Alexander Von Humboldt: um gigante da ciência mundial - Nathaniel Rich (NYRBooks)

O Brasil, infelizmente, aparece pouco, ou quase nada, nos trabalhos de Alexander Von Humboldt, pois as autoridades portuguesas deram ordens aos seus agentes aduaneiros nas fronteiras norte do país para justamente impedir o seu ingresso no território português do Brasil, por volta de 1800, quando ele se encontrava na Venezuela, querendo passar do Orenoco ao Amazonas. Mais uma vez, ou precocemente, ficamos fora da história, como agora mesmo por exemplo, quando os companheiros nos deixam às margens da economia mundial. Os companheiros são os portugueses restritivos da atualidade.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

The Very Great Alexander von Humboldt - 

Nathaniel Rich

OCTOBER 22, 2015 ISSUE

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World

by Andrea Wulf

Knopf, 473 pp., $30.00

After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene

by Jedediah Purdy

Harvard University Press, 326 pp., $29.95

Museo de la Ciudad de México/Gianni Dagli Orti/Art Archive/Art Resource

Alexander von Humboldt, 1803

Humboldt’s hog-nosed skunk, the Humboldt penguin, the Humboldt squid, and more than a hundred other animal species; Humboldt’s Lily, Humboldt’s Schomburgkia, and three hundred other plant species; the minerals Humboldtit, Humboldtilith, and Humboldtin; Humboldt Limestone, Humboldt Oolite, the Humboldt Formation, the Humboldt Current; Humboldt Redwoods State Park, Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, Parque Nacional Alejandro de Humboldt; Mont Humboldt, Humboldt Mountain, Humboldt Peak, and Humboldt ranges in China, South Africa, and Antarctica; Humboldt Falls, Humboldt Glacier, Humboldt Bay, the Humboldt River, the Humboldt Sink, the Humboldt Salt Marsh; four Humboldt counties and thirteen Humboldt towns in North America alone, the Humboldt crater and Mare Humboldtianum on the moon, and asteroid 54 Alexandra, orbiting the sun.

The Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) is all around us. Yet he is invisible. “Alexander von Humboldt has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world,” writes Andrea Wulf in her thrilling new biography. “It is almost as though his ideas have become so manifest that the man behind them has disappeared.” Wulf’s book is as much a history of those ideas as it is of the man. The man may be lost but his ideas have never been more alive.

Humboldt’s legacy appeared certain at the time of his death, when he was the most famous scientist in the world. His funeral in Berlin was the grandest ever accorded to a private German individual; a procession of tens of thousands of mourners followed for a mile behind his hearse, pulled by the king’s horses. American newspapers eulogized him as the “most remarkable man ever born” and lamented the end of the “age of Humboldt.” His portrait hung on the walls of state buildings from London to Bangkok.

A decade later, on the centennial of Humboldt’s birth, parades, concerts, and firework shows were held in Moscow, Alexandria, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Melbourne, and dozens of American cities. Fifteen thousand marched in Syracuse, President Ulysses Grant joined a huge celebration in Pittsburgh, and 25,000 assembled in Central Park, in the midst of a euphoric citywide bonanza. The New York Times devoted its entire front page to the global festivities.

Times changed. Anti-German sentiment after World War I, the specialization and Balkanization of the sciences, and the passage of time conspired to dilute Humboldt’s public standing, particularly in the United States. He was eclipsed by devoted disciples—among them Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, Ernst Haeckel, and John Muir—who developed his insights in new ways. But times have changed again. In our Anthropocene age Humboldt’s theories read like prophecy. More important, they offer wisdom about the way forward. It is impossible to read The Invention of Nature without contracting Humboldt fever. Wulf makes Humboldtians of us all.

Humboldt was born during the era in which human beings stopped fearing nature and began to control it. The steam engine, the smallpox vaccine, and the lightning rod were rapidly redefining man’s relationship with the natural world. Timekeeping and measuring systems became standardized, and the few blank spaces remaining on world maps were quickly filling in. In New England, the colonists spoke of “reclaiming” North America from the wilderness, a project inextricable from the propagation of democracy. The jurist James Kent, seeking a legal basis for seizing land from Native Americans, argued that the continent was “fitted and intended by Providence to be subdued and cultivated, and to become the residence of civilized nations.” Explorers like James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville circumnavigated the globe and published their journals, which Humboldt read avidly as a boy.

Humboldt’s father was a chamberlain in the Prussian court and a confidant to the future king, who was godfather to Humboldt; his mother, the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer and member of the Prussian civil service, was of Huguenot descent. Alexander and his older brother Wilhelm spent winters in Berlin and summers at the family castle in Tegel but their childhoods were lonely. Their father died when Alexander was nine and their mother was severe and cold. Though the brothers were close, and remained so their entire lives—Wilhelm would become a linguist and philosopher—their only companions were the private tutors who gave them a rigorous education in the classics.

Humboldt was desperate to escape this claustrophobic environment but afraid to abandon his mother. “There is a drive in me,” he wrote in a letter, “that often makes me feel as if I’m losing my mind.” He likened this drive to being chased perpetually by “10,000 pigs.” After university he became an inspector in the Ministry of Mines, a job that satisfied his mother’s desire for him to ascend the ranks of the Prussian civil service, while allowing him to travel widely across the kingdom and conduct personal experiments in geology, anatomy, and electricity. It was not until his mother’s death of cancer in 1796, when he was twenty-seven, that he felt free. He did not attend her funeral.

Supported by the windfall of his inheritance, he abandoned his mining career and planned a “great voyage” to a distant location. The destination did not seem to make much difference—he considered the West Indies, Lapland, Greece, and Siberia, before settling on South America, once he was offered a passport to the Spanish colonies from King Carlos IV himself. Nor did he have any specific object of study. He would analyze everything, from wind patterns and cloud structures to insect behavior and soil composition, collecting specimens, making measurements, and taking temperatures. He wanted no less than to discover how “all forces of nature are interlaced and interwoven.” He took as the premise of his expedition that the earth was “one great living organism where everything was connected.” The insights that followed from this premise would be worth more than all of the discoveries he made.

This is not to discount the value of those discoveries, which were later collected in his thirty-four-volume Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, published between 1807 and 1826. On his voyage Humboldt explored Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru, visiting many regions never before observed by a scientist. He identified two thousand new plant species at a time when only six thousand species were known. (More plants, animals, minerals, and places are named after Humboldt than anyone else.) He discovered the magnetic equator. He was the first European to explore and map the Casiquiare River, the only natural canal on earth to link two major river systems, the Orinoco and the Amazon. He was the first to conduct experiments on electric eels, which he dissected and held in his hands, enduring violent shocks.

Humboldt carried this kind of hands-on experimentation to manic extremes in his voracious quest for total knowledge. He drank river water (the Orinoco was particularly disgusting, while the Atabapo was “delicious”), chewed bark, copied and translated scientific manuscripts, made astronomical observations, gauged the blueness of the sky with a cyanometer, transcribed the vocabularies of indigenous tribes, and sketched Incan monuments and hieroglyphs of ancient civilizations deep in the Amazonian rainforest. He studied his own lice with a microscope.

