’s belief that it would provide a laboratory in which the best ideas of the West could be tried and perfected, to the faith of early kibbutz members that they were rewriting the rules of agriculture, economics, sex, family, and ultimately, human nature, to Abba Eban’s assurance that a new Jewish state could do for the developing world what none of the great nations of Europe or North America could, a great many Zionists were brashly certain that theirs was a revolutionary undertaking of global scale and timeless importance. Even a shopkeeper in Tel Aviv, making a living in a way not much different from that of his father or grandfather, might well believe that he was forging a new and better world.
And the same could be true for Jews in America, that most unrevolutionary of new worlds. Bernard Gerson Richards, a journalist and the founder of the Jewish Information Bureau of New York, introduced a 1903 essay, “Zionism and Socialism,” with a story: “In one of the Jewish bookstores on the East Side of New York, an ardent member of a Zionist society was offering to sell tickets to its annual ball to all who entered. A young man came in to buy his daily Yiddish paper. He was accosted by the Zionist. ‘No,’ said the customer, disdainfully, ‘I do not want any of these tickets.’ ‘Ah,’ said the ticket-vendor, angrily, ‘you are one of those Socialists.’ ”14
Even in New York, many Jews at the start of the century dreamed of this new world or that. Having decided to quit Russia for America, before he ever boarded a boat, Abraham Cahan found his fellow emigrants in a utopian reverie: “A spirit of prophecy was here. A man on the street would suddenly begin an impassioned speech on the world-wide brotherhood which was to grow out of our American communist colonies. Our idea, he said, would spread all over the earth; there was to be one language for all humanity, and an end to all tyranny, misery and injustice. The whole world would be changed!”15
Most Jews who came to America sought, not to change the whole world, but rather to improve their own meager circumstances. “In America,” Cahan wrote, “a ‘shister’ [shoemaker] could soon become a ‘mister,’ ” and this homely aspiration tugged on the imaginations of most immigrant Jews more than anything Marx or Herzl ever wrote.16 But even Jews whose most radical wish was to graduate from shister to Mister found that they, too, sought a new world. Jews eagerly paging through want ads sought a world in which “Christians only” did not appear. Jews dreaming that their children would study in the best universities in the land, and then in its best medical schools, sought a world without quotas. Jews wishing to send their children to the public schools sought a world in which pupils were not forced to mouth Christian prayer, or study the New Testament, or sing of Christ’s glory at Christmastime. Jews wishing to pursue economic opportunities wherever they saw them sought a new world in which the Klan had no power and no place.
For most Jews in the first decades of the twentieth century—whether they found themselves in Russia, America, Palestine, or Poland, Germany, England, France or any of the dozens of other countries which they occupied—there were only new worlds. The social forms that defined the lives of their grandparents were unavailable (and in any case hardly appealing) to a great many Jews in a great many places at this time.17 Relatively few Jews even lived in the same region that their grandparents had. And as the twentieth century proceeded, fewer and fewer shared a mother tongue with their grandparents. Especially in the three great destinations that have been the focus of our attention, Jews faced new opportunities that could hardly have been imagined in prior generations, of living in new ways and forging new relationships with the rest of the world, their neighbors near and far. In the first decades of the twentieth century, this experience—of facing a future in a new world, perhaps with enthusiasm, perhaps with trepidation—was a great shared experience, perhaps the great shared experience, of many Jews in widely different places.
And it was this great shared experience that begins to explain the affinity and ardor these far-spread Jews shared for science. Like many others at this time, a good many believed that the rise of science was corrosive of the “old world”—the old social orders in which their prospects were limited. And like many others of the day, a good many believed that the ideals and values that science might deliver might produce societies that were at once better and better for Jews. Like the Scottish-Jewish mathematician Hyman Levy, many believed that science demands that statements of fact (and, by extension, whatever policies might be based on them) be “invariant with respect to the individual,”18 meaning that science was at odds with the sort of discrimination that often stood between Jews and the education they desired, the jobs they sought, and the public standing they longed for.
