Norman Lebrecht, Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847–1947, (New York: Scribner, 2019), 464 pp., $30.00.

ON DECEMBER 11, 2019, just before he was to host the White House Hanukkah parties, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that called for “robust” enforcement of existing civil rights protections for Jews on university campuses. The order cited Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits federal funding for discriminatory programs. The order stated that

Anti-Semitic incidents have increased since 2013, and students, in particular, continue to face anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on university and college campuses. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI), 42 U.S.C. 2000d et seq., prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving Federal financial assistance … individuals who face discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin do not lose protection under Title VI for also being a member of a group that shares common religious practices. Discrimination against Jews may give rise to a Title VI violation when the discrimination is based on an individual’s race, color, or national origin. It shall be the policy of the executive branch to enforce Title VI against prohibited forms of discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism as vigorously as against all other forms of discrimination prohibited by Title VI.

The executive order marked the first time that Jewish students were classified as a class protected from discrimination. The executive order did not define what it meant by “Jews” and “Jewish.” Nevertheless, the order prompted a major debate within the Jewish community, spurred in part by an erroneous interpretation of the executive order that appeared in the New York Times, as to whether applying Title VI to Jews labelled them a “nation” or a “race” rather than a “religion.” Some Jewish leaders were concerned that such an interpretation might, as a possible consequence, expose the Jewish community to the hoary anti-Semitic charge of dual loyalty—in this case to Israel as well as the United States.

Indeed, within days of Trump having signed the order, an Israeli-American student named Jonathan Karten, acting through a group called The Lawfare Project, filed a complaint against Columbia University and requested an investigation by the Department of Education’s Civil Rights office. The complaint accused Columbia’s administration of deliberately ignoring a “hostile environment” against Jews on the university campus.

Karten’s lawsuit received wide coverage and prompted a new debate over the executive order in general and the place of Jews on Columbia’s campus in particular. A group called Palestine Legal, not surprisingly condemned the complaint. Jewish groups supported it.

There have been reports over the past several years that Jewish students, who constitute a significant proportion of Columbia’s student community, have been the subject of harassment by both fellow students and pro-Palestinian professors. Indeed, one Jewish group ranked Columbia’s campus environment as the most hostile to Jews among all major colleges and universities. That Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s president, unleashed a separate controversy when he invited Malaysia’s openly anti-Semitic president, Mahathir Mohamad, to speak at the university—after having issued a similar invitation to Iran’s then-president and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—did little to mitigate perceptions of Columbia’s attitude toward Jews.

ARE JEWS a “nation,” a “race,” or an ethnic group rather than a religion? Norman Lebrecht’s fascinating but flawed book, Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847–1947, seems to argue that they are. By trade a journalist, novelist, and historian of culture, and most especially musical culture in all its forms, Lebrecht considers “being Jewish” as either “having Jewish parents” or “practicing the Jewish faith.” Why someone whose parents were Jewish but who personally was not should be considered “Jewish” is not entirely clear. It is true that some Jews who nominally converted to Christianity nevertheless spoke and acted as if they were Jews. For example, Heinrich Heine, the subject of one of the many vignettes that constitute Lebrecht’s book, famously abandoned the Jewish religion but certainly was not much of a Christian.

On the other hand, many others whom Lebrecht also profiles certainly did not consider themselves Jewish: the German-American financier August Belmont, for example. Why then does Lebrecht identify them as Jews? Hitler might have done so because he considered the Jews a despised race. In analogous fashion, the State of Israel enacted its Law of Return, which accepts non-Jews who had a single grandparent who was Jewish, in order to welcome those whom the Nazis would have consigned to the gas chambers, again, on racial grounds. Lebrecht evidently sees Jews in the same light; indeed, when he quotes those who label Jews as a race, he never refutes their assertions.