At times The Invention of Nature reads like pulp explorer fiction, a genre at least partially inspired by Humboldt’s own travelogues. On the Chimborazo volcano, 17,000 feet above sea level, we find Humboldt crawling along a two-inch-wide ridge between a sheer icy cliff and a thousand-foot drop with “almost perpendicular walls…covered with rocks that protruded like knife blades.” Humboldt bathes in the Orinoco among crocodiles, gigantic boa constrictors, herds of capybaras, and jaguars. He contracts fevers, dysentery, blood infections, and nameless horrific Amazonian diseases. With his companion, the naturalist Aimé Bonpland, he scales every peak he can see in the Andes. When his shoes disintegrate, he continues barefoot. While traveling from Cuba to the Atlantic seaboard he sails straight into a hurricane, which lingers overhead for six days, inundating the ship so that the passengers must swim through the captain’s cabin, while sharks circle in the turbid waters.

Wulf, a design historian at the Royal College of Art in London and the author of two histories of gardening, seems liberated to have exited the garden. She has gone to near-Humboldtian lengths to research her book: traversing the Venezuelan rainforest, walking around Walden Pond “in deep freshly fallen snow,” hiking in Yosemite, and even climbing Chimborazo. She visited archives in California, Berlin, and Cambridge, where she read Humboldt’s dozens of books in German, Darwin’s copies of Humboldt’s books, and his personal files. (Humboldt, as manic in his correspondence as in all else, wrote more than 50,000 letters and received more than twice as many.) Wulf sought out, 12,000 feet high on Ecuador’s Antisana volcano, the dilapidated hut where Humboldt spent a night in 1802, and in Quito she found his original Spanish passport.

Rediscovering Humboldt is by this point a subgenre unto itself—recent entrants include Humboldt’s Cosmos (2004) by Gerard Helferich, Laura Dassow Walls’s The Passage to Cosmos (2011), and Aaron Sachs’s valuable The Humboldt Current (2006), which traces Humboldt’s influence on American environmental thought. But Wulf offers a more urgent argument for Humboldt’s relevance. The Humboldt in these pages is bracingly contemporary; he acts and speaks in the way that a polyglot intellectual from the year 2015 might, were he transported two centuries into the past and set out to enlighten the world’s benighted scientists and political rulers.

After his five-year voyage through Latin America, Humboldt landed in the United States in May 1804. He spent a week in Washington, regaling President Jefferson, Secretary of State James Madison, and Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin with information about the Spanish colonies, which to that point had largely been closed to American contact. Jefferson was then in a border dispute with Spain over the land between the Sabine and Rio Grande rivers. Humboldt convinced Jefferson that the land—today the state of Texas—despite its deserts and savanna, was worth fighting for. “We have little knowledge” of the Spanish colonies, a grateful Jefferson told Humboldt, “but through you.”

Humboldt settled in Paris, where he set to writing and lecturing about his voyage. He skipped meals and barely slept. His hand couldn’t keep up with his brain: he crammed the margins of his handwritten pages with ideas for other chapters and essays. When he ran out of space, he continued to write on his desk itself, carving his thoughts into the wood. He delivered a series of widely attended talks at the Académie des Sciences, in which he “jumped so quickly from one subject to another that nobody could keep up.” The Jardin des Plantes exhibited some of his botanical specimens, but not all: he had brought back 60,000. His maps, political essays about the colonies, and the data he collected about agriculture, manufacturing, geology, botany, zoology, fluviology, and meteorology revolutionized each of those fields.

He met often with politicians, scientists (including Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck), and the aristocracy. He appears to have been nearly universally adored, with one exception. “Napoleon,” wrote Humboldt, “hates me.” Wulf suggests that Napoleon might have envied Humboldt’s success. Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent was published at nearly the same time as Napoleon’s Description de l’Égypte, a twenty-three-volume study compiled by two hundred scientists who had accompanied Napoleon’s troops during the 1798 invasion of Egypt. Humboldt had achieved more on his own.

Wellcome Library, London

Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland collecting plants at the foot of Chimborazo in today’s Ecuador; aquatint from Humboldt’s Vue des Cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique, 1810–1813

Humboldt’s most consequential findings, however, derived from his conception of the world as a single unified organism. “Everything,” he said, “is interaction and reciprocal.” It seems commonplace today to speak of “the web of life,” but the concept was Humboldt’s invention. Into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thinkers like René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Carl Linnaeus were still echoing Aristotle’s view that “nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man.”

Particularly heterodox was the implication that the decline of one species might have cascading effects on others. The possibility that animal life might not be inexhaustible had been proposed by the German anatomist J.F. Blumenbach (who taught Humboldt at the University of Göttingen), but was not widely accepted. “Such is the œconomy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct,” declared Thomas Jefferson in 1784, an opinion shared by most naturalists. Convinced to the end of his life that mastodons still existed in North America, most likely in the “unexplored and undisturbed” regions of the continent, Jefferson urged Lewis and Clark to look for them during their expedition.

Humboldt traveled so far, saw so much, and observed so closely that he began to notice similarities across continents. Rhododendron-like plants on the mountains near Caracas reminded him of alpine trees in the Swiss Alps; a sea of cacti, seen from the distance, recalled the grasses in the marshes of northern Europe; a moss in the Andes resembled a species he had found growing in German forests.

This comparative approach allowed him to take staggering intellectual leaps. He looked beyond the characteristics of organisms and tried to determine the structures underlying nature, leading him to formulate the idea of ecosystems. He was the first to understand that climate emerged from the “perpetual interrelationship” between land, ocean, wind, elevation, and organic life. He introduced the idea of classifying plants by climate zones instead of taxonomy, taking into account altitude, temperature, and other conditions related to location. He invented isotherms, the lines used on maps to connect regions with the same average temperature and atmospheric pressure. The similarity of the coastal plants in Africa and South America led him to postulate an “ancient” connection between the continents, anticipating plate tectonic theory by more than a century. He also studied how different systems interacted with one another. Nobody before Humboldt, for instance, had been able to explain how forests, by releasing oxygen, storing water, and providing shade, have a cooling effect on climate.

In the Llanos, the vast grasslands that stretch from the Andes to the Amazon River, Humboldt noticed with wonder how many species found food or protection from the occasional Mauritia palm tree. It sheltered insects and worms from the wind, provided fruit to monkeys and birds, retained moisture and soil, and generally spread “life around it in the desert.” The Mauritia palm was what, two centuries later, would come to be known as a “keystone species,” an organism on which the health of an entire ecosystem depends.

If everything in nature interacted, then it stood to reason that the natural world was not stable but prone to dynamic changes. It followed that man, by disrupting the natural order, might inadvertently bring about catastrophe. Humboldt was among the first to write of the perils of deforestation, irrigation, and cash crop agriculture, asserting that the brutal repercussions of man’s “insatiable avarice” were already “incalculable.” During his yearlong expedition to Russia in 1829, he gave a speech at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg calling for a vast international collaboration in which scientists around the world would collect data related to the effects of deforestation, the first global study of man’s impact on climate, and a model for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, assembled 160 years later.

The idea that human beings might be interfering with the natural order of things was a radical rejection of prevailing views about man’s dominion over nature. These views were most forcefully expressed by the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who wrote with disgust of primeval nature; his Natural History is replete with words like “grotesque,” “filth,” “nauseous,” “pestilential,” and “terrible.” Buffon’s views echoed those of William Bradford, the first governor of the Plymouth Colony, who described the new world as “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men,” and the English naturalist John Ray, who wrote of man’s duty to bring nature in line with God’s design through settlement and cultivation. To Humboldt, however, man was “nothing” in the larger scheme of things. Wulf notes that nowhere in his five-volume magnum opus, Cosmos—his attempt to summarize his thinking on the natural world, the universe, and the entirety of human history—does Humboldt mention God.

