With this essay, Yuri Slezkine stands in a series of interpretations that have made the connection between social minority and social success in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the subject of their analysis. The fascination that emanates from his brilliantly written essay lies in the fact that he dissolves the primarily "ethnic" grounded argument through universalizations and shows how secondary virtues of modernity that are considered to be "Jewish" generalize and are thus brought to their historical concept. With his thesis of "Mercury" modernity, a world in which everyone has finally become "Jewish", Slezkine shows how in the European fin de siècle social habitus rationalized into ethnic difference. Using literary examples - Kafka, Proust, Joyce - he traces the Jewish and non-Jewish variants of a tendency which in the case of the Jews developed in three directions: towards communism, Zionism and the pluralistic, multi-ethnic liberalism of America. Slezkine's essay is a controversial contribution to the still untapped potential of Jewish historical experience.

Translated by: Bettina Engels, Michael Adrian
Foreword by: Dan Diner