Why the Jews are good to think: Reflections on Chad Alan Goldberg’s Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought

The central figures associated with sociology’s formative period shared a preoccupation with coming to terms with modernity, which meant in part discerning what modernity actually amounts to and in part sorting out the societal processes associated with the shift from tradition to modernity, along with the potential problems associated with that shift. Generations of scholars who have plumbed the history of the discipline have explored this terrain, and thus one might ask whether scholars are capable of offering anything new. Chad Alan Goldberg’s invaluable new book, Modernity and the Jews, offers a convincing “yes” to the question. He examines how a selection of what are acknowledged to be the most consequential early practitioners of sociology in France (Émile Durkheim), Germany (Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber), and the United States (Robert E. Park) addressed this question. What is new is that he does so through the unique vantage of how they located Jews vis-à-vis gentiles in relation to the premodern/modern binary, and in so doing he succeeds in shedding new light on their thinking.

Goldberg is a gifted writer, capable of writing about complex ideas produced by scholars who were not themselves always models of clarity in a precise and clear manner that illustrates the virtues of lucidity. Moreover, the scholarship underpinning the book is truly impressive, evidencing a thorough command of the primary texts that constitute the core of his exegetical examinations as well as the most relevant secondary literature. The latter includes not only the major publications that one would expect to see, but also any number of largely forgotten or less well-known texts. Two examples will suffice: for the former, Benjamin Nelson’s (1949) The Idea of Usury and for the latter, James Aho’s (1975) German Realpolitik and American Sociology. It is unnecessary to belabor the point, but not only did Goldberg dig deep into the relevant literature from the past, but that literature is complemented by the most current scholarship. This includes Joachim Radkau’s (2009) Weber biography, Marcel Fournier’s (2013) Durkheim biography, and Aldon Morris’s (2015) The Scholar Denied, an account of the sociological career of W. E. B. Du Bois that treats Park as the narrative’s bête noire.

The book cannot be read without thinking about it in the present context of antisemitism as a central feature in the rise of extremist White nationalism in Europe and America – that along with the rise of anti-Black and anti-Brown racism looks very much like the return of the repressed. Jonathan Weisman’s (2018) (((Semitism))): Being Jewish in the Age of Trump (the title’s parentheses are an alt-right antisemitic symbol used to highlight Jewish names) represents one secular Jewish journalist’s personal encounter with the vile nature of neo-fascist social media assaults and his attempt to make sense of what’s happening and what might be done to stop it. Interviewed on the National Public Radio program “Fresh Air” by its host and executive producer Terry Gross on 19 March 2018, Weisman described the eerie feeling of seeing played out the old tropes reminiscent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. From tiki torches in 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, and chants of “Jews will not replace us,” to the burning of kosher groceries and an attack on a synagogue in Paris in 2014, to leaders of Alternative für Deutschland promoting historical revisionism, to the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the evidence is all too clear that Weisman’s eerie feeling reflects the disturbing rise of antisemitism in the twenty-first century. The present is complicated by the simultaneous rise of Islamophobia and the role of Muslim immigrants in further fueling antisemitism.

Closer to the time frame of the scholars analyzed in Goldberg’s book, I read it shortly after a visit to Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris to pay homage to Durkheim. Discovering that French military officer Alfred Dreyfus was also buried there, I sought out his grave. Based on the stones placed on it, his resting place, like Durkheim’s, is an important pilgrimage site. Durkheim’s support of Dreyfus, according to Steven Lukes (1973), was predicated on his view that the Dreyfus Affair had succeeded in “introducing into political life a new degree of moral seriousness and political participation” (p. 333). The exonerated Dreyfus lived a free man until his death in 1935. What caught my attention was that on the tombstone containing the names of several family members, with Alfred at the head, was the name of the person directly below him: Madeline Levy. She was Dreyfus’s granddaughter. The translated inscription reads, “Deported to Germany, disappeared in Auschwitz, age 25” (this was in 1944).

The point of these historical markers is that cerebral, abstract discourses on the role and place of Jews in Europe and America are always articulated in social environments that are simultaneously permeated with groups consumed by visceral antipathy toward Jews. Thus, during the era germane to Modernity and the Jews, the migration of eastern European Jews to the United States was not a typical labor migration in the way that was true of the other large immigrant groups, Italians and Poles. Rather, Jews constituted an admixture of labor migrant and asylum seeker. Goldberg is acutely aware of this general fact, and his analyses of the classics are accordingly contextualized – as with his discussion of the Dreyfus Affair. That being said, one comes away from the book with a sense that only two of the sociological giants he analyzed attempted to, in a serious way, factor the social reality of antisemitism into their work: Durkheim in the most sustained way and Park in a more oblique manner.

