Norman Lebrecht takes some pride in being a Jew. The Jewishness that matters to him has nothing to do with biological inheritance: he knows there’s no such thing as Jewish DNA. Nor is it about religious piety: most of his favourite Jews are non-believers. Jewishness, as Lebrecht sees it, is essentially a matter of culture, especially high culture, and Genius and Anxiety is an exercise in boosterism, designed to show how Jewish talent has “remade the world” in the past two centuries.
The book begins in the 1840s, with a chapter focused on Felix Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx and Benjamin Disraeli. They were “the breakthrough Jews”, according to Lebrecht: the first to stand up to the immemorial insults hurled at them by Christians. He recalls how the Irish Catholic MP Daniel O’Connell, known as the Liberator, issued a routine denunciation of Disraeli as a descendant of the killers of Christ. “Yes, I am a Jew,” Disraeli replied, “and when the ancestors of the Right Honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.” That riposte, according to Lebrecht, marks the moment when Jews “burst out of the ghetto, brimming with the bottled energies of two millennia”.
The remainder of the book documents the cultural achievements of dozens of self-emancipated Jews, not all of them A-list celebrities such as Disraeli. I was glad to make the acquaintance of Eliza Davies, who pestered Charles Dickens about his abusive caricatures of Jews, eventually eliciting not only an apology but also a revised version of Oliver Twist. I was interested to learn that the Gypsy heroine of Bizet’s opera Carmen had a Jewish prototype in the form of the composer’s wife, the magnetic Parisian hostess Geneviève Halévy. And I enjoyed the portrait of Emma Lazarus who, as Lebrecht puts it, combined “pride in Jewish identity” with “faith in the American dream”, and wrote the famous lines that ended up on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
By the end of the 19th century, Jews had become the most cosmopolitan tribe in history, with flourishing settlements from the US to South America, China, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. But geographical dispersal bred political nostalgia, culminating in Theodor Herzl’s plea for a “publicly recognised and legally secured homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine”. The tussle between two tendencies – one centrifugal, the other centripetal – frames the portraits of 20th-century Jews that fill the second half of the book: Freud, Einstein, Trotsky, Kafka, Wittgenstein and most strikingly Schoenberg, who was as fanatical about the reunification of the Jewish people as about musical rigour. The book ends with a spotlight on Leonard Bernstein, who wrapped his prodigious talents in a “golden boy persona” and “recast the Jew in the public eye”.
According to his publisher Lebrecht is “the world’s bestselling author on classical music”, and while Genius and Anxiety presents itself as a work of serious historical research, it is also laced with journalistic pizzazz. I have to confess however that for me it doesn’t always work. I soon tired of the relentless use of the present tense, his sexual knowingness, and his habit of including himself, Zelig like, in every chapter. And I simply cannot work out what he means when he says, for example, that “readers respond to Proust as dogs to Pavlov”.
As a historian, Lebrecht is often reliable, but not always. Marx’s uncle did not run “an electrical firm”, Wittgenstein’s father was not a “railroad baron”, and Einstein never held “a chair at Princeton University”. Hegel did not believe that “thesis versus antithesis equals synthesis”, and Marx did not set out to create an “ideology” (the word was anathema to him). To say that Heine ‘blows away complex sentence structures that end in verbs and morbid romanticism that ends in death’ is too clever by half. And it’s ridiculous to dismiss the psychoanalytic doctrine that sexuality depends more on fantasy than on fact as ‘the moment when Freud becomes fraud’.
Genius and Anxiety is gushing about Jewish genius, but about Jewish anxiety it is rather coy. I was astonished when I got to the end of the book and realised that it hardly mentions the Holocaust. A chapter on the events of 1942 begins in Berlin, with a sketch of the Wannsee conference and the proposal for a “final solution” to the “Jewish question”, but after a few pages it whisks us to California, where Michael Curtiz was directing Casablanca, and Massachusetts, where Gregory Pincus was embarking on the research that led to the invention of the contraceptive pill, and hence, we are told, to “the sexual and feminist revolutions of the 1960s”.
Lebrecht’s determination to present Jews as bold creators rather than victims of Nazi policy is liberating in some ways, but it is disabling as well. Jewish experience in the 20th century was shaped not just by the millions who were killed, but also by those who survived, at least for a while, and suffered in other ways. Their torments are not hard to discover: they are documented in Anne Frank’s celebrated account of the humiliations of daily life in the Netherlands, and also in the magnificent journals of Léon Werth (France), Mihail Sebastian (Romania) and Victor Klemperer (Germany). Lebrecht ignores them all, but they seem to me to be among the most powerful literary performances of the 20th century, and they also they have a close bearing on his argument. One of the striking things about Frank, Werth, Sebastian and Klemperer is that they did not think of themselves as particularly Jewish until they were confronted by antisemitic violence and by the petty twists and turns of antisemitic bureaucracy.
The ever changing prohibitions aimed at them as Jews – covering everything from keeping pets to travelling on trams or putting on plays – together with the raids, the expropriations, the beatings and spittings and the yellow stars, made every moment of their lives incalculably precarious. They were left with nothing to cling to except their Jewishness, which was simultaneously made into a source of shame.
