Each week, The Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is Albert S. Lindemann's "Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews." Published in 1997, "Esau’s Tears" is a fascinating account of the rise of modern antisemitism that focuses not merely on the hatreds of antisemites but also on the social tensions created by rapid Jewish advancements in the fields of finance, the professions, academia and politics. Lindemann argued that there was no point in writing yet another book presenting Jews as passive victims of hate-filled antisemites. Instead, he sought to show that some antisemitic perceptions had a “kernel of truth” in the sense that Jews really were disproportionately represented in finance, radical politics and the professions. Most Historical accounts of the modern world present Jewish history as a chain of persecutions. What they leave out is that Jews were often the biggest winners in modern society.

Modern antisemitism, according to Lindemann, must be understood in the context of the dramatic social and economic rise of Jews. Emancipation allowed Jews to leave the ghetto and enter broader society. Between 1800 and 1930, Jews became disproportionately prominent in finance and commerce (banks and stock exchanges); the professions (law, medicine, academia and journalism); culture (music, literature and philosophy); and radical politics (socialism, anarchism and Bolshevism). While Jews were a small minority of the population, their visibility and success made them a lightning rod for resentment.

Lindemann demolishes many myths along the way. For example, he argues that Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s innocence was by no means as clear-cut as contemporaries and later historians have assumed. He does not outright declare Dreyfus guilty, but he pushes back against the canonical narrative that Dreyfus was an innocent Jew persecuted by black-hearted antisemites. This stance shocked many historians, who insist on seeing the Dreyfus Affair as a textbook example of modern antisemitic injustice.

Lindemann challenges the widely-held belief in the ubiquity of antisemitism. For long stretches of the 19th century, he writes, Jews were not only tolerated but welcomed into the higher echelons of society. Jews served in the military and attended universities; they became lawyers, doctors, professors and journalists. In Vienna and Berlin, Jewish cultural life flourished. Jews themselves often described their lives in these societies as filled with opportunity--they did not feel themselves to be the victims of persecution.

Another myth Lindemann challenges is that of the Russian pogroms. Lindemann is skeptical of what he sees as the “mythologizing” of Russian pogroms. He argues that while there were pogroms in Russia, their scale and frequency have often been wildly overstated in Western accounts. Many pogroms were local, sporadic riots, not centrally-planned genocidal campaigns. Historians have presented them as Holocausts-in-the-making; in fact, victims numbered in the dozens, not in hundreds of thousands. Lindemann does not excuse the pogroms, but he contextualizes them as episodes of popular unrest in a collapsing empire that also targeted other groups.

Critics naturally argued that Lindemann was validating the logic of antisemitism. By pointing to the disproportionate number of Jewish bankers, Lindemann, according to critics, appeared to be giving credence to the stereotype of “Jewish finance.” By emphasizing the proliferation of Jewish revolutionaries, Lindemann was legitimating the “Jewish Bolshevism” trope. By highlighting Jewish prominence in sexual reform, research on homosexuality or psychoanalysis, Lindemann was providing support to the charge of Jewish “moral corruption.”

Scholars also took umbrage at Lindemann’s tone. While often dismissive of what he refers to as the "lachrymose conception of Jewish history," he was at the same time sympathetic to the anxieties of antisemites, describing them as “understandable” or “reasonable.”

Lindemann however wrote a work of history, not a work of moral condemnation. He sought to understand people as they understood themselves. Albert S. Lindemann's "Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews" remains among the best scholarly accounts of a phenomenon that is rarely discussed in any truthful or balanced way.