With the American Jewish sociologist Robert Merton, these Jews believed that science demands honesty, integrity, skepticism, disinterestedness, impersonality, and other values that could only make the societies in which they lived more welcoming to Jews.19 Like the German-American Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas, they were certain that science insisted that “a citizen be judged solely by the readiness with which he fits himself into the social structure and by the value of his contributions to the country’s development,” and not by accidents of birth and belief.20 With the American Jewish physicist Robert Oppenheimer, many maintained that “science has brought all the different quarters of the globe so close together that it is impossible to isolate them one from another … [and] if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together in the same world at peace.”21 Like Russian Jewish sinologist Vitaly Rubin, many noticed that in the scientific faculties of universities (like Moscow University, where Rubin studied), “the Jewish Question did not arise there. Not only did it not arise in the form of anti-semitism; it did not arise at all.”22 And like the Russian-English Palestinian-Jewish chemist Chaim Weizmann, many Jews saw in science “a commonwealth of learning freely open to all men and women of every creed and race [through which] political strife and division cease and all creeds and races will … be united in the great common task of searching for truth, [producing] a future pregnant with possibilities not only for the Jews or for Palestine, but also for the awakening East and for mankind at large.”23 And like the Polish-Russian, Turkish-educated Palestinian-Jewish David Ben Gurion, who served as Israel’s first prime minister, many Jews believed that the Jewish state reflected “the best of the Western scientific tradition—scientific honesty, respect for merit, self-criticism, and reward based on competence.”24
These very different people from very different circumstances with very different aspirations understood the ethos of twentieth-century science in a startlingly similar way.25 They all saw science as a progressive force that would replace arbitrary old orders (with their fealties to class, rank, and religious and cultural pedigrees that had long ensured the exclusion of all but a few Jews from the seats of power, wealth, and public esteem) with new orders based on fact not faith, achievement not pedigree, and innovation not whorish fealty to hoary ways. Also, they saw science as a universal-ist and universalizing force. (“Science is wholly independent of national boundaries and races and creeds,” wrote Franz Boas in his manifesto, signed by 1,284 of the world’s leading scientists.)26
It was the hearty appeal of this universalism for Jews in the first half of the twentieth century that seemed to Jean Paul Sartre the very soul of the Jews he had observed in Europe, Palestine, and North America. Writing in 1944, a fraught moment soon after the liberation of Paris, Sartre explained this appeal:
Of all things in the world, reason is the most widely shared; it belongs to everybody and to nobody; it is the same to all. If reason exists, then there is no French truth or German truth; there is no Negro truth or Jewish truth. There is only one Truth, and he is best who wins it. In the face of universal and eternal laws, man himself is universal. There are no more Jews or Poles; there are men who live in Poland, others who are designated as “of Jewish faith” on their family papers, and agreement is always possible among them as soon as discussion bears on the universal. … The best way to feel oneself no longer a Jew is to reason, for reasoning is valid for all and can be retraced by all. There is not a Jewish way of mathematics; the Jewish mathematician becomes a universal man when he reasons.27
Science itself, reason itself, seemed to demand that the Jewish mathematician not only view himself as “a universal man,” but that he be viewed that way by all others who took science and reason seriously. Sartre was savaged by critics of his day for missing the complexity of Jewish experience,28 or for misconstruing Jews altogether (“I was surprised,” wrote Octavia Paz, “by his saying that Judaism, the least universal of the three monotheisms, is the origin and foundation of this hope [for universal and universalist goodwill]: Judaism is a closed fraternity”).29 Sartre had, in fact, essentialized Jewish experience in a way that overlooked its great variety in different epochs and locales. But he had captured something true about his moment, when many Jews throughout the West sought to be treated where they found themselves as human beings rather than Jews, and saw in science an aid to reach that end. And like Mosei Gran and the other editors of the Leningrad journal Problems of the Biology and Pathology of Jews, they saw science as doing this in two ways at once: reforming Jews and reforming the societies in which they lived, leaving each less closed and less fraternal than they had been before.
This yearning of many Jews for a new world, one in which they could find a place on terms unlike any their parents and grandparents had known, was what was common to Jews in the very different new worlds of New York, Moscow, and Tel Aviv. It was this yearning for new worlds, too, that explains what Jewish affinity for science shares with other Jewish predilections of the day. Scholars have argued that the desire to portray on screens across America a society that embraced all its sons and daughters was a part of what drew Jews to Hollywood in such numbers, at the same time and in the same way they were drawn disproportionately to Harvard. Others have argued that a wish to help fashion a new society of Soviets, in which the old tsarish prejudices were remembered as obscene and bygone history, was part of what drew Jews to the Soviet police forces (and especially the secret police) and army in such large numbers, at the same time and in the same way they were drawn to research laboratories.30 And it may be that a wish to help fashion a new society of collectivist equality and ruddy agrarian health was part of what drew Jews to kvutzot and kibbutzim, at the same time and in the same way that they were drawn to a Hebrew University. Science was not the only way in which Jews in the first half of the twentieth century sought to build a new world. It was not the most important. But in every place that Jews set out to reform themselves and the places they lived, a great many saw in science a tool, powerful and true, to do so. This was a source of its appeal not just to those who saw in science a vocation, but also to the Jewish lay leaders and rabbis, politicians, philanthropists and public intellectuals, writers and businessmen, and so many more whose enthusiasm for science was, in place after place, unmatched by any of the other groups among whom they lived.