In his review of the book in Contemporary Sociology, Daniel Chirot (2018) ponders why it is that “Jews have played such an outsized, mostly negative role in the imagination of Christians and Muslims” given that “there have never been that many Jews” (p. 712). His answer focuses on Jews as “visible carriers of capitalism,” whose “relative success” made them “ideal modern scapegoats.” He is, however, not convinced by Goldberg’s analysis, suspecting that the “book may go too far in making Jews so central to the creation of modern sociology” (Chirot, 2018: 713). He arrives at this assessment without actually engaging the distinctiveness of Goldberg’s (2017) thesis, which is concerned with the “symbolic function of Jews and Judaism in social thought” (p. 115). A succinct summary of what Goldberg is getting at occurs in a section titled “Why the Jews Are Good to Think” in the book’s concluding chapter. The phrase is a take on Claude Lévi-Strauss’ claim that totemic emblems are chosen, “not because they are ‘good to eat’ but because they are ‘good to think’.” Goldberg thus proposes to consider Jews in an analogous way, which calls for seeing them in relational terms, seeing the “relationship between Jews and Christians [as forming] a code for signifying the relationship between premodernity and modernity.”

The book is predicated on a view that, at least for the scholars scrutinized, Jews were considered to occupy a unique social space in western Europe and North America, one in which they constituted an Other unlike any other Other. They explored this proposition – explicitly or implicitly – by concentrating on differing aspects of modernity. These differences, which informed emerging distinctions that would hereafter shape distinctive though interrelated national sociological traditions, are the stuff of much debate, generally pitting splitters who stress the distinctiveness of national sociologies versus the lumpers who see the potential for convergence from the start and the acceleration of it ever since (see, for example, Gusfield, 1997; Levine, 1995). Goldberg (2017: 10) does not get mired in these debates, content to concur with Donald Levine (1995) about the existence of national differences without delving into the cultural and philosophical reasons for those differences or overstating them. Instead, he points to the way that each tradition deployed a different synecdoche: the legacy of 1789 in France, capitalism in Germany (Chirot’s sole focus), and urbanization in the United States. The book’s analytic framework is deceptively simple – capable of being summarized in a two-by-two table locating the various thinkers under investigation in terms of whether they considered Jews to be custom-bound premodern traditionalists or harbingers of modernity and whether that assessment is seen in a positive or negative light.

Goldberg’s account begins with France. If the French were still trying to sort out the meaning and significance of the French Revolution in the 1980s, on the eve of its two-hundredth anniversary, this was an interpretive battle pitting intelligentsia of various ideological stripes situated in a liberal democracy. A century earlier, when Émile Durkheim came of age during the formative years of the Third Republic, the battles were of a quite different nature, for the nation had lurched during the nineteenth century between a new regime seeking to instantiate itself and the old regime seeking to restore the status quo ante. It was in this highly contested and politically volatile context that Durkheim’s sociological vision developed. Durkheim’s single-minded and unwavering intention as a scholar was to advance sociology as a discipline in the French academy. His motivation was underpinned by his conviction that this new science of society had the capacity to advance understanding of the different bases of solidarity in traditional versus modern societies, the goal being to assist in effecting the transition to modernity by offering guidance about how to mitigate the pathologies that inevitably resulted during a period of rapid social change. The partisan Durkheim’s defense of and support for the Third Republic reflect his embrace of the modern, a moral commitment to which he was likewise unwavering. There was, thus, a seamless character to Durkheim’s sustained efforts to institutionalize sociology and his commitment to assisting in the success of the spirit of 1789 in overcoming the counterrevolutionary challenge posed by aristocrats, clerics, monarchists, and militarists.

Goldberg (2017) begins by observing that “the social and economic advances made by French Jews during the Third Republic coincided with renewed antisemitism in royalist, clerical, and socialist circles” (p. 18). He points to the contradictory claims advanced by reactionary versus radical antisemites. Whereas the former considered Jews to be a modernizing revolutionary vanguard and therefore constituted the enemy, the latter deemed them deeply rooted traditionalists whose worldview was at one with the old regime, and for that reason were condemned. In locating Jews on the advanced/backward continuum, Durkheim places them squarely in the backward category. Thus, his position constituted a repudiation of reactionary antisemites, which Goldberg (2017) summarizes in the following way: “mechanical solidarity – the very form of solidarity that reactionary antisemites wished to restore in France – is ironically epitomized by the very group whom they held responsible for its destruction” (p. 31).

