Published: 19 November 2019
Last updated: 5 March 2024
NORMAN LEBRECHT TAKES SOME PRIDE in being a Jew. The Jewishness that matters to him has nothing to do with biological inheritance: he knows there’s no such thing as Jewish DNA. Nor is it about religious piety: most of his favourite Jews are non-believers.
Jewishness, as Lebrecht sees it, is essentially a matter of culture, especially high culture, and Genius and Anxiety is an exercise in boosterism, designed to show how Jewish talent has “remade the world” in the past two centuries.
The book begins in the 1840s, with a chapter focused on Felix Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx and Benjamin Disraeli. They were “the breakthrough Jews”, according to Lebrecht: the first to stand up to the immemorial insults hurled at them by Christians.
The remainder of the book documents the cultural achievements of dozens of self-emancipated Jews, not all of them A-list celebrities such as Disraeli.
FULL STORY Genius and Anxiety by Norman Lebrecht review – 100 years of Jewish brilliance (Guardian)
Photo Einstein in 1931 (AP)
