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The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science, by Amos Morris-Reich. Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, Vol. 54. London: Routledge, 2008. 193 pp. $95.00.
In this short but interestingly conceived volume, Amos Morris-Reich presents a systematic study of the role of the Jews and Jewish assimilation in the thought of Franz Boas and Georg Simmel. The two thinkers are of obvious interest, because both were of Jewish background but themselves assimilated into German-Jewish culture, albeit in different ways, and because their thinking was formative for social and cultural anthropology (Boas) and theoretical sociology (Simmel), respectively. The volume’s clearly stated thesis is that the concept of the Jews and Jewish assimilation played a central role in the thinking of both authors, and therefore in the intellectual construction of modern social science. That this thesis is correct seems obvious; new are the comparative approach and the way Morris-Reich goes about his analysis.
Although Morris-Reich offers some biographical details, historical context takes second place here to a history of ideas approach. Here, the relevant linkages are to other thinkers (for example, to Kant, Moritz Lazarus, and Dilthey in the case of Simmel), more than to other formative influences, such as the social context of academic scholarship. This emphasis is appropriate, ironically, even from a social historical viewpoint, because the milieu in which both thinkers learned what scholarship is encouraged precisely such philosophical groundings and intellectualized self-conceptions. As Morris-Reich notes, however, his authors paid a price for taking such an approach; in their work, “the Jews” constitute a conceptual entity related to, but not necessarily identical with, actual Jews; nor did either author actually engage in extensive empirical research on Jews.
In the first part of the book, Morris-Reich presents a carefully nuanced and illuminating analysis of Franz Boas’ shift from physical to social and cultural anthropology (from “race” to “culture”) after his move from Germany to the United States, and the impact of that shift on his thinking both about “race” and about “the Jews.” Surprisingly, however, as Morris-Reich shows, Boas’ representations of Jews did not actually result from his turn to society and culture, but “derived from the principles he developed for the study and representation of physical differences among populations” (p. 45). Geography was central among these principles; “the Jews” initially represented for Boas variations within an “Oriental type,” who assimilated easily into the surrounding populations. It was precisely on the basis of such thinking, on this account, that Boas could later argue that the category of “race,” understood as a fixed physical type, had no scientific standing; and it was on the basis of that claim, based in part on his views on “the Jews,” that Boas became one of the leading anti-racist scholars in the United States from the 1920s through the 1940s.
Especially interesting is Morris-Reich’s additional discussion of the impact of Boas’ later anti-racist cultural pluralism on studies of race and ethnicity in America (often carried out by assimilated Jews who had studied with Boas), and on discourse about “race” since 1945. Here Morris-Reich does not neglect to add a brief section on the problems posed for anti-racist pluralist thinking by recent renewed discussion of “physical” (now, genetic) markers in ethnic populations (e.g., markers for heritable diseases like Tay-Sachs among so-called Ashkenasi Jews).
Most important and innovative in the second part of the book is Morris-Reich’s emphasis on the role of Jews and Jewish assimilation in Georg Simmel’s general sociology, rather than on his often-cited essay “The Stranger” (1908). This approach helps him to establish that Simmel’s Neo-Kantian style of thinking profoundly affected his conception of “the Jew.” As he shows, in Simmel’s writings “the Jew” appears as an abstract entity, a subset of broader categories like “the social,” “societion” or “otherness,” not as a group of actual human beings in all its diversity. Put ironically, we could say that Simmel’s “Jew” is already assimilated, which is why his category “the stranger” is not and was not intended to be applicable to Jews as such, but only to those—like Eastern European Jews in Germany in Simmel’s time—who were not yet assimilated, or who tried to affiliate with both the “host” culture and their culture of origin at the same time.
These examples suffice to show the insightfulness and originality of this study. Two problems with the analysis might be noted. First, Morris-Reich insists on calling Boas’ and Simmel’s individual approaches “paradigms.” This concept—normally used for modes of thinking shared among many scholars, rather than the unique approach of a single scholar—seems unnecessary to do the conceptual work required here. Second, though Morris-Reich realizes that both authors exemplify the very Jewish assimilation he discusses, he does not consider directly the implications of this fact for the general validity of his own analysis. For historians of Germany and of the sciences as well as of Jews in that culture, this book provides important new insights into the way highly educated German-speaking Jews reflected upon and responded creatively to their very specific historical situation, ca. 1870–1914. It says some things, but perhaps not enough, about why the resulting concepts and modes of thinking became so important to modern social science.
Mitchell G. Ash
Head, Working Group in History of Science
University of Vienna
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