In July 1833, when Felix Mendelssohn arrived in London, he went straight to the House of Commons. He was hailed as the most talented composer after Mozart and the most devout Lutheran after Bach, and was attracted by what the media called the Jewish Act, a heated political debate over whether to grant equal rights to Jews among British citizens.
German-Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn
"Earlier today," Mendelssohn wrote in a letter to his mother, "the Jews were liberated. It makes me proud... For us, the UK is a better place. "The letter was banned from publication for a long time. His narrative is interspersed with a large number of Hebrew and Yiddish words for hatred and anti-Semitism. It's some sort of crypto-exchange between the outwardly assimilated artist and his artistically masked Jewish identity. Reading this passage prompted me to start looking for the root of a problem that has plagued me for most of my adult life.
It is well known that from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century, a few great men changed the world. About half of them are Jews. Is this a cliché? Jews make up less than 0.002 percent of the world's population, but it looks like they're driving the biggest advances of our century.
The most well-known revolutionary thinkers were household names just by their last names—Marx, Disraeli, Trotsky, Einstein, Freud, Wittgenstein. There are also many people who have invented many necessities of contemporary life, such as motor vehicles, chemotherapy and blue jeans, but their names have been buried in history. I am often struck by the fact that their creations stem from thinking outside the path of Western tradition and raising a different kind of question.
The Jews have a palpable capacity to "think differently," and this idol-denial stems from centuries of separation from isolated lives, as well as from perennial immersion in the speculative style of the Talmud, which I have been practicing for a long time. Over time, I began to realize that in this century of creation, this attitude had led to immeasurable changes in the practical language of Western culture.
The Talmud (Essential Edition)
Apparently, the main works of Kafka, Proust, Mahler, and Schoenberg changed literature and music. Mahler was the most thought-provoking composer of the twentieth century, Schoenberg was the cornerstone of atonal modernism, Kafka was the engine of anxiety, and Proust was the most effective archaeologist of memory outside of Sigmund Freud.
It is also obvious that the Jews created a vast commercial system of mass music and visual entertainment. Jewish immigrants established popular music as the soundtrack of our lives and film as our most popular way of distracting. Refugees and African-Americans from Russia's wave of anti-Semitism found aural similarities between the minor music of synagogues and the plantation blues of southern America. At the beginning of the Jazz Age, the Jews unearthed musical geniuses (Louis Armstrong was running errands for a Jewish family at the time) and founded the major record labels of the future. George Gershwin, the composer of the African-American opera Pokey and Bass, called his composition "Frigisch"—a Yiddish word for describing Talmud-style problems. The aria "Summer Time" at the opening of Pokey and Bass is a flashback of a metaphor for the Sabbath morning synagogue.
Sam Godwin, one of Hollywood's founding fathers, is the source of many Talmud-style antagonistic aphorisms and pranks — "anyone who goes to a psychiatrist needs to check his head." As Hollywood's most enduring film, Casablanca has little to do with the real-world Moroccan city of shisha and kebabs. Instead, it's a Jewish café in Budapest reconstructed in a surreal imagination, created by Jewish director Michael Kurtiz from Budapest, which, as Freud put it, is a subconscious impulse.
Language issues are crucial. Heinrich Heine, a contemporary of Mendelsssohn, liberated the German language from Goethe's formality and restraint, allowing poetry to flow like later rap songs. Anyone who knows fifty German words can happily read Heine because German is Heine's second language. His native language is Hebrew/Yiddish. It was Heine who taught Karl Marx to transform the esoteric Philosophy of Hegel into inflammatory slogans. They have nothing to lose except the chains of an alienated society.
Marcel Proust transformed the French narrative from linear to loose, and some consider this color he brought to the French to be "Jewish". "For a long time, I went to bed very early." The simple but difficult-to-translate opening of his masterpiece immediately conveys a memory of early sleep and early wake-up as a teenager, and can express the insoluble yearning for the lost time and the lost temple. It is no accident that Dubliner James Joyce set Leopold Bloom as a Jew, inspired by Itaro Suvo, a Jewish teacher in Trieste. In this way, Bloom, as an outsider, has more freedom and unfettered access to English than the Irish who attend Sunday school. In a rare explanation, Joyce said Ulysses was "an epic of two peoples (Israel-Ireland)."
