Content uploaded by Adam Ferziger
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Adam Ferziger on Feb 14, 2017
Content may be subject to copyright.
DOMINIQUE KIRCHNER REILL.Nationalists Who Feared
the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dal-
matia, Trieste, and Venice. (Stanford Studies on Central
and Eastern Europe.) Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press. 2012. Pp. xvii, 313. $65.00.
The study of nationalism was long considered the de-
fault area of interest for historians of Habsburg Central
Europe. But over the past decade or so, a number of
scholars have pushed for increased attention to the at-
titude of men and women who found the exhortations
of national activists unappealing or even incomprehen-
sible. Becoming national was, in this view, often a pro-
cess of dragooning and disciplining the nationally in-
different, not of gently “awakening” inhabitants’
preexisting identities.
Dominique Kirchner Reill’s monograph can be seen
as both a useful contribution to this recent surge of in-
terest in national indifference and as a healthy correc-
tive to it. As the paradoxical title suggests, Reill’s focus
is on a group of people who were unmistakably national
activists themselves—and thus poor candidates for the
label of nationally indifferent—but who nonetheless ex-
pressed a very similar kind of skepticism about the con-
sequences of pursuing monist national logics. Just as
appreciation of national indifference has required de-
pathologizing such an attitude, so Reill argues that to
understand such “fearful nationalists,” we need to
avoid dismissing their ambivalence as the result of “ide-
alistic confusion, bouts of denationalization, or wily po-
litical maneuvering” and instead explore how their na-
tionalism and their pluralism developed in tandem (p.
3).
The main characters of this story are six journalists
and political activists—Niccolo` Tommaseo, Francesco
Dall’Ongaro, Pacifico Valussi, Medo Pucic´, Ivan Au-
gust Kanacˇic´, and Stipan Ivicˇevic´—who lived and
worked in Venice, Trieste, and Dalmatia, near the
shores of the Adriatic Sea, in the early nineteenth cen-
tury. Dall’Ongaro and Valussi have been remembered
as part of Italy’s national revival, Pucic´, Kanacˇic´, and
Ivicˇevic´ as contributors to the South Slavic awakening.
Tommaseo emerges as the pivotal figure of the book,
both because of his intellectual stature and resulting
influence among the others and because he has been
viewed as both an Italian and a Slavic patriot. But Reill
persuasively describes all of these men as part of an
integrated and evolving debate about how national par-
ticularity could be cultivated alongside multinational
interaction.
The book is an impressive example of socially em-
bedded intellectual history. Reill’s main sources are the
published writings of and the correspondence among
the six protagonists, and her main quarry is understand-
ing their political and philosophical visions. But she de-
votes admirable attention to the various settings in
which these ideas were articulated, vividly describing
both the common world that the writers shared and the
importance of local particularity and personal back-
grounds. The long history of Venetian domination of
the Adriatic meant that La Serenissima loomed large in
everyone’s understanding of the region. But other lo-
cations exerted a gravitational pull. Dall’Ongaro and
Valussi promoted their publishing base, Trieste, as the
“Hamburg of the Adriatic” (p. 94), a trading hub tying
the region together, while Pucic´’s multinational vision
ultimately moved toward a kind of “Greater
Dubrovnik” (p. 221), extrapolating outward the Slavic-
Italian cultural balance of his hometown.
The revolutions of 1848 provide the natural climax to
Reill’s story. These events have often been viewed as
the end of an innocent phase in the development of
nationalism, the moment when nationalists came to
view rival nationalists, not supranational dynasties, as
their primary foes. Reill tries to avoid narrating this
shift as either an inevitable awakening from utopian il-
lusions or an inexplicable triumph of xenophobic pas-
sions. She instead provides a thick description of the
“rupture in experience” between the city of Venice,
which became locked in a desperate showdown with
Habsburg counterrevolution, and Dalmatia, which saw
little revolutionary violence. Facing hunger and deadly
outbreaks of cholera, Venetians were given increasingly
strident exhortations by their leaders, portraying the
city’s enemies as not only lackeys of the Habsburgs but
as bloodthirsty Germans and Croatians. Most residents
of Dalmatia, in turn, were happy to have avoided Ven-
ice’s fate and became preoccupied with other political
issues, such as the province’s future relationship to the
Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia. Reill’s emphasis on con-
tingency may not satisfy every reader; ethnicized ap-
peals, after all, presumably only resonate—or come to
mind in the first place—where ethnicized views of the
world are already familiar and meaningful. But this is,
on the whole, a nuanced and persuasive account.
