HUM 438 Jews & Gypsies in Modern Europe. Re-invention of Difference in the Age of Homogenization

Since the time of the French Revolution Europe has transformed itself progressively into a continent of homogenized nations and their states. Minorities in these states were either assimilated or became themselves would-be nations seeking autonomy or secession. The Jews and Gypsies did not fit this modern European framework. Their assimilation failed, but they were not eager to transform themselves into modern nations either. The modern trajectories of those asymmetric minorities, however, were different. Whenever had the Jews an opportunity, they became quickly part of successful middle classes of modernizing Europe. Still, the more they strove to be the same, the more they were identified as the others. Having lost their footholds in traditional Judaism and being refused the full membership in the surrounding majority nations, some Jewish intellectuals and writers created unique worlds of their own in their works whereby they contributed hugely to the development of European modernism. Gypsies, on the other hand, resisted assimilation and processes of modernization tended to make of them an underclass. Still, many Gypsy groups were able to maintain or re-invent their identity even at the social bottom. In a way, they achieved on the collective level what Jewish modernists achieved on the level of their individual creation. In both cases the failure of assimilation amounted to a successful re-invention of the difference.

The course will begin by the exposition of the concept of Mercurians which, according to Iuri Slezkine, captures shared features of Jews, Gypsies and similar groups of ?service nomads? such as the Parsis in India or the Chinese in Indonesia. The contradictions of Jewish emancipation in the 19th and early 20th century and their reflections in modern social theory (e.g. K. Marx, W. Sombart, the Frankfurt School) and modernist writing (F. Kafka, M. Proust, J. Joyce) will be dealt with in the first part of the course. The second part, which will be devoted to the Gypsies, will emphasize their difference from conventionally conceived ethnic groups. Rather than on a mythical past and genealogy, Gypsies base their identity on their ability to maintain their living-together ?here and now?. Their difference does not stem from specific cultural contents but rather from their ability to give a specific Gypsy twist to any cultural content which they appropriate for their own use from the surrounding societies. Not surprisingly, they share this feature with an ambivalent existence of assimilated Jews of the 19th and the first part of the 20th century.