A curator of the British Museum named Emmanuel Deutsch, who shocked George Eliot with his vast knowledge of Near Eastern culture, asked her to write the story of Daniel Deronda, which, after being translated into Hebrew and Yiddish, became the main inspiration for modern politicized Zionism. Charles Dickens was so impressed by a Jewish woman who bought his London property that the author of Orphans of the Mist, which contains the most anti-Semitic characters after Shakespeare's Sherlock, inserted an idealized Jewish character of Leah in his later book, Our Mutual Friend.
Mahler's symphony is full of Jewish mockery. Arnold Schoenberg's music is more tonal than atonal, reminiscent of sounds older than Western all-scale harmonies. In his First Symphony, Leonard Bernstein quotes what he once read at the rite of passage in a way that can only be described as bold and even reckless. These are only part of the Jewish way of subverting speech and lyrical art (visual art was less influenced, probably due to the taboo of idol graphics in the Ten Commandments).
This shock and disruption is not always obvious or consistent. In Paris in March 1875, the non-Jewish composer Georges Beejay's Carmen suffered a historic defeat at its premiere. I found that Carmen was by far the most popular opera, in part because its heroine was set not only in the image of a gypsy, but also in the form of an uncontrollable Jewish woman based on the image of Bizet's erratic wife, Ginaviev Halev. Bizet's wife later became a template for Proust's characters.
Actress Sarah Bernhardt was the daughter of a Jewish courtesan who, through careful calculation and planning, made herself the most famous social figure since Napoleon. When the Germans besieged Paris in 1870, Sarah operated a theater she managed as a military hospital. When the theater returned to normal, she poured Victor Hugo upside down with her performance, bringing Dumas's La Traviata back to its glory, and her characters shuddered with her frankness and humanity. Sarah became the greatest actress of her time, but it wasn't enough. She sought greater fame.
Sarah Bernhardt
Newspapers at that time would publish all kinds of lace news about Sarah at the same time, her bed was a coffin, she let wild animals run around her room, and she didn't wear corsets. In that era of advocating fullness, she rebelliously maintained a slim figure. She shares a bedroom with a female partner. Her lovers included both a brilliant banker and a baron-level robber.
In London, tickets for the season in which she performed in French were sold out. In the United States, she saved Abraham Lincoln's widow from drowning. D.H. Lawrence once said to his girlfriend: "She (Sarah) represents the raw passion of women... I could love her until I went crazy. In World War I, Sarah performed for the French army in the trenches despite losing a leg due to arthritis. She signed a Hollywood contract at the age of 70. In 1945, she appeared on a stamp in the form of Marianna, a symbol of the eternal woman representing the French Republic.
Sarah Bernhardt redefined fame in the modern sense. As a single woman and a Jew, she saw fame as strength and created a celebrity cult to protect herself. During the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish officer was wrongly convicted of being a German spy, she told Le Figaro: "I am the daughter of the great Jewish nation. After being told she didn't look Like a Jew, she retorted, "What does a Jew look like?" "She has done more than anyone else in changing the way the world views Jews." Since then, she has provided templates for each female idol (Marilyn Monroe, Avita, Madonna, Princess Diana). "I'm so famous, you can't make a mistake."
After Jewish talents were unleashed by opening up the ghetto, anxiety became its ongoing engine. Almost every genius in history lives in fear that the next persecution is coming at any time, and they are forced to think at exponential speed. Countless Anglican couples have married in Felix Mendelssohn's Wedding March, and he himself died at the age of 38 after a stroke caused by workaholic anxiety, and he was unable to escape this inevitable Jewish identity.
Norman Lebrecht's new book Genius and Anxiety: How the Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947, British edition