Norman Lebrecht’s new book, Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947, is both humbler and more ambitious than its title suggests.
A reader judging the book by its cover would be forgiven for assuming that Lebrecht considers “genius” and “anxiety” to be two separate, innate characteristics of that era’s Jews — and perhaps of Jews in any era. In fact, anxiety is a condition imposed upon the Jews in question, and genius describes the intellectual, scientific, and other breakthroughs that resulted from that anxiety. “Anxiety acts on them like an Egyptian taskmaster in the book of Exodus. It goads them to acts of genius,” Lebrecht writes.
That’s the humility of the thesis. The ambition comes when Lebrecht promises to explore not only how the Jews changed the world but how the world changed the Jews of this period. It’s an important recognition of the fact that Jews are not simply agents of change. They are humans, not a plot device.
Their humanity often finds its expression in a particular kind of tragedy: the drive for acceptance that ends in expulsion. Nowhere does Lebrecht better illustrate this tragedy than with his retelling of the life of the German-Jewish scientist Fritz Haber.
Each of the book’s chapters is marked by a specific year, around which Lebrecht centers a group of microhistories. The main player in the chapter “1905: The Known Unknowns” is Albert Einstein. Along the way, Lebrecht introduces Einstein’s good friend Haber. Born a Jew, Haber strayed into practicing Lutheranism. When WWI broke out in 1914, a five-year-old scientific discovery of Haber’s became essential to Germany’s survival. Haber and Carl Bosch had patented a way to mass-produce ammonia for fertilizer and explosives. “Without the Haber-Bosch process,” Lebrecht writes, “it is estimated that Germany would have run out of food and munitions by 1915.” Haber, for his part, declared that “in war, scientists belong to their Fatherland.” Thus did Haber father the deployment of chemical weapons in modern warfare. On their successful use against Allied forces, Haber was promoted. His wife committed suicide.
Haber and his assistants continued to experiment with pesticides. Under Haber’s supervision, one assistant came up with Zyklon A. Another assistant “improved” on that formula and created Zyklon B, the gas later chosen by the Nazis to mass-murder Jews. After Adolf Hitler came to power, Haber, despite his conversion, was fired from his job and forced to flee the country. “At sixty-four years old, he has sold his soul to a Germany that has turned its face against him,” Lebrecht writes.
Lebrecht is a skillful storyteller with an impressively wide range. Another standout chapter is on Sarah Bernhardt, the French actress whom Lebrecht credits with being the “inventor of celebrity.” The book is filled with famous men and women, usually racing against the clock, never at ease: Chaim Weizmann, Theodor Herzl, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Karl Marx, Franz Kafka. About Kafka, Lebrecht writes: “His anxiety is more than just a conditioned response to a history of Jewish persecution. It is a creative distillation of that legacy into something recognizable as genius. Anxiety is the engine of Franz Kafka’s humanity.”
Lebrecht also spends time on lesser-known figures: “Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery; without Paul Ehrlich, no chemotherapy; without Siegfried Marcus, no motorcar … without Genevieve Halevy, no grand opera; without Emanuel Deutsch, no State of Israel.”
But is all that really true? Genevieve Halevy was the daughter of the composer Jacques Halevy, whose student, Georges Bizet, fell in love with and married Genevieve. She was dogged by mental health struggles, and he died young — but not before he scored the novel Carmen into an opera. Lebrecht makes his case that the character of Carmen is based on Genevieve. And Carmen, despite initial negative reviews, eventually became a path-breaking mass-consumption opera. But even if Genevieve is the inspiration for Bizet’s Carmen, the show premiered in 1875 — nearly 40 years after, for example, the premier of Les Huguenots, the celebrated production by Giacomo Meyerbeer, certainly considered by most to be “grand opera.” One has the impression that Lebrecht has exaggerated a bit to make a point, but the exaggeration ends up casting doubt on the wisdom of including Genevieve at all.
The same can be said for Deutsch, whom Lebrecht credits with inspiring the Zionism of the British novelist George Eliot, whose novel Daniel Deronda, Lebrecht argues, lit the spark of Zion among Israel’s founders. It’s a cute point, but Herzl’s movement for a Jewish state would have had the same result had Herzl not read the novel “on the eve of the first Zionist Congress.”
But these are minor quibbles. After all, perhaps long-overlooked figures are entitled to a historian’s hyperbole. Genius & Anxiety is a clear triumph and a pleasure to read. It is the rare work of reference that reads like a novel, and it illuminates the Jews’ relationship with the world like few books before it.
Seth Mandel is the executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