At a minimum, Lebrecht appears implicitly to classify Jews if not as a race then as an ethnic group. And he is prepared to validate what many consider to be ethnic Jewish stereotypes: “unquenchable optimism ... a macabre sense of humor, a dazzling turn of phrase, and a capacity for improvisation.” Yet regardless of whether he considers Jews to be race or ethnic group, he overlooks the light brown Jews of Yemen, the dark brown Jews of Cochin, and the black Jews of Ethiopia. As it happens, not only the State of Israel but strictly Orthodox rabbinic authorities consider these people to be full-blooded Jews. And they are Jews because of their religion—not because of their ethnicity.

Lebrecht evidently adopts the racial/ethnic approach in order to cast the widest possible net over those whose great accomplishments he wishes to highlight as being products of their Jewishness, even if they or their parents were baptized. As he puts it, paraphrasing Psalms 121:4, “their Jewish psyche neither sleeps nor slumbers.” Moreover, he argues that in

every person of genius who appears in this book, there runs a current of existential angst. Jews in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century are gripped by a dread that their rights to citizenship and free speech will be revoked.

Why, however, should this fear of losing one’s rights affect converts to Christianity, or, even more so, children of converts? Did Benjamin Disraeli, who features in this book, truly believe he would be stripped of his rights? What about American Jews? Did anxiety affect their behavior if they did not convert? 

Lebrecht’s assertion would certainly surprise the millions of Jews who immigrated to America precisely in order to breathe and live freely. Certainly, some Jews converted to Christianity for social reasons, but until the second half of the twentieth century the vast majority did not. American Jews might have faced some discrimination well into the 1960s, but they never feared that they would lose their rights as free citizens of the country that had welcomed their parents and grandparents. Evidently, Lebrecht is not aware of George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew congregations of Newport, Rhode Island, dated August 18, 1790, in which he famously wrote:

For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support … May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.

LEBRECHT IS strongest when he writes of the lives and music of composers, musicians, and their conductors, songwriters, and entertainers. His longer sketches range from Gustav Mahler (a converted Jew); to Arnold Schoenberg (another converted Jew) to Sarah Bernhardt (a baptized half-Jew), George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and the young Leonard Bernstein. He finds time for some far more obscure musical types: the cantor Abraham Zevi Idelsohn and the musicologist Robert Lachlan. He also pays some attention to novelists—the baptized half-Jew Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, for example, and a few scientists as well, but they are in the distinct minority.

Other career paths do not fare as well or are not mentioned at all. One searches in vain for major military figures such as Colonel Emile Mayer, the influential theorist of mechanized and air warfare, whose most famous acolyte was Charles de Gaulle; General Sir John Monash, Australia’s greatest military leader, whose name graces a major Australian university and a $100 million museum in France commemorating the role of the Anzacs in World War I; and Major General Jack Faraj Rafael Jacob, who led the Indian forces that liberated what became Bangladesh in their smashing 1971 victory over Pakistan.

Nor can one find sports figures such as the American baseball slugger and Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg, who ignored the anti-Semitism that accompanied his efforts to surpass Babe Ruth’s home run record (no anxiety there); or Maurice Podoloff, first president of the National Basketball Association, the league that is now a worldwide phenomenon, as the recent death of Kobe Bryant has again made abundantly clear.

And then there are the boxers. To name but a few of a rather long list: the American champions Benny Leonard, Barney Ross, and Jackie Fields; the British light heavyweight champion “Kid” Lewis; and the half-Jewish Max Baer, who wore a Star of David on his boxing shorts.

The list of omissions goes on. Leon Blum, leader of the French socialists and prime minister of France is barely mentioned and does not appear in the book’s rather incomplete index. Emile Durkheim, the great French sociologist is nowhere to be found; nor is the French anthropologist Claude Levy-Strauss. Evidently, unless a Frenchman is an artist or author, he or she gave little to the world. Even the impressionist Camille Pissarro, whom many consider to be the greatest French-Jewish painter of them all, also finds no place in Lebrecht’s Franco-Jewish pantheon. Leading Italian Jews fare no better: Luigi Luzzatti, prime minister of Italy in 1910–11, gets nary a mention.