Durkheim disagreed with radical antisemites, but the question arises about how he formulated his disagreement with them given that both saw Jews as backward. Here, Goldberg offers an intriguing and, I believe, compelling answer that revolves around differing understandings of the ultimate significance of the French Revolution. Durkheim embraced socialism, which along with democracy he saw as its legacy, but given the plasticity of what that term meant, it is not immediately clear what he took it to mean. Goldberg (2017: 33–34) states unequivocally that his was not a “socialism of fools,” while Fournier (2013: 211) contends that Durkheim did not view socialism as a “scientific doctrine,” but rather as a “plan for the reconstruction of societies, a programme for a collective life which does not yet exist.” As such, the centrality he attaches in his sociological work to education and morality must be understood in terms of their capacity to prod that reconstruction in beneficial ways. Key to this new form of collective life is the recognition that individualism is at the heart of the matter.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1969 [1835–1840]) introduced the idea of individualism into social thought, first Democracy in America and once again in The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Tocqueville, 1955 [1856]). We know from Fournier (2013: 39) that Durkheim read both books in 1881. What we do not know is his reaction to Tocqueville’s discussions of individualism. However, what we do know, based perhaps most explicitly on Durkheim’s (1969 [1898]) “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” is that he had a different conception of what individualism meant in the modern world. Steven Lukes (1973) aptly describes the essay as “a Dreyfusiste manifesto and an eloquent defense of liberalism,” and it articulates a vision of a new mode of solidarity predicated on “a religion in which the human person becomes a sacred object” (p. 339). It is on this point that Goldberg sees Durkheim mounting his critique of radical antisemites, whose exclusionary version of solidarity constitutes a throwback to mechanical solidarity, and thus reveals their deviation from the ideals of 1789.

The future of France’s Jewish community was thus tied to the success of those committed to the autonomy of the individual made possible by a new solidarity order, and the vehicle for that success was the Third Republic. However backward Durkheim thought that community to be, and however driven by an understandable defensiveness due to their historic marginalization, he thought they were capable of assimilation without necessarily leading to the withering away of their religiously based communal identity. In Suicide, Durkheim (1951 [1897]: 168) asserted that the Jewish propensity for educational success was an example of such marginalization, allowing Jews to be “better armed for the struggle” while doing little to undermine tradition-bound communal attachments. However, as his own family history suggests, there was more going on than he fully appreciated – perhaps because of a lack of self-reflexivity in his gaze on the community from which he came. For example, Alexander Riley (2015: 10) points out that Moïshe, Durkheim’s father and an Orthodox rabbi, was clean-shaven and his sartorial choices were modern. The family spoke French in the household, not Yiddish. Fournier (2013: 24) notes that the father supported his son’s decision to study in Paris, which he views as a reflection of Moïshe’s “modern side.” Perhaps in his haste to become modern, Durkheim did not sufficiently appreciate that the community he left behind in Épinal was also changing.

Goldberg begins his analysis of the German tradition by citing Friedrich Naumann’s claim that what the French Revolution is to the French in comprehending national identity, so is capitalism for the Germans. Unlike the preceding chapter, this one examines four thinkers: Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber. Several points stand out. First, the peripatetic exile Marx preceded the trio by a generation and never held an academic appointment – thus he was far removed from Germany’s academic mandarin culture. Second, Simmel, Sombart, and Weber were at various junctures in collegial relationships, and despite their contrasting views on a range of topics, there appeared to be an element of mutual respect. This calls for disentangling the personal from the scholarly. One can add to this the fact that Marx modified his views from his early to mature career, while Sombart moved from being an avowed Marxist to embracing Hitler’s National Socialism. Two – Marx and Simmel – were born into Jewish households where their fathers had converted to Christianity and where both, in fact, had been baptized into the Lutheran faith. What did this mean about their connections or lack thereof to the Jewish community? Two of these figures – Marx and Sombart – were explicitly anti-capitalist, while the other two appear to take it as an inevitable given. How Jews factored into their differing conceptual frameworks was thus intertwined with their reactions to capitalism tout court.

Goldberg (2017) proposes that in attempting to make sense of each of these thinkers, it is useful to concentrate on the role of “cultural schemas derived from Christian theology” in determining their respective understandings of the “relationship between Jews and modern capitalism” (p. 46). He begins his exegetical accounts with the early philosophical Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,” an essay that begins by offering a critique of the idea that political emancipation alone is sufficient to overcome human alienation. It was necessary, as his support for Jewish emancipation makes clear. However, to achieve genuine human freedom requires freedom from both religion and private property. The “sabbath Jew’s” attachment to religion is one manifestation of alienation. The other is a consequence of the role Jews play in economic life, which Marx sums up as “huckstering” and in which money becomes the “worldly god” of the “everyday Jew.” It is in this section of the essay that the antisemitic tropes appear, not simply condemning Jews, but going further to claim that while they initiated the process leading to money’s domination over humans, it has come to pervade the entire society: “the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations” (all quotes from Goldberg, 2017: 50).

