Book R e v i e w s . . . . . John Murray Cuddihy, THE ORDEAL OF CIVILITY: FREUD, MARX, LEVI-STRAUSS, AND THE JEWISH STRUGGLE WITH MODERNITY. New York: Basic Books, 1974. 272 pp. REVIEWER Laura Kitch and Egon Mayer, New York.

Brooklyn College,

City University

of

In this book, John Cuddlhy aims to be revolutionary: he may merely be revolting He attempts to convince the reader that some of the fundamental concepts of modern social science that are associated with Freud, Marx, and Levi-Strauss are not derived from the experience of man in general but from a particular experience -- the Jewish experience. That's fairly revolutionary. He defines the Jewish experience as the confrontation between the "uncivil," "pre-modern," "vulgar," shtetl Jew and the civil, modern, refined Christian society. That's pretty revolting. The starting point of Cuddihy's argument is a basic sociology-of-knowledge truism-any thinker's ideas will be shaped by his position in society. According to Cuddihy the single most important determinant of the social location of Freud, Marx and LeviStrauss was the fact of their Jewishness. Since the nineteenth century, "being Jewish" in the modern world has posed an inescapable problem for the intellectual: As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the advanced guard of emancipating Jewry encountered head-on the specific problem of social integration with the Gentile West . . . . It was precisely the relatively rapid "promotion rates" enjoyed by this Jewry in the political, economic, and cultural spheres that brought, home to it the realization of that special misery of "relative deprivation" that was long to be its lot in the social sphere. (p. !3)

That "special misery" is what Cuddihy calls the ordeal of civility. The ordeal denves from the fact that the moral order of modern society demands obeisance to the Protestant Ethic, in general, and to a Protestant Esthetic and a Protestant Etiquette, in particular: The cultural collision, the Kulturkampf, between Yiddishkeit and the behavioral and expressive norms we call the Protestant Esthetic and Etiquette came to constitute the modern form of the ancient Juden~rage: the "Jewish question" (p. 4) The intellectual Jew has two problems First, having attempted to reject his vulgar shtetl Yiddishkeit, his parents and grandparents, he experiences cultural shame:

Thus, Jewish emancipation, assimilation, and modernization constittJte a single, total phenomenon. The secularizing Jewish intellectual, as the avant-garde of his decolonized people, suffered in his own person the trauma of this culture shock ...cultural shame and awkwardness, guilt and the "guilt of shame." (p.4) An even more profound problem is the inherent resistance of the Jew to the modernization process. As a pre-modern ethnic he is fundamentally unsuited for civil society. According to Cuddihy, no amount of education, active repression or indeed assimilation will "convert" the Jew into a polite, "nice" citizerl of the modern world. The shtetl mentality -- the Yid, in Cuddihy's expression -- cannot be suppressed under the veneer of a parvenu. It is the need to come to terms with their Yiddishkeit that informs the work of Freud, Marx and Levi-Strauss. In working out his Jewish problem, Freud developed the concepts of the id, the Oedipus complex and the methodology of psychoanalysis. (Of course, Freud developed other concepts but apparently Cuddihy does not see in them a reflection of Freud's Jewish angst.) "Freud's lifework," Cuddihy maintains, "was to make sense of the Jewish Emancipation experience" (p. 29):

His basic unspoken premise can be put in lapidary if vulgar form as follows: the id of the "Yid" is hid under the lid of Western decorum (the "superego"). (p.29) The pivotal concept of the Oedipal complex derives from a single incident in Freud's life. The shame that Freud allegedly felt at his father's cowardice in the face of a Gentile insult was sufficient motivation for this major theory of psychological development. (p.48). Finally, the very method of psychoanalysis is seen by Cuddihy as a device to cope with the false euphemisms of civility. On the couch we can all be Yids. Freud solves his Jewish problem by making the problem of civility a universal problem: In one stroke, Freud, a new "Moses" in his own fantasy. "passes" his Jews into the Gentile Gesellschaft and "converts" his Gentiles into "honorary Jews." (p.97) Although the bulk of this work is devoted to Freud, Cuddihy, almost as an afterthrought, applies the same kind of analysis to Marx and Levi-Strauss (one hundred pages for Freud, thirty-one for Marx, but only ten for Levi-Strauss). Marx and Levi-Strauss were less demure (for Cuddihy they were presumably more Jewish) in their attack upon the "beauty of the West." Marx stripped away the veil of idealizations which hide the basic "cash nexus" at the root of capitalistic (Western-Christian-modern) society. LeviStrauss, through his extrapolations from studies of primitive societies, has toppled the West from its status as the paragon of human progress. The technical vocabularies may differ but, Cuddihy maintains, the strategy remains the same: to compensate for the wounds of Yiddishkeit by making all men recognize their essential lack of refinement. The reader must accept this premise in order to accept this book and we do not. First, throughout this work Cuddihy is asking the reader for an indulgence which we inevitably must reject: To make any kind of my interests and me simply to assert otherwise , my study

of sense, it (the book) should be placed in the context convictions, and a certain indulgence will be asked, allowing these convictions and interests, rather than to argue them: will never get off the ground. (p.9)