Over the past half-century, this enthusiasm has lost some of its force for Jews in at least some of the places they find themselves. Throughout the West, science has lost some of its appeal over the last six decades. Hiroshima was, for many, the start of a long nightmare in which science produces menace, not progress. As deserts spread, and storms grow more violent and unruly, many wonder if science and scientific technologies have not given rise to problems that scientists and technologists are unable to solve. When tyrants and zealots can produce deadly viruses in dirty laboratories using recipes they download from the Internet, the notion that science and scientific technologies by their nature spur progress, award merit, and militate against age-old hatreds like anti-Semitism has come to seem quaint and implausible.
What’s more, the role that science plays in Western societies, and the image of the scientist, are very different now than they were when, say, Einstein wrote to Roosevelt to propose that the president take “quick action” to build an atomic bomb.31 Einstein could advise politicians about political decisions precisely because his scientific expertise was taken to transcend politics. Science conferred on Einstein a voice not as a citizen, and certainly not as a Jew, but as a faithful representative of scientific knowledge itself. This was part of the appeal of science in Einstein’s day—its ability to raise political debate above the province of gentlemen, where it had resided for so long, often to the exclusion of Jews. But science no longer has that ability, surely not to the degree that it did. “It is not usually possible any longer to depoliticize or depersonalize political decisions and actions,” political theorist Yaron Ezrahi explained in a recent lecture at Harvard. “This was pervasive before.”32 Science and scientists no longer have the status they did a century ago, and they are more often seen as embattled participants in political debates (on climate change, say, or genetic engineering or vaccination or teaching evolution in public schools, etc.), rather than objective arbiters of these debates. Not only did science cease to be seen, by many, as an admirable agent of democratic values; it increasingly came to be seen, by some, as an enemy of these same values. “Believing that they were forced to choose between democratic values and the benefits of science,” Andrew Jewett concluded, “many Americans were prepared to reject the dream of scientific democrats and their Enlightenment-inspired vision of a society modeled on the intellectual freedom of scientists.”33
Such considerations are only part of the story, of course. In the United States, science provided a solution to a problem that Jews no longer face in an acute way. American Jews today, as a group, enjoy wealth that American Jews of a century ago could hardly have imagined. The same is true for access to power wherever it resides, in politics, business, law, media, and academia. If science was seen in the first half of the twentieth century as a tool for a dual reform—making Jews more fit for American society and making American society more fit for Jews—such reforms are no longer needed. Intellectual traditions decline slowly, and the strength of American Jewish opposition to teaching “intelligent design” in public schools suggests that Jews continue to hold science in higher regard than any other ethnic or cultural group in the United States.34 Still, the high-water mark of Jewish avidity for science has passed and much of the passion has waned, as the steadily declining numbers of American Jews entering the sciences demonstrate.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the exodus of the greater part of the Jewish communities there ended with finality the remarkable, short-lived story of Soviet Jews and sciences. Only in Israel does it live on, although even there, each year fewer students study advanced physics, chemistry, biology, or mathematics in high school. Aaron Ciechanover, the Israeli biologist who won the 2004 Nobel Prize in chemistry, rages against the decline of science he sees around him, as demonstrated by “the school students’ declining results, the brain drain and the shortage of means for buying new research equipment. In much more difficult times for the state we saw David Ben-Gurion’s glowing face when he dedicated the new building for the Technion’s chemistry faculty. Today, not even a deputy minister from a marginal party would deign to attend such a ceremony. … We had a state with narrow roads and broad universities, not one with broad roads and narrow universities.”35
Still, for all that the attraction of science has diminished, the notion that science has something of particular merit, of moral mettle, remains strong in Israel, as it does among many Jews in America and elsewhere. The romance of science has quieted as the circumstances of Jews have changed, but it has not disappeared. All one need to do to see that this is true is to take a trip with a vanload of rabbinical students to Kentucky’s Creation Science Museum. Wandering the vitrines with the next generation of American Jewish leaders, registering their surprise, measuring their disappointment and their mounting despair, you will see how alive science remains in the political, social, and yes, religious imaginations of many American, and not just American, Jews. Indeed, the tumultuous last century of Jewish history, which saw both a methodical campaign to blot out Europe’s Jews and the inexorable absorption of Western Jews into the societies in which they now live, makes little sense except in light of the place of honor science has occupied—for a brief and momentous time—in Jewish imaginations. Through the generations when Jews entered Western societies in great numbers, science was a vivid feature of their dreams of refashioning these societies to ensure that they maintained a place for Jews.