Marx shifts his position in his mature work, viewing Jews instead as precursors to modern industrial capitalism, but not the main actors in the emerging system brought about by the Industrial Revolution. They are now associated primarily with a merchant and money-lending class predating the modern economy. Rather than Christians becoming Jews, as in the earlier formulation, Goldberg (2017) nicely describes a process of supersession in the following passage: “like the sculptures of Ecclesia ascendant over Synagoga displayed at cathedrals in Bamberg, Paris, Reims, Strasbourg, and elsewhere, Christian industry now dominated the Jewish commerce and usury that once promoted it” (p. 54).

Jerry Z. Muller (2010: 46) contends that the role of Jews and finance capital constituted a “three-way debate” between Simmel, Sombart, and Weber. This amounted to a very explicit debate between Sombart and Weber. Whereas the former argued in accord with the early Marx that Jews were responsible for the emergence of modern capitalism, Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis proved a powerful counterpoint. Weber, in his comparative studies of the ethical foundations of the major world religions, was searching for the reason that modern capitalism emerged precisely where it did and when it did. Since he concluded that it was the religious worldview of the Calvinist Protestant that jump-started modern capitalism, he needed to account for the role of Jews in this long-term historical process. His conclusion parallels the mature Marx’s supersessionist view, with the pariah capitalism of Jews being overtaken by industrial capitalism whose “spirit” was infused with Calvinist theology. Sombart had disagreed, contending that it was Jews and not Calvinists who were responsible for the modern capitalism that he despised. His contempt for capitalism was at one with his contempt for those responsible for it. When this took the form of distinguishing heroic from trading peoples, one can see the seeds of the antisemitism that with an embrace of German nationalism would lead him on the path to National Socialism. Leo Rogin (1941), writing shortly after Sombart’s death, concluded that his life trajectory meant that he “did not so much surrender to National Socialism as espouse it” (p. 493). Goldberg concludes that both Sombart and Weber viewed Jews negatively, but for Sombart it was because they reflected the modern, whereas for Weber it was quite the opposite.

Simmel is less easy to characterize. Indeed, while Goldberg (2017) concludes that he views Jews negatively due to their contribution to a money economy, he characterizes Simmel as providing “an ambivalent narrative of Judaization” (p. 55). This is because he was not univocally hostile to the rationalistic world made possible by money (Poggi, 1993). Moreover, I would suggest, though space does not permit elaboration, that there is an affinity between his and Durkheim’s respective understandings of individualism in the modern world. What is clear is that money is instrumental, abstract, and impersonal, contributing to what Eva Illouz (2007) called “cold intimacies.” However, a money economy is Janus-faced, for it also makes possible individual freedom insofar as it allows people to sever or attenuate the thick ties of primary groups, which in turn promotes a worldview rooted in a distinctly modern idea of individualism. Muller (2010) persuasively concludes that “Simmel’s contributions seem most prescient” because “he presented a conception of man under advanced capitalism that was far richer and more open than the caricatures of the purposeless accumulator or spiritless professional [of Weber] or the soulless calculator [of Sombart]” (pp. 59–60).

This leads to the third national case, the American tradition represented by Robert E. Park and his colleagues at the University of Chicago. We are well aware of Park’s intellectual debt to Simmel. While a similar debt to Durkheim is less obvious, there is evidence pointing to influence and an affinity between their thinking regarding the individual in modernity (Kivisto, 2017: 134; Matthews, 1977: 41–50). Because he was so thoroughly comfortable with an American culture that was individualistic and future-oriented, he had the most positive assessment of modernity and the least concern about the erosion of tradition. The city became the vehicle by which Park articulated a vision of modernity. He once wrote that the world “can be divided into two classes: those who reach the city and those who have not yet arrived” (Park, 1950: 167). With Chicago as his laboratory, he and his students were able to observe the impact of migrations on rapid urbanization. Chicago grew due to the influx of eastern and southern European immigrants, Midwestern rural dwellers, and rural Blacks from the American South.

Goldberg shows that in this cacophony of difference, Jews represented for Park a particular type best suited for modern urban culture. They were his exemplar of marginal men who had long been city dwellers, in contrast to most newcomers to the city. Far from the antisemitic trope of Jews as rootless cosmopolitans, Park saw them, as a consequence of their marginality, as “the more civilized human being” (quoted in Goldberg, 2017: 88), and thus as the prototype of the modern urbanite. He thought that such people were essential if progressive democratic vistas were to be advanced.

At this dark historical moment reflected in the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and America, it is good to reflect on lessons from the sociological past that can assist us in thinking through how best to advance a humane, liberal, and pluralistic democracy that can shape the dynamics of modernity. As Goldberg has shown, there is much to be learned from that past.