Russian and Polish Jews fare equally if not more poorly. The painter Marc Chagall merits but two cameo appearances. The Nobel Prize winning novelist and poet Boris Pasternak and the poet Osip Mandelstam occupy just under a page between them. At least they are mentioned. Maxim Litvinov, Stalin’s foreign minister until 1939, fails to make it; nor does Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to London during World War II or Yakov Malik, Soviet ambassador to the United Nations from 1948–52 and again from 1968–76.

LEBRECHT IS at his weakest when it comes to the history of American Jewry (composers, songwriters, singers, and conductors excepted), and, to some extent, of American history in general. In one of the many howlers that appear far too often in this volume, Lebrecht writes that it was due to the intervention of the banker Jesse Seligman that Ulysses S. Grant rescinded his order, known as General Order No. 11, to “expel Jews from territory under his control.” In fact, as any student of American Jewish history knows, it was Abraham Lincoln who, upon learning of the expulsion order, rescinded Grant’s decree one week after the Jews were expelled. Moreover, Seligman does not appear to have played a leading role in Lincoln’s decision. Several leading Jews, including Cesar Kaskel, a merchant whom the order directly affected, telegraphed the president to confirm that the order had been issued. Kaskel then travelled to Washington where he personally lobbied the president to rescind it. Grant did regret the order for the rest of his life, and when he served as president he went out of his way to promote Jews within the ranks of the federal government.

Lebrecht mishandles other aspects of American Jewish history. He confuses the Joint Distribution Committee with the American Jewish Committee. It was in fact the latter, created in 1906, which founded the Joint eight years later. He states that Emma Lazarus’ Jewish nationalism was opposed by “a member of the Sulzberger dynasty, owners of the New York Times.” Lazarus died in 1887; a Sulzberger did not marry the daughter of Arthur Ochs, owner of the Times, until 1917.

The list of quite famous American Jews that Lebrecht omits is both lengthy and surprising. Among those who did not make his cut: Judah P. Benjamin, secretary of state of the Confederacy; Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo; Henry Morgenthau Sr., American ambassador to the Sublime Porte and witness to the Armenian Massacre; Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Franklin Roosevelt’s influential secretary of the treasury who created the War Refugee Board; Rabbi Stephen Wise, leader of American Reform Jewry and a major actor in the tragedy of American Jewry’s pusillanimity in responding to the Holocaust; Rabbi Joseph Soloveichik, the spiritual force behind Modern Orthodox Judaism; and Rabbi Aaron Kotler, who immigrated from Poland to create what has become the epicenter of the modern American ultra-Orthodox yeshiva movement in Lakewood, New Jersey.

Lebrecht’s limited grasp of American history extends beyond the Jewish community. When writing about the workings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he describes Richard Nixon as “counsel to the huac investigations.” It is true that Nixon had practiced law, but in fact he was a member of the committee, having been elected to Congress in 1946. Perhaps in all of these cases it is just sloppiness, either his own or that of his fact checker, if he had one.

Even when he gets his history right, the majority of Lebrecht’s “geniuses” are German speakers, whether German, Austrian, Czech, or Hungarian; or Americans who emigrated from German-speaking lands. Lebrecht goes so far as to lace his book with German phrases, some of which he doesn’t bother to translate. If the reader does not understand, that’s his or her problem.

MANY OF Lebrecht’s vignettes describe obscure individuals; indeed, Lebrecht delights in asserting that their obscurity masks their contributions to civilization. Thus, in addition to Einstein, Marx, Freud, or Wittgenstein, he includes the likes of scientist and Nobel Prize winner Karl Landsteiner, another converted Jew, who first identified blood types. Lebrecht writes that “nobody remembers Landsteiner.” There is also the engineer Siegfried Samuel Marcus, father of the automobile. A Viennese statue commemorates his accomplishment, but it was Ford, Daimler, and Benz, among others, who took Marcus’ invention and developed what became the modern auto. Lebrecht’s claim, however, that “without Siegfried Marcus [there would be] no motorcar,” stretches credulity. So too does his assertion that the scientist Leo Szilard, who campaigned against nuclear weapons, supposedly “saves the world.”

