Genius and Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World 1847-1947 by Norman Lebrecht (Oneworld, £20)
Norman Lebrecht has a rare ability to evoke the past with the immediacy of a good journalist, broadcaster, novelist or blogger. But then, he has been all of these and more. Music lover extraordinaire, Lebrecht is author of the highly successful blog Slipped Disc and many will know his often provocative books about musicians and the music business. His novel The Song of Names has just been launched as a film.
Lebrecht is also profoundly conscious of his Jewish heritage, not least the dominance of Jewish-born musicians from Mendelssohn to Mahler, Schoenberg and beyond, as well as of countless scientists, authors and intellectuals, artists, actors and film-makers who also happened to be Jewish. In his new book, a magnum opus of well over 400 pages, he brings his lifelong interests together.
Fearless as ever, Lebrecht launches boldly into his central theme: that Jews “changed the world” between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th. Many of the people he features (Heine, Marx, Disraeli, Freud, Kafka, Trotsky, Einstein etc) will be familiar to most readers. Others are less well-known: Eliza Davis, who put Dickens right about Jews, Bizet’s wife Geneviève (née Halévy) who became the prototype of Carmen, the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld or Karl Landsteiner, who was the first to identify blood groups.
What do all these have in common? Some were practising Jews but many were not. Nor was it a matter of shared DNA or a common belief in Israel as a homeland. Lebrecht emphasises their shared history: the triumphs, the tragedies, the travels — and being aware of “differentness”. All this helped mould two prerequisites for any kind of genuinely fresh thinking: an element of “anxiety” and a capacity for “genius”.
The story unfolds through a sequence of more-or-less decennial chapters, each concentrating on particular events and personalities prominent in and around a year. Much is narrated in the historic present: Marx “arrives (in London) in June 1849, intending to stay for a few weeks” and, a decade later, Dickens “puts his house on the market after separating from his wife”.
The text is packed with entertaining (if sometimes questionable) bons mots as we read that Sarah Bernhardt is “the Einstein of fame”, Freud “crosses the bridge from failure to fame by means of deceit” and Lenny (Bernstein) is “God’s Jew, farts and all”.
As for the specifically Jewish element Lebrecht seeks within the achievements he outlines, you may find him striving too hard at times. But his overall thesis is neatly summed up by his hero, Gustav Mahler, whom he quotes (twice) as saying: “A Jew is like a swimmer with a short arm. He has to swim twice as hard to reach the shore”.
Daniel Snowman is an author and biographer