By casting aside religious and political ideology, Humboldt was able to diagnose plainly the cruelties of colonial rule. The sight of the slave markets in the Spanish colonies made him a fervent abolitionist. He told Americans (though not Jefferson himself) that slavery was a “disgrace” and that the oppression of Native Americans was a “stain” on the nation. Humboldt was the first to make the correlation between colonialism, with its crude emphasis on extracting resources and disregard for indigenous populations, and ecological devastation.

Humboldt wrote figuratively, with high emotion, of the beauty he found in wilderness. Wulf calls his rhapsodic Views of Nature “a blueprint for much of nature writing today.” Just as his scientific views influenced Darwin and Marsh (who warned in Man and Nature that “climatic excess” might lead to the “extinction of the [human] species”), Humboldt’s lyricism served as a model for Thoreau, Haeckel, and Muir. Wulf dedicates a chapter to each of these figures, all of whom idolized Humboldt and drew liberally from his work.

Darwin stands out as the most slavish of his acolytes, writing in his journal that Humboldt “like another Sun illumines everything I behold.” Darwin wrote that it was Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, a seven-volume subsection of Voyage, that inspired him “to travel in distant countries, and led me to volunteer as naturalist in her Majesty’s ship Beagle.” He brought his copy of the Personal Narrative on the Beagle with him and read in it Humboldt’s discussion of the “gradual transformations of species.” Humboldt wrote that plants and animals “limit each other’s numbers” through “long continued contest” for nourishment and territory, with only the strongest surviving—an idea, Wulf notes with some understatement, “That would become essential to Darwin’s concept of natural selection.” Wulf also points out that the final, crowning paragraph of Origin of Species is a nearly verbatim plagiarism of a passage in Personal Narrative.

Humboldt also exerted a profound influence on Goethe (with whom he had a deep friendship), Charles Lyell, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jules Verne, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Flaubert, Pushkin, Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Aldous Huxley, Ezra Pound, Erich Fried, Justus Liebeg, James Lovelock, and Rachel Carson, yet Humboldt makes only a passing appearance in Jedediah Purdy’s otherwise instructive After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Purdy, a professor of law at Duke, sets out to do two things in his monograph. He first charts the history of modern man’s relationship to the natural world, focusing on the American perspective—a recapitulation of Roderick Nash’s classic Wilderness and the American Mind (1967) and William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness” (1995).

Second, and more ambitiously, Purdy attempts to imagine a political system that might be capable of addressing the urgent, existential questions posed by our current environmental crisis. That we need a new way to think about the natural world is indisputable: despite best intentions and righteous rhetoric, global carbon emissions continue to rise precipitously. Naomi Klein and others have argued persuasively that capitalist democracies are uniquely incapable of resolving these problems. Authoritarian governments have fared worse. What is to be done?

Purdy defers those questions in the first four fifths of his book, which he devotes to his American history of “nature”—a concept that “has been a vessel for many inconsistent ideas.” His survey begins with John Evelyn, John Ray, and the argument that man had a providential duty to transform wilderness—originally a pejorative term, synonymous with “waste”—into orderly agricultural plots. Land cultivation was codified in colonial law, which “deployed Americans as an army of development…through a scheme of opportunity and reward.” Claiming land from nature, and exploiting it for profit, was enshrined as a foundational American right—a view that persists to this day.

It was not until John Muir (“How intensely I desire to be a Humboldt”) popularized Thoreau’s romantic views of the natural world that Americans began in large numbers to see wilderness as a spiritual and meditative refuge from the bustle of modern life. But this idealization of nature was counterproductive, protecting “a few cathedrals” like Yosemite and Yellowstone while devaluing the more pedestrian swathes of nature that made up most of the continent. The preservation movement was eclipsed by the more pragmatic conservation movement. Figures like Theodore Roosevelt, Walter Weyl, an editor of The New Republic, and Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the United States Forest Service, proposed a bureaucratic, utilitarian approach, designed to ensure that the natural world was accessible for both recreation and the extraction of resources. But when these two interests came into conflict, preservationists lost—most notably in the battle over the Tuolumne River in Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley, dammed in 1923 to provide water to San Francisco.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the politics of nature evolved to reflect a growing (Humboldtian) awareness of ecology. Concerns over air and water pollution, land development, resource extraction, species extinction, drought, wildfires, and even roadside littering were consolidated under the single rubric of “the environment.” “Once invented,” writes Purdy, “the environmental crisis could encompass many crises.” This view still dominates environmental politics, though it has been complicated by a new appreciation of the profound ways in which man has reconfigured the natural world to our own specifications. In political calculations about the environmental crisis, romantic appeals to nature’s glory have been supplanted by a rigid cost-benefit analysis. Echoes of the Hetch Hetchy debate can be seen in the battle over the Keystone Pipeline, new EPA methane and carbon dioxide emission regulations, and drilling in the Arctic Circle.

In his final chapters, Purdy identifies the familiar challenges we face. He explains, for instance, why cost-benefit analysis breaks down when applied to the climate: the cost of meaningful, long-term change will fall heavily on the people trying to solve the problem, while the benefits will be reaped by generations not yet born. Concerns over hotter summers may trouble consciences but they don’t stop people from driving cars.

Purdy proposes that we have a moral obligation to the natural world and that “a clean environment…should not be negotiable in terms of the marginal dollar.” He argues that our democracy is too beholden to the influence of money, that the processes we use to produce energy and food should be made more transparent to the public, and that technological solutions are unreliable and will not bring about the greater change of consciousness that is necessary to solve our most pressing problems. He urges an ethic of self-restraint and a new worldview in which human beings are no longer “the figure at its center.” Most environmentalists already share these views.

Purdy is slightly more audacious in his suggestion that we must think with greater imagination about our relationship to the natural world. It is crucial, he writes, that we imagine “alternative landscapes, alternative economies, alternative ways of living.” More specifically, he proposes that we embrace “an aesthetics of damage,” defined as “a way of living with harm and not disowning the place that is harmed.” Elsewhere he describes this as accepting the “uncanniness” of our fallen world and our uncertain future. A source of this uncanniness is the knowledge that there is no longer such a thing as true wilderness—no acre of the world has escaped the presence of man. Our fingerprint has entered the fossil record, inscribed in cesium, plutonium, and plastic.

An aesthetics of the uncanny already exists—you can see it, for instance, in Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of industrial landscapes, the eerie underwater reef sculptures of Jason deCaires Taylor, and Margaret Atwood’s futuristic MaddAddam novel trilogy. But Purdy’s uncanniness can also be detected in new technologies, such as the use of genetic tools to bring back extinct species, create drought- and pest-resistant crops, and grow artificial human organs in a lab. Purdy doesn’t try to imagine exactly what the future we’re creating will look like. But someone will have to do it. It may take a new Humboldt. Until then, the original Humboldt will do fine.

