Jews Without Manners

By Richard Bernstein

THE ORDEAL OF CIVILITY:

Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity

by JOHN MURRAY CUDDIHY

272 pages. Basic Books. $11.95.

John Murray Cuddihy calls this jag ged meditation a "midrash." The metaphor is apt, for like a Talmudic exegesis, the book is a learned commentary on "sacred" texts, in this case those of the giants of the Jewish Diaspora. As with a midrash, the argument unfolds from a single overriding principle: in this case the bold if cranky notion that from Marx to Freud to Abbie Hoffman, the Jewish intellectual vanguard has been obsessed by embarrassment at its own Jewishness.

The celebrated geniuses of the Jews of modernity, in Cuddihy's view, have been intellectual Davids slaying Gentile Goliaths. Why? Because historically, successful assimilation required that the Jews "be nice," that they accept the impersonal, formal civility of Gentile society at the expense of the more idiosyncratic, traditionally religious world of the ghetto. Instead of being nice, Marx, Freud and others persisted in the "coarseness that reveals," and codified their resistance into vast intellectual systems. Such people, says Cuddihy, reacted to anti-Semitism by exposing the hypocrisy at the root of non-Jewish "appearances," despising those who concealed their Jewishness out of embarrassment. They showed that behind the Gentile's surface "refinement" lay the universal "uncivil" Jew.

For Freud, the result was the theory of repression. Just as the assimilating Jew repressed the crude Yiddish-keit of his inner being, says Cuddihy, so did the Gentile repress the id that was at the root of everybody's being. As Ordeal would have it: "The importunate 'Yid' released from ghetto and shtetl is the model, I contend, for Freud's coarse, importunate Td.'" Marx, like Freud, is depicted as an iconoclastic unmasker of the hypocritical civility of the Gentiles.

As evidence, Cuddihy presents "On the Jewish Question," Marx's still controversial essay about the economic behavior of the Jews. Many scholars have seen it as an anti-Semitic tract. To Cuddihy, on the contrary, it is a description of the Jew as the universal capitalist whose "worldly God" is money. The Gentile capitalists worshiped the same God, except that they affected a veneer of civility as "a figleaf for the cash nexus ... The civilities are a kind of games goyim [Gentiles] play."

Excessive Zeal. Cuddihy, 53, was raised as a Catholic and teaches sociology at Hunter College in New York City. To offer such theories in an age that regards ethnic determinism with the deepest suspicion clearly takes nerve. Ordeal, however,.is not antiSemitic. At its best it is a provocative revisionist ramble through the received ideas of the past hundred years, which encourages readers to alter their conceptions of the world. Cuddihy's presentation is flawed by excessive zeal. If a Jew utters a word like coarse, he automatically triggers, in Cuddihy's mind, visions of the primal scream. (Though, as Freud once pointed out, sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.) Cuddihy also has a tendency to expand a quirky coincidence into a theory of cultural history.

In discussing the Oedipus complex, for instance, he assumes that the crucial element in Freud's childhood was his deep shame when he learned that his father had meekly endured an anti-Semitic insult on the streets of Vienna. Thereafter, Freud is bent on vengeance --"He will unmask these goyim" by putting the offending Gentiles on the analyst's couch. The problem is not that Cuddihy's theories are preposterous, but that he has left too much out of his calculations -- most notably the vast clinical experience that Freud always refers to in his speculative essays.

The same mix of insight and overstatement results when Cuddihy transposes his theories to the contemporary scene. A spectacular foray into the 1970 Chicago Seven conspiracy trial, "A Tale of Two Hoffmans," provides one of the book's most fascinating moments. Cuddihy puts aside the legal issues and instead analyzes the proceedings as "an ancient scenario" played out in the courtroom by Defendant Abbie Hoffman, an uncompromisingly "coarse Yid" if ever there was one, and Trial Judge Julius Hoffman, archetype of the assimilating Jew striving for Gentile "refinement." When Abbie labels Julius a "front man for the Wasp power elite," he bluntly expresses the "sociocultural wounds" that, Cuddihy says, Marx and Freud expressed only indirectly. But when Cuddihy poaches upon the field of literary criticism, his judgments cloud his vision. He arrogantly dismisses Novelist Bernard Malamud as "a teller of Christian tales who 'passes' as a Jew." evidently because Malamud does not depict the Jewish ordeal the way Cuddihy defines it. Similarly, he laments the vogue for Yiddish Storyteller Isaac Bashevis Singer on the dubious grounds that he portrays not the real Jew, whatever that is, but a "sentimental myth" instead.

The final chapter provides an appealing clue to the sociocultural wounds that led the author to write the book. Though the subject is Jewry, Cuddihy also offers a particularly original meditation on a very old theme: the conflict between tree-swinging creative joy and the forces of social conformity.

As an intellectual gadfly, he makes a compassionate statement for all the mavericks and pariahs who refuse to become, in Max Weber's phrase, "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart."

-- Richard Bernstein

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