The final paragraphs of Nationalists Who Feared the
Nation are gems of lucidity and economy. Reill first
notes how national storytelling—“our need to map a
clear trajectory of imagining a nation, founding a na-
tion, and then consolidating it” (p. 243)—has previ-
ously shoehorned figures such as Tommaseo,
Dall’Ongaro, Valussi, Pucic´, Kanacˇic´, and Ivicˇevic´ into
crude genealogies of Italian or South Slavic national
awakening, blinding us to the shared discussions and
partially overlapping visions that shaped their work.
But she also rightly cautions readers against lapsing
into alternative (Central) European mythologies, nat-
uralizing a “world bridged together by borderlands and
multi-national seas” destined to harmony in the present
and future despite the inexplicable hatreds of the past
(p. 244). This book is, in short, an impressive example
of how historians can productively balance empathy
and critique, and it is a welcome addition to the schol-
arship on nationalism in modern Europe.
JAMES BJORK
King’s College London
DANIEL B. SCHWARTZ.The First Modern Jew: Spinoza
and the History of an Image. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press. 2012. Pp. xv, 270. $39.50.
Europe: Early Modern and Modern 923
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2013
This wide-ranging and piercing study exhibits impres-
sive familiarity with the long list of original analyses of
Baruch Spinoza’s life and philosophy. Daniel B.
Schwartz’s goal is not to interpret Spinoza himself, but
rather to chronicle key reflections of his Jewish recep-
tion over the past 250 years. Secularizing Jews have con-
strued Spinoza as a “cultural icon” or found in him a
“usable past” that serves as precedent for their own per-
sonal and ideological deviations from traditional Jewish
practices and principles. The ongoing Jewish fascina-
tion with this Amsterdam-born philosopher who pio-
neered the rejection of Jewish fundamentals in the sev-
enteenth century and was banned by his Spanish-
Portuguese community—but who still rejected the
option of apostasy—is the focus of Schwartz’s learned
examination.
After a valuable methodological introduction, chap-
ter one addresses the earliest discussions of Spinoza’s
life and ideas. The “fashioning of Spinoza into a sym-
bol,” Schwartz emphasizes, was “initially left to non-
Jews” (p. 20). Only with the rise of the modern Jew in
the mid-eighteenth century, as epitomized by Moses
Mendelssohn, did this change. The book provides a
great deal of evidence for what the author refers to as
“the cult of Spinoza.” Rather than exhausting the boun-
tiful examples of this phenomenon, the focus is on key
figures and junctures in the evolution of Jewish fasci-
nation with Spinoza.
The first is Mendelssohn’s ambivalent “reclamation”
of “the Jew, Baruch Spinoza.” Despite his heretical phi-
losophy, opined Mendelssohn, Spinoza could have re-
mained an Orthodox Jew had he not “called genuine
Judaism [halakhah] into question and in so doing
stepped outside the law” (p. 51). Berthold Auerbach,
the enlightened German Jewish fiction writer and es-
sayist, championed Spinoza as the forerunner of the
modern Jew’s effort to get “out of the ghetto.” Others
who identified with the nascent Reform movement re-
invented Spinoza as a “good Jew” whose antinomian
outlook and lifestyle did not lead to formal conversion.