Vacinacao: a irresponsabilidade de pais que nao imunizam seus filhos- NY Review of Books

Eu me pergunto se pais irresponsáveis que não vacinam seus filhos perguntam a eles se preferem ficar doentes ou ser vacinados.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

There’s No Way Out of It!

Jerome Groopman

The New York Review of Books

March 5, 2015 Issue

On Immunity: An Inoculation

by Eula Biss

Graywolf, 205 pp., $24.00

Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine

by Paul A. Offit, M.D.

Basic Books, 231 pp., $27.99

Collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, State Art Museum of Florida, Florida State University Peter Paul Rubens: Achilles Dipped into the River Styx, circa 1630–1635

Even many years later, when my mother told the story, fear still showed on her face. One morning in 1954, at the age of two, I awoke and told her that my head hurt. I had a fever, and she put me to bed. Over the next days, my temperature rose, and my headache worsened. My parents called our pediatrician, who came to our small apartment in Astoria, Queens. He found that my neck was stiff and my legs were weak. Polio, he said, was a possible diagnosis. There were tens of thousands of cases of the paralytic illness each year in the United States. The doctor insisted that I be hospitalized in an isolation unit in upper Manhattan. My parents readily complied.
After a week in the hospital, my temperature fell and my legs became stronger. Tests showed that it was not polio; the infection was never identified.¹
My mother and father feared debility and death due to pathogens. They were raised in immigrant New York neighborhoods at a time when diphtheria, typhoid, and tuberculosis were rife. My parents also knew that microbes were not restricted to the newly arrived and poor. Polio had struck the patrician FDR in his prime.
The world of my parents, and that of their children, dramatically improved in the latter half of the twentieth century as modern medicine introduced an array of effective vaccines and antibiotics. When the Salk vaccine against the polio virus became available a few years after my mysterious illness, I was inoculated, along with my siblings. The idea of preventing or curing dreaded infectious diseases “naturally,” relying on the body alone, hardly entered our minds.
But two generations later, such ideas have considerable traction in our society. Eula Biss, a writer who teaches at Northwestern University, seeks to understand their appeal, and whether they should be given credence. On Immunity is an effort to reconcile her divided feelings, fearing both infection and the imagined risks of vaccination. Her book weaves metaphor and myth, science and sociology, philosophy and politics into a tapestry rich with insight and intelligence.

In 2009, Eula Biss gave birth to her first child and became fixated on the many ways he might be harmed—poisoned by chemicals in his plastic bottles or suffocated in his crib by lying incorrectly. Her intense concern about such dangers coincided with the appearance of a new strain of H1N1 influenza in the United States. Much of the country was in a panic: some churches were serving wafers at Mass on toothpicks, and airlines removed pillows and blankets from their flights. “What surprises me now is how unremarkable this seemed to me at the time,” Biss writes.

It all became part of the landscape of new motherhood, where ordinary objects like pillows and blankets have the power to kill a newborn…. It was as if the nation had joined me in the paranoia of infant care.

The strain of the virus was potent for children and teenagers, not only those who typically suffer severe cases of influenza, like the elderly and diabetics. Public health officials recommended widespread vaccination. But among her group of new mothers, “every exchange about the new flu vaccine was an extension of the already existing discussion about immunization, in which all that is known of disease is weighed against all that is unknown about vaccines.”
Biss reflects on the myth of Achilles, and the profound maternal desire to make a child impervious to harm. Achilles’ mother dipped him into the river Styx, but holding him by his heel, which left him vulnerable:

Immunity is a myth, these stories suggest, and no mortal can ever be made invulnerable. The truth of this was much easier for me to grasp before I became a mother. My son’s birth brought with it an exaggerated sense of both my own power and my own powerlessness. I found myself bargaining with fate so frequently that my husband and I made a game of it, asking each other what disease we would give our child for prevention against another—a parody of the impossible decisions of parenthood.

For Biss, decisions about which, if any, vaccines should be given to her son were made “impossible” by allegations on the Internet and anecdotes from other mothers about their long-term risks:

We fear that vaccination will invite autism or any one of the diseases of immune dysfunction that now plague industrialized countries—diabetes, asthma, and allergies. We fear that the hepatitis B vaccine will cause multiple sclerosis, or that the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine will cause sudden infant death. We fear that the combination of several vaccines at once will tax the immune system, and that the total number of vaccines will overwhelm it. We fear that the formaldehyde in some vaccines will cause cancer, or that the aluminum in others will poison our brains.

Her anxiety is amplified by a larger culture of suspicion. In contrast to my parents, who put complete trust in the integrity and authority of their doctor, Biss and her fellow mothers distrust government, pharmaceutical companies, and journalists who seek to inform and reassure the public:

The fact that the press is an unreliable source of information was one of the refrains of my conversations with other mothers, along with the fact that the government is inept, and that big pharmaceutical companies are corrupting medicine. I agreed with all these concerns, but I was disturbed by the worldview they suggested: nobody can be trusted.

One of her efforts at calm is to understand how emotions color perception of risk. Scientists typically present the risks of a vaccine by citing the numbers of people suffering side effects against the total numbers given the treatment. Reviewing the work of the scholars Paul Slovic at the University of Oregon and Cass Sunstein at Harvard Law School, Biss notes:

Risk perception may not be about quantifiable risk so much as it is about immeasurable fear. Our fears are informed by history and economics, by social power and stigma, by myth and nightmares. And as with other strongly held beliefs, our fears are dear to us. When we encounter information that contradicts our beliefs,…we tend to doubt the information, not ourselves.

How should she keep herself informed? Should she give weight to the anecdotes told by fellow mothers? Listen to mainstream doctors, among them her father, a blunt-speaking man dismissive of her crowd? Or should she trust the antiestablishment clinicians on the Internet? And might there be ethical tenets to help her make a sound choice to vaccinate, or not?

As a writer and teacher, Biss is primarily concerned with language, specifically how metaphor sculpts thought and feelings:

“Our bodies prime our metaphors,” writes James Geary in I Is an Other, his treatise on metaphor, “and our metaphors prime how we think and act.” If we source our understanding of the world from our own bodies, it seems inevitable that vaccination would become emblematic: a needle breaks the skin, a sight so profound that it causes some people to faint, and a foreign substance is injected directly into the flesh. The metaphors we find in this gesture are overwhelmingly fearful, and almost always suggest violation, corruption, and pollution.

Biss moves from the power of language to the demographics of sociology. She cites a 2004 analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and writes: “Unvaccinated children…are more likely to be white, to have an older married mother with a college education, and to live in a household with an income of $75,000 or more—like my child.” Such unvaccinated children generally live near one another, which means that if they contract a disease, it can be readily passed on to others. Then there are so-called undervaccinated children, those who have received some but not all of their recommended immunizations. They “are more likely to be black, to have a younger unmarried mother, to have moved across state lines, and to live in poverty.”
These demographic distinctions inform Biss’s understanding of the scientific concept of “herd immunity”:

If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity. This is the principle of herd immunity, and it is through herd immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination.

Her physician father articulates the value of herd immunity in public health, and Biss extends his analysis to a political principle she holds dear:

“Vaccination works,” my father explains, “by enlisting a majority in the protection of a minority.” He means the minority of the population that is particularly vulnerable to a given disease. The elderly, in the case of influenza. Newborns, in the case of pertussis. Pregnant women, in the case of rubella. But when relatively wealthy white women vaccinate our children, we may also be participating in the protection of some poor black children whose single mothers have recently moved and have not, as a product of circumstance rather than choice, fully vaccinated them….