And then there is Emanuel Deutsch, a German Jew living in England, who Lebrecht claims inspired George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the novel that in turn inspired a generation of Zionists including Ben Gurion and Theodore Herzl. Deutsch is the subject of yet another of Lebrecht’s several hyperbolic assertions that appear throughout his book. Lebrecht calls Deutsch, who befriended and may have influenced George Eliot, “the scholarly spark that lit the Zionist flame.” If that were true, then Israeli cities would have named their streets for him, as they have done for Eliot, since Israelis never miss a chance to pay homage to anyone who contributed to Jewish history or the history of the Jewish state. Moreover, there already existed a proto-Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century called Hovevei Zion that encouraged emigration to Israel and founded Jewish towns with the help of Baron Edmond de Rothschild. 

Lebrecht also could have written more extensively about the political philosopher Moses Hess (a favorite subject of Sir Isaiah Berlin’s lectures on Zionism), whose Rome and Jerusalem, published in 1862, had a far more profound impact on Herzl and other Zionist leaders than any novel. To postulate that “without Emanuel Deutsch [there would be] no State of Israel” is, to put it mildly, rather a stretch.

Lebrecht also introduces obscure non-German speakers, especially if they are somehow connected to the world of music. Thus he writes of Genevieve Haley, who married Georges Bizet and who, according to Lebrecht, was the model for Carmen. He likewise devotes space to the French pianist and composer Charles-Valentin Alkan, who is so obscure that even Lebrecht is compelled to acknowledge that “his death ... is the most celebrated fact of his life.” Whether these individuals could be termed geniuses and how they changed the world are both open questions.

Lebrecht does include some prominent Englishmen, Frenchmen, Poles, and even a few Russians whom he simply cannot ignore—Trotsky, Chaim Weitzmann, and Ben Gurion, for example, and, as noted, Pasternak and Mandelstam. Often, however, “Ostjuden,” as the German Jews derisively have termed their Eastern European coreligionists, get little more than a mention, or, as with the Nobel Prize winning Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, at best a few paragraphs, and not long ones at that. Even when writing about German-speaking Jews, however, Lebrecht still can get his facts wrong: Marcus Goldman did not marry the daughter of banker Joseph Sachs and start a bank. It was Samuel Sachs who married Goldman’s daughter.

Indeed, errors abound to an annoying degree; examples can be found across the decades. Lebrecht asserts that in May 1835 Benjamin Disraeli “delivers one of his great put-downs” to an anti-Semitic taunt by the Irish MP Daniel O’Connell: “I am a Jew. And when the ancestors of the Right Honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.” But Disraeli actually said, “while your ancestors were painting themselves blue, my ancestors were worshipping one God.” And the reply was neither verbal nor in parliament, as Lebrecht implies. Disraeli’s retort was in a letter to The Times; he did not become a member of the House of Commons until 1837.

Lebrecht writes that a Chinese diplomat named Feng-Shan Ho rescued “an entire yeshiva in Lithuania” from the oncoming Nazi juggernaut. Actually, it was a Japanese diplomat, Chiune Sugihara, vice consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, who issued Japanese visas to the entire Mir Yeshiva. The students (and their teachers) were then able to survive the war while pursuing their religious studies in Shanghai. Lebrecht goes on to accept, at face value, a plaque on the wall of Shanghai’s Ohel Moshe Synagogue that “states proudly that China is the only country in the world that knew no anti-Semitism.” The same could be said of India, whose forces, as noted, at one point were led by Major General Jack Jacob.

Lebrecht describes Solomon Mikhoels, a Jewish actor that Stalin liquidated, as “the prototype Tevye in Sholom Aleichem’s shtetl play (later reborn on Broadway as Fiddler on the Roof.)” But Solomon Rabinovitch (Sholom Aleichem’s actual name) actually introduced Tevye in a short story in 1894, when Mikhoels was but four years old. And Nikolai Bukharin, another victim of Stalin’s Great Purge, was not, as Lebrecht writes, editor of Izvestia, the USSR’s official paper of record. He edited Pravda, the Communist Party’s major organ.