Regardless of what Cuddihy's interests might be, social science does not rest on unargued assertions. If the author intends to make a connection between a specific way of life (the shtetl and diaspora Jewry) and specific ideas, then at the very least he must describe that life and not just the ideas. Nowhere in this work is Eastern European shtetl life examined. It appears that Cuddihy's only source of information is the popular Life is With People by Zborowski and Herzog, based on oral histories, the remembrances of elderly people presently residing in America. Cuddihy has no reference at all to the actual lives of either Western Jews or the Ostjuden who migrated to the West after the emancipation. Given the fact that the charge of sociology of knowledge is to uncover the relationship between ideas and actual conditions, Cuddihy's lack of empirical data is a glaring flaw. Further, Cuddihy is bound by tenets of the sociology of knowledge to investigate the Jewish circumstances of Freud, Marx and Levi-Strauss, and to demonstrate ho~ those circumstances actually led to the formulation of their revolutionary ideas. Apart frorr allusions to the fact that all three were vaguely aware of "being Jewish" (Marx, tc be sure, even less than the other two), Cuddihy does not deal with their individua experiences of Jewishness. How did Vienna treat the Jewishness of a Freud and Pari; that of a Levi-Strauss? Was Marx, born to a nominally non-Jewish family and baptizec at the age of six, responding to the same "socio-cultural status wound" of Yiddishkei as Freud? Cuddihy asks for the reader's credulity without providing the necessar~ evidence. Apart from these difficulties, there is an even more serious substantive issue whicl" must be raised. Cuddihy implies that ideas such as the Oedipal complex, alienation

and the morality of savage people could only emerge out of the "vindictive objectivity" of the Jewish intelligentsia. Anyone familiar with the history of these ideas is aware that their origins lie well outside of the world of shtetl and diaspora Jewry Marx. for example, can only be understood in the context of German idealism, Feuerbach's materialism, French socialism and English political economy. Another problem emerging from Cuddihy's commitment to his outrageous hypothesis is that, not only ,-,re the ideas of these social scientists informed by the Gentile-Jew confrontation, but also are al} Jewish socio-cultura] products. As a result, he clearly distorts the nature of certain twentieth century events. In his "Tale of Two Hoffmans" (chapter 21), for example, he interprets the confrontation between the political radical {Abbie Hoffman} and the legal establishment (Judge Julius Hoffman) as a conflict between de-modernizing Yiddishkeit and the assimilated Jew. When Cuddihy takes a side trip into Jewish literature the problem only increases Jewish literature is evaluated by only one standard. It is only really good and Jewish if it exposes the vulgar, unrefined id-Yid We have Bernard Malamud defined as "a teller of Christian tales, and passing" as a Jew." (p.203) Philip Rahv and Lionel Trilling are chided for calling Malamud a master, particularly since they "should know better." Obviously, whether the tales are Christian, Jewish, or neither, Malamucl could be a master in the eyes of those who might know better. Not so for Cuddihy. Malamud and "many figures constituting the so-called American Jewish literary renaissance" have denied their true heritage by producing "incognito Christs passing as superstitious Jews." (p.204) As far as Cuddihy is concerned, unless Jewish literature expresses his "ordeal of civility" it is not literature but pretense All of the above rests on the single-minded acceptance of one proposition: the ideas of Jewish intellectuals, since the nineteenth century, are inescapably rooted in their Jewishness. We would suggest that there is another way of looking at the position 0| Jews in society. The concept of social marginality, a more general phenomenon, might better explain the role of the Jewish intellectual and would lead to greater historical accuracy. Freud, Marx and Levi-Strauss were able to see, respectively, the repression, the alienation, and the overly civilized modern reality, not because they were unreconstructed pre-modern ethnics but because they were in a position to see -- they were marginal. Had Cuddihy chosen to employ this concept many of ~he reducti0nistic flaws of this book might have been avoided. The fact that he did not use this approach leads us to wonder what the author really had in mind. Cuddihy has raised the Jewish Question neither in the languages of Christian theology nor nineteenth century liberalism but in the seemingly innocuous language of social science (Cuddihy's "vindictive ob)ectivity?") Modernity. he insists, is a "seamless robe," an integrated package It includes not only rational technology, bureaucratic institutions and universal human rights, but also an appropriate and mandatory form of consciousness. Modernity requires the psychological ability to differentiate between manners and morals, between feelings and appearances. Modernity requires that one treat others with a certain matter-of-fact civility although they are not kin or tribal peers. These qualities of mind were nurtured, according to Cuddihy, in Protestant Christianity: hence, only the so-called WASP is appropriately -ego-synctonic" (his phrase) with modernity: others can only try to acquire those qualities. But the quest entails great cost. This is the ordeal of civility. |t is not likely to be succesful -- the slip of the "Yid" will always show under the lid of civility Phrased in the language of social science. Cuddihy's argument acquires a veneer of legitimacy which is disturbing. What it conceals is a profound disdain for and insensitivity to Jews, in particular, and the vast majority of the (non-WASP) human race, in general. This being the case, one cannot help but wonder whose ordeal is this book really about, ours or his?