THE ORDEAL OF CIVILITY:
Marx, Lévi-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.