Immunity…is a common trust as much as it is a private account. Those of us who draw on collective immunity owe our health to our neighbors.

But do we owe so much to the collective that we should sacrifice our autonomy? I learned in On Immunity that the term “conscientious objector” came out of resistance to a British law passed in 1853 requiring the vaccination of all infants. Forty-five years later, the government added a “conscience clause,” allowing parents to apply for an exemption. The exemption clause was rather vague, requiring only that the objector satisfy a magistrate that it was “a matter of conscience.”
Biss turns to her sister, a philosophy professor at a Jesuit college who studies Kant. She explains Kant’s contention that we have a duty to ourselves to examine our conscience, the “inner judge” that unites thoughts and feelings. An individual might resist flaws in the dominant moral code and thus create the possibility for reform, or conscience can be what keeps your actions in line with publicly defendable moral standards.
Biss, while aware that a conscientious objector to vaccination may contribute to an epidemic, affirms that “our laws allow for some people to exempt themselves from vaccination, for reasons medical or religious or philosophical. But deciding for ourselves whether we ought to be among that number is indeed a matter of conscience.” Yet this seems too facile a conclusion, since the freedom to exempt oneself negates a responsibility not only to society, but to one’s own children who do not have the agency to decide for themselves.

Paul Offit, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and the head of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is one of the most courageous and sober voices arguing to protect children from exemptions made by their parents.² Biss draws from one of Offit’s books, Autism’s False Prophets, in her examination of the ideas of the British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield.

In 1998, Wakefield published a study in The Lancet of twelve children indicating that vaccines caused autism. The publication was accompanied by a promotional video of a press conference in which Wakefield supported the suspicions of parents who already believed what the study suggested. Although there were caveats in the Lancet paper, it resulted in a sharp drop in vaccination against measles. Later, when the study was discredited and shown to be sloppy, Wakefield portrayed himself as the victim of establishment persecution.
Another vaccine opponent is Dr. Joseph Mercola, who heads the Mercola Natural Health Center in the Chicago suburbs. Mercola offers information on a website about the dangers of water fluoridation and metal amalgam in dental fillings, as well as speculation that AIDS is not caused by HIV. Biss notes that the site is visited by nearly two million individuals a month, and “products available for purchase range from tanning beds to air purifiers to vitamins and supplements. The website and Mercola LLC generated an estimated $7 million in 2010, and in 2011 Mercola donated $1 million to a number of organizations” that oppose vaccination.
Offit’s book debunks the claims of such antiestablishment clinicians. But his criticism extends to the morality of parental “conscience” when imposed on the health of children. Offit recounts painful tales of children dying from diseases that could be easily prevented or cured if parents had accepted the advice of doctors. In his most recent book, Bad Faith, he argues that we fail minors by giving permission to parents who seek exemptions from vaccination on religious grounds. Sacrificing the lives of vulnerable minors, he contends, negates God, since all human beings are created in His image. But, to date, legislatures and the courts have been loath to override religious beliefs that reject life-saving treatments for children.

On Immunity follows the ebb and flow of Biss’s mind, sometimes taking up a point, like herd immunity, first from a scientific perspective, then a political one, then a philosophical. Interspersed are her stories as a new mother. When she searches for a pediatrician, she is referred by her midwife to one who appears to share her “left of center” mindset:

When I asked the pediatrician what the purpose of the hep B vaccine was, he answered, “That’s a very good question,” in a tone that I understood to mean this was a question he relished answering. Hep B was a vaccine for the inner city, he told me, designed to protect the babies of drug addicts and prostitutes. It was not something, he assured me, that people like me needed to worry about.

Biss’s pediatrician may be left of center, but she discovers that he is not reliable in his reply. Biss won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for Notes From No Man’s Land, a collection of essays on race, and she is alert to suggestions of stigma. She cites epidemiological data indicating that there is a decline in the incidence of hepatitis B only when all children are vaccinated against the infection:

One of the mysteries of hep B immunization is that vaccinating only “high risk” groups, which was the original public health strategy, did not bring down rates of infection. When the vaccine was introduced in 1981, it was recommended for prisoners, health care workers, gay men, and IV drug users. But rates of hep B infection remained unchanged until the vaccine was recommended for all newborns a decade later. Only mass vaccination brought down the rates of infection, and it has now virtually eliminated the disease in children….

This is a radical inversion of the historical application of vaccination, which was once just another form of bodily servitude extracted from the poor for the benefit of the privileged. There is some truth, now, to the idea that public health is not strictly for people like me, but it is through us, literally through our bodies, that certain public health measures are enacted.

Still, Biss wonders if there may be reasonable alternatives to vaccination that effectively protect children:

Some parents feel that the immunity produced by the chicken pox vaccine is inferior to immunity by natural infection because it does not last as long. To carry immunity through adulthood, when chicken pox can be quite serious, one must get a booster in adolescence. “So what?” my father says. I am trying to explain the phenomenon of chicken pox parties to him. I say, “Some people want their children to get chicken pox because,” and pause to think of the best reason to give a doctor. “They’re idiots,” my father supplies.

But Biss understands what appeals to these mothers: “I do not think they are idiots. But I do think they may be indulging in a variety of preindustrial nostalgia that I too find seductive.”
Then there is “Dr. Bob” Sears, who hews to a supposed middle ground. In The Vaccine Book, he claims to offer a compromise between vaccinating and not vaccinating. Sears endorses changes in the schedule of childhood vaccination for parents worried about overtaxing the immune system. He proposes a selective vaccine schedule, so a parent can provide only the vaccines that Dr. Bob believes most important. But Biss notes his omission of vaccines against hepatitis B, polio, measles, mumps, and rubella. Another strategy of Dr. Bob is to spread out over eight years all the vaccines a child typically receives in two years.
Biss rightly takes him to task, disputing his claims that tetanus is not a disease that affects infants and that measles is not that bad: “He does not mention that tetanus kills hundreds of thousands of babies in the developing world every year,…and that measles has killed more children than any other disease in history.”
After much indecision, the altruistic principle of herd immunity and its benefits for children of all socioeconomic and racial groups ultimately moves Biss to embrace vaccination.

We no longer see children stricken with polio in wheelchairs or hear of those suffocating from diphtheria, of babies born to mothers with rubella whose eyes are clouded by cataracts and hearts deformed. The success of protecting against such pathogens has removed a sense of their immediacy and caused many to forget their horror. But that may change, as we receive reports of outbreaks of infections due to unvaccinated children and mothers. In January, California health officials reported an infant death from pertussis and a measles outbreak among children who visited Disneyland. Currently, some 8 percent of children in California kindergartens are not adequately vaccinated.