Lebrecht writes of a “new wave” of Viennese Jews who, in escaping from the Nazis, arrived in Shanghai in the late 1930s. He notes that “everyone spoke German.” Not really. He completely overlooks, or ignores, the flood of Polish and Lithuanian Yiddish-speaking refugees whom Sugihara had saved, and who reached Shanghai two years later. They too were herded into the ghetto that the Japanese established in 1943. There were, however, Jews who continued to live and flourish in the city’s French concession. Lebrecht overlooks them as well.

Virtually absent from Lebrecht’s volume are the Sephardim—those Jews who made their homes in Arab lands and beyond. They receive even less notice than those German speakers who left their religion and Jewishness behind. Men like Sir Solomon de Medina, contractor to Britain’s King William III and the first Jew to be knighted; Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, a founder of the University of London; and David Saul Marshall, a brilliant lawyer of Sephardi origin who served as prime minister of Singapore from 1955–57, simply do not figure in Lebrecht’s retelling of Jewish accomplishments.

Sephardi Jews suffered from serious discrimination and physical violence too. They were cooped up in mellahs, the Arab version of the European ghetto, whose entrances were locked at night. They certainly had every reason to be “anxious” about their condition. Yet, other than one great rabbi, Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad, they apparently produced no geniuses, since none appear in Lebrecht’s telling other than a very few who are mentioned in passing. Evidently, Europe’s Ashkenazim, especially their German branch (“Ashkenaz” means German in Hebrew), hold the monopoly on genius.

IN MANY respects, Lebrecht’s opening chapter sets the stage for his entire volume, and, at the same time, points to its shortcomings. He offers a brief sketch of the private life of Felix Mendelssohn, whose grandfather was the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, but whose parents baptized him when he was thirteen, the age at which Jewish boys celebrate their Bar Mitzvah. Lebrecht’s tone, as it is throughout the book, is conversational; he writes in the present tense. Like the anti-Semitic Richard Wagner, or the converted Jew Heine, Lebrecht calls Mendelssohn a Jew. But Mendelssohn never referred to himself as a Jew, with but one exception: when he wrote of his reviving Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion. Lebrecht takes that reference at face value; more likely Mendelssohn was simply striving for maximum ironic effect. In any event, as in many of his other sketches, Lebrecht offers no convincing evidence that Mendelssohn suffered from any degree of anxiety because of his Jewish forebears.

Nor is it clear that Mendelssohn “changed the world,” or even the world of music. On the one hand, he certainly does not rank with Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. And, on the other hand, as Lebrecht acknowledges in a rather unsuccessful attempt at literary artistry, “within a year [of his death] Mendelssohn’s reputation falls like a cemetery angel in a winter storm. The new order, Wagner, Liszt, Schuman—rejects his perfectionism, his style, his anguished sincerity.” Do cemetery angels really fall in winter storms? Perhaps occasionally they do.

Lebrecht’s profile of Mendelssohn does differ from many of his vignettes in one important respect: it does not delve into the composer’s sex life. It is one thing to entitle a chapter, a la the hit American television series, “Sex in the City,” which highlights Magnus Hirschfield’s pathbreaking research into homosexuality and Sigmund Freud’s seduction theory. It is quite another to point out almost ad nauseam this or that person’s infidelity, homosexuality, or erotic yearnings. Why these observations contribute to a person’s genius is not entirely clear. Is Lebrecht connecting sexual anxiety to genius? Or is it the author trying to convey to his readers that Jews are oversexed? In that respect they are certainly not unique.

Lebrecht often draws inferences from Jewish religious texts and history, as well as popular idioms, to buttress his observations and assertions. Unfortunately, he does not always get them right. “Yallah” is Arabic, not Hebrew, for “hurry” or “let’s go.” “Oh” is not a Yiddish word meaning, “just imagine a world without such things.” The correct word is “Oy,” which, depending on context, can take on several meanings, including the one Lebrecht offers. “Shmatter,” is not Yiddish; “shmatta” means rag, or colloquially, especially in Britain, a garment, as in the garment trade. And when Eliezer Ben Yehuda, father of modern Hebrew, included “traklin” (meaning “salon” or “hall”) in his lexicon, he simply lifted the word from the Talmud’s Ethics of the Fathers, whose chapters Orthodox Jews have for centuries recited every week during the summer months.

