John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity, Basic Books, 1974.

John Murray Cuddihy's thesis is the social tensions arising from the legal emancipation of the Jews in Europe - an event that was perhaps the most important consequence of the French Revolution. "The story of the exodus of Jews into Europe in the 19th century is a case study of culture shock," he writes, and it is the effects of that "culture shock" in the works of prominent Jewish intellectuals that Cuddihy traces in his book. From the mid-17th century there was an movement from Eastern Europe and Poland of millions of Jews into Europe. They were essentially a people emerging from the Middle Ages, habituated to a theocratic and ethnocentric mode of life. They were to encounter, in the gentile nonkinship universalistic nation-state, a whole new system of manners in a context of what was considered proper to social, public behavior. The encounter of the Jews with "civil society" became, for the Jewish intelligentsia, an intellectual apologetic. Their "hidden theme,"says Cuddihy, is the ordeal of civility -- the "ritually unconsummated social courtship of Gentile and Jew... the ideology of the Jewish intellectual was frequently a projection onto general, Gentile culture of a forbidden ethnic self-criticism."

The tenor of Jewish intellectual activity can be characterized as an attempt to subvert or unmask the 'hypocrisy' of 'appearances.' Freudian psychoanalysis, for instance, became a way to transform social conflicts into 'cognitive problems' -- "For Freud, the whole business of courtship and the sexual courtesies deriving from the feudal court are confronted ... with the reality of an erect penis." The Freudian 'id' became the moral equalizer legitimating Jew-Gentile equality as psychoanalysis became a counterculture adversary to the bourgeois- Christian ethos of civility and respectability -- the "Protestant Esthetic and Etiquette."

Likewise Marxism availed to tear away the "bourgeois superstructure" to reveal the ugly reality of exploitative economic relations beneath it. Marxism became a way to cover the deficit of Jewish "social morality" by generalizing it to capitalist society. Exposing economic relations in all their "crudity" -- tearing away the "fig-leaf... of misleading appearances" -- would make society fit for the Jews rather than by looking into the question of how the Jews were to become fit for society. Thus Cuddihy describes the intellectual atmosphere of 19th century Europe as comprised in large part of strategies of projection -- "an endless quest for euphemisms to describe 'the Jewish problem.'"

Cuddihy describes the "ancient value-package" deriving from the concept of charity which became feudalized into chivalry which became secularized into courtesy which became modernized into civility as the collective representation of Western culture which "rubbed emerging Jewry the wrong way." The signal feature of this movement from charity to civility over the 2,000-year period is the distinction between the "person" and the "idea," culture and religion, faith and reason, private and public. That there could be a notion of truth and the value and dignity accorded to the search for it was highly dependent upon the maintenance of the civil realm, the public dimension - the 'appearances,' which discouraged the intrusion of the excessively personal, the crude, the obsessive, the antagonistic, the fanatic. The unwritten rules of civic participation undergirded the written political ones and made possible the continuation of the civis itself. This foundational fact was not understood by gentile society in the 19th century and it is still little understood today.

As readers of my various websites well know, I have often called attention to Owen Barfield's book, Saving the Appearances as an important study of the evolution of Western science. Western cultures were already embarked upon a long process of dissolving the 'appearances' through a single-minded pursuit of empiricism, nominalism, reductionism, and materialism in scientific and philosophical thinking. In the 19th century these processes in European culture encountered the emancipated Jewish intellectualism and the two movements collided in full force. After this collision, the two streams become almost impossible to disentangle.

The wreckage from this collision lie all around us today in the ruins of what were once hopefully denominated "Western civilization." As Gandhi once quipped, when someone asked him about Western civilization, he said -- "It would be a good idea." Cuddihy's book discusses the Jewish contribution to this civilizational crisis, and by connecting the prominent themes of the Jewish intelligentsia to issues of Jewish emancipation, assimilation, and modernization, helps to fill in an important part of the picture.

March 22, 2005