The infection has now spread beyond California to Utah, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Mexico. Last year, California made the “personal belief” exemption law more stringent, requiring parents to submit a form signed by a health professional. But Governor Jerry Brown, at the last minute, added a religious exemption, so that parents who object to vaccination as a matter of faith do not need a physician’s signature.³
Countering such actions by state officials, the father of a six-year-old boy who had leukemia and still suffers from reduced immunity has asked the superintendent of his Marin County school district to keep unvaccinated children out of the classroom, since they pose a significant threat to his own son. The county health officer expressed sympathy for the father’s concern, but would not enforce such a ban on unvaccinated pupils.⁴
Measles in particular is one of the most contagious viruses, causing illness in more than 90 percent of those who are exposed to it. There is legitimate concern that the outbreak, which originated in California, will spread throughout the nation, particularly in locales where parents have sought exemption from vaccinating their children. Those at greatest risk for debility and death from measles have impaired immunity, like the child in remission from leukemia, or newborns whose immune systems are not yet strong enough to resist the virus. The outbreak, which is said to affect more than a hundred people in some fourteen states as of the beginning of February and is getting increasing public attention, will force the issue around parental choice and social responsibility. Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey waffled when asked whether vaccination should be mandated, asserting that there should be room for parents to choose. President Obama strongly supports the science behind vaccination, but it will take more than statements from a bully pulpit to safeguard the nation from epidemics that would be prevented through vaccination. Ultimately, either lawsuits or legislation will be needed to protect the health and welfare of children in schools and other public institutions.
My wife and I are physicians. We are acutely aware that every clinical intervention carries a potential downside. We also question clinical data from research studies and challenge the idea of a single authority that always wisely weighs risk and benefit. But we also know firsthand what infectious diseases can do. When our children were born, we vaccinated them. The natural world of unopposed pathogens is full of danger; it should not be presented as idyllic.

1. Last autumn, there were more than a hundred reports of unexplained paralysis following viral infections in the US. See Catherine Saint Louis, “After Enterovirus 68 Outbreak, a Paralysis Mystery,” The New York Times, January 12, 2015. ↩
   
2. See my “Libertarian Medicine: And Why It Doesn’t Work,” a review of Paul Offit’s Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine, The New Republic, October 21, 2013. ↩
   
3. Adam Nagourney and Abby Goodnough, “Measles Cases Linked to Disneyland Rise, and Debate Over Vaccinations Intensifies,” The New York Times, January 22, 2015. ↩
   
4. Tamar Lewin, “Sick Child’s Father Seeks Vaccination Requirement in California,” The New York Times, January 29, 2015. ↩
   

Antijudaismo: uma velha fobia - a book by David Nirenberg (reviewed by Michael Walzer, NYRBooks)

Imaginary Jews

Michael Walzer

The New York Review of Books, March 20, 2014

Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition

by David Nirenberg

Norton, 610 pp., $35.00

1.

In 1844, Karl Marx published his essay “On the Jewish Question.” This wasn’t an engagement with Judaism, or with Jewish history, or even with the sociology of German Jews. Its occasion was the contemporary debate about Jewish emancipation, but its real purpose was to call for the overthrow of the capitalist order. The call was expressed in a language that is probably not surprising to readers today and that was entirely familiar to readers in the nineteenth century. Still, it is a very strange language. Capitalism is identified by Marx with Judaism, and so the overthrow of capitalism will be, he writes, “the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” The argument is worth quoting, at least briefly:

The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish way…not only insofar as he has acquired financial power, but also insofar as, through him and without him, moneyhas risen to world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples. The Jews have emancipated themselves to the extent that the Christians have become Jews.

“Through [the Jew] and without [the Jew]”—mostly without him: as Marx certainly knew, Jews made up a very small part of the moneyed elite of England, the most advanced capitalist country, and an even smaller part of the “rising” German bourgeoisie. His own father had converted to Protestantism in order to facilitate his entry into bourgeois society, where Jews were not welcome in the early nineteenth century.

What Marx is doing here, David Nirenberg argues in his brilliant, fascinating, and deeply depressing book Anti-Judaism, is exactly what many other writers have done in the long history of Western civilization. His essay is a “strategic appropriation of the most powerful language of opprobrium available to any critic of the powers and institutions of this world.” That sentence comes from Nirenberg’s discussion of Martin Luther, but it applies equally well to Marx. Still, we should be more surprised by Marx’s use of this language than by Luther’s, not only because of Marx’s Jewish origins but also because of his claim to be a radical critic of the ideology of his own time. He might, Nirenberg says, have questioned the association of Judaism and capitalism and written a critical history aimed at making his readers more reflective about that association. Instead, he chose to exploit “old ideas and fears about Jewishness.”

Consider another famous use of this language of opprobrium, this time not in support of but in fierce opposition to revolutionary politics. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, Edmund Burke compared what was going on in France to previous revolutions (like England’s in 1688) that were led by noblemen “of great civil, and great military talents.” By contrast, he wrote, the revolutionary government in Paris is led by “Jew brokers contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils.”

In Burke’s case, the choice of this language was probably not “strategic.” The choice was structural—anti-Judaism was a feature of the worldview with which Burke was able to recognize what Marxists later described as a “bourgeois” revolution. “Given the complete absence of Jews from the actual leadership, whether political, pecuniary, or philosophical, of the French Revolution,” Nirenberg writes, the line about “Jew brokers” (and also Burke’s proposal to help the revolutionaries by sending English Jews to France “to please your new Hebrew brethren”) may, again, seem very strange. In fact, it is utterly common; only Burke’s ferocious eloquence is uncommon.

Friendly writers have worked hard to exonerate Burke of anti-Semitism. Nirenberg says only that they miss the point. Burke certainly knew that Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and their friends and enemies among the revolutionaries were, all of them, Catholics and lapsed Catholics (plus a few Protestants). They were only figurative Jews, imaginary Jews, who came to Burke’s mind, and to many other minds,

because the revolution forced him…to confront basic questions about the ways in which humans relate to one another in society. These were questions that two millennia of pedagogy had taught Europe to ask in terms of “Judaism,” and Burke had learnt the lesson well.

2.

Nirenberg’s book is about those two millennia and their pedagogy. It isn’t a book about anti-Semitism; it isn’t a history of the Jewish experience of discrimination, persecution, and genocide; it isn’t an example of what the historian Salo Baron called the “lachrymose” account of Jewish life in exile; nor is it an indictment of contemporary anti-Zionism or a defense of the state of Israel. The book is not about Jews at all or, at least, not about real Jews; it deals extensively and almost exclusively with imaginary Jews.

What Nirenberg has written is an intellectual history of Western civilization, seen from a peculiar but frighteningly revealing perspective. It is focused on the role of anti-Judaism as a constitutive idea and an explanatory force in Christian and post-Christian thought—though it starts with Egyptian arguments against the Jews and includes a discussion of early Islam, whose writers echo, and apparently learned from, Christian polemics. Nirenberg comments intermittently about the effects of anti-Judaism on the life chances of actual Jews, but dealing with those effects in any sufficient way would require another, and a very different, book.

Anti-Judaism is an extraordinary scholarly achievement. Nirenberg tells us that he has left a lot out (I will come at the end to a few things that are missing), but he seems to know everything. He deals only with literature that he can read in the original language, but this isn’t much of a limitation. Fortunately, the chapter on Egypt doesn’t require knowledge of hieroglyphics; Greek, Hebrew, and Latin are enough. Perhaps it makes things easier that the arguments in all the different languages are remarkably similar and endlessly reiterated.

A certain view of Judaism—mainly negative—gets established early on, chiefly in Christian polemics, and then becomes a common tool in many different intellectual efforts to understand the world and to denounce opposing understandings. Marx may have thought himself insightful and his announcement original: the “worldly God” of the Jews was “money”! But the identification of Judaism with materialism, with the things of this world, predates the appearance of capitalism in Europe by at least 1,500 years.