The Galician Enlightenment scholar Salomon Rubin
named his Hebrew rendition of Spinoza’s philosophical
system Moreh nevukhim he-hadash (The New Guide to
the Perplexed). In so doing, “Spinoza was reappropri-
ated in Hebrew literature as the second coming of Mai-
monides” (p. 81).
Rubin’s rehabilitation project featured integrating
the Amsterdam heretic into the redemptive axis of the
Jewish enlightenment from Moses Maimonides to Mo-
ses Mendelssohn. Yet the most profound expression of
the transformative and near-mystical role played by
Spinoza for these Jewish rebels is the description by
Micah Josef Berdichevsky, the literary figure and critic
of Jewish tradition, of his first encounter with the He-
brew rendition of Spinoza’s Ethics in 1900: “Suddenly,
everything changed before me; mountains surrounded
me and lo and behold! The body of Spinoza touched my
own and a voice cried inside me: the book in your hands
is the answer to the mystery of the universe . . . Here I
was sitting at the feet of my teacher and rabbi, lonely
like him, and like him cut off from Israel” (p. 107).
If Berdichevsky felt no compunction to “spirit” Spi-
noza “back into the fold through the back door,” the
same could not be said for his former Odessa neighbor,
Joseph Klausner, the Revisionist Zionist and historian.
In a 1927 speech at the recently established Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, Klausner famously declared
the ban on Spinoza to have been lifted. Indeed, twenty-
seven years later Labor-Zionist David Ben-Gurion, the
first prime minister of Israel, aimed to “right the wrong
to Jewish culture” done to the individual who “inau-
gurated the breakthrough of the scientific spirit into
modern Judaism.”
Schwartz’s work is a major contribution to the now
rich field of Jewish memory inaugurated by his late
teacher Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. It also brings a fresh
voice to long-running debates over the emergence of
the modern Jew. Azriel Shohet saw practical deviations
from religious standards already manifest at the turn of
the eighteenth century as key indications of change,
whereas Jacob Katz located the shift toward modern
Jewish life in Mendelssohn’s life and works. If recent
scholarship has revitalized Shohet’s approach,
Schwartz’s study rekindles the sense that personal de-
partures from norms are only transformed into truly
new identities when they receive ideational justifica-
tion.
Schwartz presents Spinoza as the first and foremost
in a series of Jewish-born individuals that includes Sig-
mund Freud and Albert Einstein, individuals whose
secularism facilitated their positions as heroes to whom
a wide range of modern Jews could relate. An alter-
native but equally compelling interpretation is that
modern Jewish self-understanding is epitomized by the
visceral desire to be accepted by Gentile society or at
least to be acknowledged not only for one’s Jewishness.
This far less romantic approach would explain the Jew-
ish passion for reclaiming these relatively “non-Jewish
Jews” so eloquently chronicled in Schwartz’s tome.
ADAM S. FERZIGER
Bar-Ilan University
BERNARD WASSERSTEIN.On the Eve: The Jews of Europe
before the Second World War. New York: Simon and
Schuster. 2012. Pp. xxi, 552. $32.50.
This brilliant book by Bernard Wasserstein is difficult
to classify. It is a kind of conventional history, a pan-
oramic and prodigiously comprehensive socioeconomic
and political survey of European Jewry in the 1930s. In
that sense it may be employed as a primer packed with
information of all kinds and complete with photo-
graphic illustrations. At another level, and more fun-
damentally, it attempts “to restore forgotten men,
women and children to the historical record, to breathe
renewed life momentarily into those who were soon to
be dry bones” (p. xxi). The book’s motto is taken from
Simon Dubnow’s proclamation that the “historian’s es-
sential creative act is the resurrection of the dead.” This
924 Reviews of Books
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2013
CopyrightofAmericanHistoricalReviewisthepropertyofOxfordUniversityPress/USA
anditscontentmaynotbecopiedoremailedtomultiplesitesorpostedtoalistservwithout
thecopyrightholder'sexpresswrittenpermission.However,usersmayprint,download,or
emailarticlesforindividualuse.