Changing the World
Music critic and novelist Norman
Lebrecht tells the story of how the marginalized Jewish community in 1847 moved
to the center of Western culture within one hundred years, yet continued to
live under the shadow of antisemitism. His history starts with the death of
composer Felix Mendelssohn and ends with U.N. resolution establishing the State
of Israel.
The book is written is a stream of
consciousness style that chronologically highlight different ways in which Jews
entered the cultural mainstream. Simply put, in order to be accepted Jews had
to be better and more innovative than their contemporaries. Early on we see the
actress and daughter of a prostitute Sarah Bernhardt establish herself as a pop
star. He tells of how Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” was influenced by his Jewish
wife Genevieve. After Bizet’s death Genevieve would establish a Paris salon
which introduces Marcel Proust to the world. Lebrecht highlights the importance
George Eliot’s (not Jewish) novel “Daniel Deronda” in influencing jump-starting
the Zionist movement and how the Dreyfus Affair shattered the complacency of
the rising Jewish middle class.
Because Lebrecht is a music critic he
has many vignettes on Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Kurt
Weil and Arnold Schoenberg, among others. Although he really doesn’t get into
the Jewish role in Hollywood he leaves space for director Michael Curtiz’s
“Casablanca.” Thus this book covers much more ground than covering the obvious
personalities of Marx, Freud, Disraeli, Trotsky and Einstein. He especially
notes the tragic figure of chemist Fritz Haber who invents the chemical
fertilizer industry but also plays a role in the development of poison gases
first for World War I and then later for the death camps.
There are three vignettes that
especially struck me. The first is how Eliza Davis, a friend of Charles
Dickens, get him to edit out Jewish references to Fagin in his “Oliver Twist.”
Second he sheds new light on the murder of Jewish diplomat Victor Arlozorov on a
Tel Aviv beach in 1934. Jabotinsky’s revisionists were initially tried and
later acquitted. Here Lebrecht fingers German intelligence agents under the
direction of Goering. Lastly he tells the very improbable, but true story, of
how Admiral Wilhelm Canaris chief of the Abwehr (German military intelligence)
gets the Lubavitcher Rebbe Yitzchak Schneersohn out of German occupied Poland
thereby enabling the sect to thrive in the United States.
I have a few minor quibbles with the
book. First Lebrecht leaves out the Talmudic injunction that Jews teach their
male children to read, making literacy an important attribute that gets
embedded into the DNA. Along with literacy, numeracy become important to
maintain the far flung trading relationships of Diaspora Jewry. And second, it
was the Gaon of Vilna who in the late 1700s opened up the yeshivas to secular
subjects that enabled Jews to catch the wave of the Enlightenment when
emancipation finally came in the 1800s.
Quibbles aside, there is much more to
Lebrecht’s marvelous book than described here. In this time of rising
antisemitism is important to remember how it was overcome.
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