Since I want mostly to describe Nirenberg’s argument (and, though without the authority of his erudition, to endorse it), let me note quickly one bit of oddness in it. One could also write—it would be much shorter—a history of philo-Judaism. It might begin with those near-Jews, the “God-fearers” of ancient Rome, whom Nirenberg doesn’t mention. But the prime example would be the work of the Christian, mostly Protestant, Hebraists of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who searched in biblical and rabbinic texts for God’s constitution and produced books with titles like The Hebrew Commonwealth. Many of these writers studied with Jewish scholars, chiefly from the Netherlands, but (with some notable exceptions) remained in most of their references to contemporary Jews conventionally anti-Semitic.

Nirenberg writes about these Christian Hebraists with his usual learning, but they don’t fit neatly into his book. They were looking for an ancient, biblical Judaism (with the rabbis of the talmudic age as helpful interpreters) that they could learn from, even imitate. Nirenberg’s proper subject is a hostile understanding of Judaism, early and late, reiterated by writers of very different sorts, with which the social-political-theological-philosophical world is constructed, enemies are identified, and positions fortified. Philo-Judaism is aspirational; anti-Judaism claims to be explanatory.

What is being explained is the social world; the explanatory tools are certain supposed features of Judaism; and the enemies are mostly not Jews but “Judaizing” non-Jews who take on these features and are denounced for doing so. I will deal with only a few of Judaism’s negative characteristics: its hyperintellectualism; its predilection for tyranny; its equal and opposite predilection for subversive radicalism; and its this-worldly materialism, invoked, as we’ve seen, by both Burke and Marx. None of this is actually descriptive; there certainly are examples of hyper-intellectual, tyrannical, subversive, and materialist Jews (and of dumb, powerless, conformist, and idealistic Jews), but Nirenberg insists, rightly, that real Jews have remarkably little to do with anti-Judaism.

3.

Speaking to German students in May 1933, a few months after the Nazis took power, Joseph Goebbels proclaimed that “the age of rampant Jewish intellectualism is now at an end.” Goebbels was a third-rate German intellectual (the word is unavoidable: he had a Ph.D.; he wrote articles; Nirenberg suggests that we think of him as an apostate intellectual). But he was making an argument that had been made by many less infamous, indeed, more worthy, figures. It begins in the Gospels, with the earliest attacks on the Judaism of the Pharisees. Christian supersessionist arguments—i.e., arguments about what aspects of Judaism had been superseded by Christianity—were based on a set of oppositions: law superseded by love, the letter by the spirit, the flesh (the material world, the commandments of the Torah, the literal text) by the soul. “I bless you father…,” writes Luke, “for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to little children.”

The Pharisees were indeed learned and clever, as were their rabbinic successors; the discussions and disputations of the Talmud are a particularly revealing display of learning and cleverness. By comparison (it’s a self-description), the early Christians were naive and innocent children to whom God spoke directly, evoking the faith that brought salvation (which law and learning couldn’t do).

The difficulty here is that the Christians very quickly produced immensely learned, clever, and disputatious theologians of their own, who were then accused, and who accused each other, of Judaizing—thinking or acting like Jews. The earliest Christian writers, Paul most importantly, were engaged with actual Jews, in some mix of coexistence and competition that scholars are still trying to figure out. Nirenberg writes about Paul with subtlety and some sympathy, though he is the writer who sets the terms for much that comes later.

By the time of writers like Eusebius, Ambrose, and Augustine, the Jews had been, as Nirenberg says, “a twice-defeated people”—first militarily by the Romans and then religiously by the imperial establishment of Christianity. And yet the threat of Judaism grew greater and greater as the actual Jews grew weaker and weaker. According to their triumphant opponents, the Jews never gave up their hostility to Jesus and his followers (indeed, they didn’t convert). They were endlessly clever, ever-active hypocrites and tricksters, who mixed truth with falsehood to entice innocent Christians—in the same way that those who prepare lethal drugs “smear the lip of the cup with honey to make the harmful potion easy to drink.”

That last charge is from Saint John Chrysostom, who was such a violent opponent of “the Jews” that earnest scholars have assumed that Judaism must have posed a clear and present danger to Christianity in his time. In fact, Nirenberg tells us, there was no such danger; the people mixing the poison were Christian heretics. If Saint John feared the Jews, “it was because his theology had taught him to view other dangers in Jewish terms.”

Bridgeman Art Library

The cover of a French edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, circa 1940

The critique of Jewish cleverness is fairly continuous over time, but it appears with special force among German idealist philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who repeat many of the supersessionist arguments of the early Christians. Kant understood the heteronomy he sought to overcome—action according to moral law externally imposed rather than freely accepted by the agent—in Jewish terms, but he was himself considered too Jewish by the philosophers who came next, most importantly by Hegel. Kantianism, Hegel claimed, was simply a new version of “the Jewish principle of opposing thought to reality, reason to sense; this principle involves the rending of life and a lifeless connection between God and the world.” According to Hegel, Abraham had made a fateful choice: his rejection of the world in favor of a sublime God had alienated the Jews forever from the beauty of nature and made them the prisoners of law, incapable of love. (Needless to say, Schopenhauer, in the next generation, thought that the academic Hegelians of his time were “Jews” and followers of “the Jewish God,” but I shall stop with Hegel himself.)

It isn’t Nirenberg’s claim that any of these philosophers were anti-Semites. Indeed, Hegel defended the rights of Jews in German universities and thought that anti-Semitic German nationalism was not “German-ness” but “German-stupid-ness.” Nor is Nirenberg arguing for any kind of intellectual determinism. He doesn’t believe that Goebbels’s attack on Jewish intellectualism was the necessary outcome of the German philosophical identification of Judaism with lifeless reason—any more than German idealism was the necessary outcome of Christian claims to supersede Pharasaic Judaism or of Lutheran claims to supersede the Judaizing Catholics. In all these cases, there were other possible outcomes. But philosophers like Hegel used the language of anti-Judaism to resolve “the ancient tension between the ideal and the real,” and their resolutions were enormously influential. The idea of Judaism as the enemy of “life” had a future.

4.

Judaism’s associations with worldly power and subversive rebellion are closely linked, for what is rebellion but an effort to seize power? So Jewish bankers can rule the world and Jewish Bolsheviks can aspire to overthrow and replace the bankers. In some alcoves of the Western imagination, the two groups can almost appear as co-conspirators. The populist anti-Semitism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (what August Bebel called “the socialism of fools”) has a long history. One very early example is Saint Ambrose’s response to the emperor Maximus, who punished the leaders of a Christian mob that burned a synagogue in the Mesopotamian city of Callinicum: “That king,” Ambrose said, “has become a Jew.” What made Maximus a “Jew” was not that he defended the Callinicum Jews but that he ranked enforcement of the law over the demands of the spirit (and the religious enthusiasm of the mob).

Often in the Middle Ages, Christian rulers were accused of Judaizing by populist rebels; the accusations had a curious doubleness. Tyranny was, first of all, imagined as a feature of Judaism, both when there were Jews at court (as physicians, advisers, tax collectors, and money-lenders) and when there were no Jews at court. The Jewish “seduction” of princes was one common way of understanding tyranny. Of course, Jewish seduction was often princely exploitation: the Jews were allowed to collect interest on loans to the king’s Christian subjects so that he could then “expropriate a considerable share of the proceeds.” It was a kind of indirect taxation, at a time when the royal power to tax was radically constrained. The indirectly taxed subjects resented the Jewish money-lenders, but, Nirenberg stresses, the resentment was politically acted out, again and again, in many times and places, though Jews rarely predominated in royal financial affairs “and then only for short periods of time.”

Anti-Judaism also had a second and rather different political usefulness. Jews were imagined not only as tyrants or the allies of tyrants but at the same time, and more realistically, as oppressed and powerless. Given their rejection of Jesus Christ and their complicity in his death, the oppression of the Jews was justified; but when a tyrannical ruler oppressed his Christian subjects, he could be accused of trying “to make a Jewry” out of them, which obviously wasn’t justified. “We would rather die than be made similar to Jews.” That last line is from a petition of the city council of Valencia to King Peter in 1378. So tyranny was twice understood in Jewish terms: a Judaizing prince treated his subjects like Jews.

Populist rebels obviously did not think of themselves as Jews; the construction of subversion and rebellion as “Jewish” was, and is, the work of conservative and reactionary writers. Among modern revolutionaries, the Puritans actually were Judaizers (focused far more on the Old than the New Testament), though with their own supersessionist theology. The use of the tropes of philo- and anti-Judaism during the English civil war made some sense, even though there were no Jews in England in the 1640s. The French revolutionaries were neither Jews nor Judaizers, though Burke and others understood them by invoking the “old ideas and fears.” But it was the Bolsheviks who, more than any other group of rebels, were widely understood as “Jewish.” It is true that many of them were Jews, though of the sort that Isaac Deutscher called “non-Jewish Jews.” Judaism had nothing at all to do with Bolshevism and yet, if Nirenberg is right, the Bolsheviks would have been explained in the language of anti-Judaism even if there had never been a Trotsky, a Kamenev, or a Radek among them.

5.

The identification of Jews with merchants, money-lenders, royal financiers, and predatory capitalists is constant in Nirenberg’s history. I will focus on one moment in that history, Shakespeare’s England and The Merchant of Venice, which will give me a chance to illustrate the difference between his anti-Judaism and the anti-Semitism that is the subject of more conventional, but equally depressing, histories. Anthony Julius’s Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in Englandincludes a long and very intelligent discussion of Shakespeare’s play.1 Julius callsThe Merchant of Venice an anti-Semitic drama that is also a dramatization of anti-Semitism and the beginning of its literary investigation. Shakespeare, as always, writes from opposing perspectives, but he clearly leans toward Shylock’s enemies.

Shylock himself is the classic Jew: he hates Christians and desires to tyrannize over them; he loves money, more than his own daughter; he is a creature of law rather than of love. He isn’t, indeed, a clever Jew; in his attempt to use the law against his Christian enemy, he is unintelligent and inept. (A modern commentator, Kenneth Gross, asks: “What could [he] have been thinking?”) But in every other way, he is stereotypical, and so he merits the defeat and humiliation he receives—which are meant to delight the Elizabethan audience.

Julius doesn’t ask Nirenberg’s question: What put so many Jews (like Shylock or Marlowe’s Jew of Malta) on the new London stage, in “a city that had sheltered fewer ‘real Jews’ than perhaps any other major one in Europe”? His answer—I can’t reproduce his long and nuanced discussion—is that London was becoming a city of merchants, hence a “Jewish” city, and Shakespeare’s play is a creative response to that development, an effort to address the allegedly Judaizing features of all commercial relationships, and then to save the Christian merchants by distinguishing them from an extreme version of the Jew. But the distinction is open to question, and so the point of the play is best summed up when Portia asks, “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?” The play is about law and property, contracts, oaths, pledges, and promises. Shylock is the Jew of the gospels: “I stand here for law.” But he is defeated by a better lawyer and a more literal reading of the law: Portia out-Jews the Jew—which is surely an ironical version of Christian supersession.

So Shakespeare understands the arrival of modern commerce with the help of Judaism, though he knew no Jews and had never read a page of the Talmud. He knew the Bible, though, as Shylock’s speech about Jacob multiplying Laban’s sheep (Act 1, scene 3; Genesis 30) makes clear. And Paul and the gospels were a central part of his intellectual inheritance. Shylock emerges from those latter texts, much like, though the lineage is more complicated, Burke’s “Jew brokers” and Marx’s “emancipated Jews.” The line is continuous.

6.

Nirenberg’s epilogue addresses one major theorist’s denial of that continuity. In the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt mocks what she calls the doctrine of “eternal antisemitism” (this could serve, Nirenberg writes, “as an ironic title for my own book”) and insists that the “specifically Jewish functions” (banking and finance) in the capitalist economy made the Jews partly “responsible” (her word) for the hatred they evoked.2 This is much like Marx’s claim that “the Jews have eagerly contributed” to the triumph of their “worldly cult,” “Haggling,” and their “worldly God,” “Money.”

Arendt actually draws on the statistical work of Walter Frank, a Nazi economist, who headed an Institute for the History of the New Germany, to support her account of the role of the Jews in the German bourgeoisie. It can’t be the case, she argues, that the Nazis, who had “to persuade and mobilize people,” could have chosen their victims arbitrarily. There has to be a concrete answer, a local socioeconomic answer, to the question: Why the Jews?

Nirenberg agrees that the choice of the Jews was not arbitrary; nor does he find Arendt’s argument surprising—though he rejects all the usual hostile explanations: her assimilationist childhood, her long relationship with Heidegger, and so on. He does think it remarkable that Arendt “clung” to her argument about Jewish responsibility “even after the full extent and fantastic projective power of Nazi anti-Semitism (including its vast exaggeration of the Jews’ economic importance) became clear.” But his whole book is a kind of explanation for why she found it so easy to connect Jews and finance: the connection was one of “the a priori ideological commitments that structured her selection and interpretation of ‘facts’ about the Jews.”

The disagreement with Arendt nicely sums up Nirenberg’s book. His argument is that a certain view of Judaism lies deep in the structure of Western civilization and has helped its intellectuals and polemicists explain Christian heresies, political tyrannies, medieval plagues, capitalist crises, and revolutionary movements. Anti-Judaism is and has long been one of the most powerful theoretical systems “for making sense of the world.” No doubt, Jews sometimes act out the roles that anti-Judaism assigns them—but so do the members of all the other national and religious groups, and in much greater numbers. The theory does not depend on the behavior of “real” Jews.

Nirenberg’s history of anti-Judaism is powerful and persuasive, but it is also unfinished. It never gets to the United States, for example, where anti-Judaism seems to have been less prevalent and less useful (less used in making sense of society and economy) than it was and is in the Old World—and where philo-Judaism seems to have a much larger presence. The modern state of Israel also makes no appearance in Nirenberg’s book, except for one sentence on the next-to-last page:

We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of “Israel.”

So we have a partial discontinuity (the US) and an unexplored continuity (contemporary Israel) with Nirenberg’s history. There is still work to be done. But here, in this book, anti-Judaism has at last found its radical critic.

• 1
  Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 178–192. ↩
• 2
  Harcourt, 1968, pp. 5–7, 9. ↩