Lebrecht devotes many pages to a variety of Jewish religious leaders, almost all of them Orthodox and many of them rabbis. Yet their impact on world affairs, and often even on Jewish history, is either nonexistent or marginal at best. These include, among others, Haham Moses Gaster, the Ashkenazi-born spiritual leader of the British Sephardim, who played an exceedingly minor early role in the events that led to the Balfour Declaration.

Lebrecht also includes Franz Rosenzweig, another German Jew, who today is widely recognized as the godfather of what became the American Conservative stream of Judaism. That accolade is not sufficient for Lebrecht, however. He erroneously and hyperbolically claims that Rosenzweig’s major work, The Star of Redemption, had “a resonance unparalleled among Jews since Samson Raphael Hirsch’s The Nineteen Letters.” He further claims that Rosenzweig’s “existential idea rises so high above sectarian divisions of Orthodox and Reform that both can embrace it.” Actually, German Orthodoxy and Hirsch himself flatly rejected Rosenzweig’s thesis that Judaism changed with the times; present day Orthodoxy continues to view him as beyond the pale.

LEBRECHT ALSO offers an extended sketch of Rabbi Hirsch himself. Hirsch was the leader of Frankfurt’s Orthodox Jewish community. Lebrecht rightly claims that Hirsch is the father of what is termed Modern Orthodoxy, but in another outburst of hyperbole, Lebrecht compares him to Bach (a great composer, to be sure, and German at that!), writing that the rabbi “synthesized a worn tradition and made it transmissible to an empirical age.”

Lebrecht is off base when asserting that it is upon Hirsch’s philosophical approach to the non-Jewish world that New York’s Yeshiva University is based upon. It is true that Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen, refers to Yeshiva University as “Hirsch College.” Yeshiva University, and Modern Orthodox Judaism in general, however, owes more to two other leading German Orthodox rabbis, both of whom were Hirsch’s contemporaries. Asriel Hildesheimer and David Zvi Hoffman were successively the leaders of the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary. Unlike Hirsch, both men were strong supporters of the nascent Zionist movements, worked with non-Orthodox Jewish organizations, and advocated and practiced positive engagement with non-Jewish academic studies. Hirsch not only criticized their writings, but also actually questioned whether they were truly Orthodox, which they certainly were.

Whether any of these three rabbis, or indeed, any of the rabbis about whom Lebrecht writes—with the possible exception of Rabbi M.M. Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe who transformed his Chabad organization into a worldwide movement—really “changed the world” is an open question. Certainly, many of them had an impact on the development of Judaism, primarily Orthodox Judaism, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but that tended to represent the bounds of their influence. In some instances, however, even the extent of their influence in any sphere is highly questionable. That appears to be the case with a would-be chief rabbi of France named Salomon Wolf Klein.

Klein was a chief rabbi of the community of Alsace and Lorraine who vied for the French Chief Rabbinate and lost out to another Orthodox rabbi who, unlike Klein, was sufficiently open-minded to win the support of Paris’ reform Jewish community. Klein then founded a school that failed. One wonders why he appears in the book at all, until one arrives at the very end of Lebrecht’s sketch: “Salomon Wolf Klein is my direct ancestor, the grandfather of two of my grandparents.”

The author’s linkage to Klein is far from his only appearance in this volume. Zelig-like, he figures in, or at the end of, almost every one of the book’s chapters. Sometimes his personal connections add to the force of his argument, but all too often they do not; they are an unnecessary distraction. Moreover, as with Klein, it appears that Lebrecht includes certain personalities because of his connection to them rather than due to their inherent contribution to “the world.”

Take, for example, his sketch of Meir Arlozorov, the Labour leader and mayor of Tel Aviv who was assassinated in June 1933. Lebrecht initially speculates, with no evidence, that Vladimir Jabotinsky’s right-wing Revisionists killed Arlozorov. He then erroneously asserts that Revisionist violence that began with Arlozorov’s murder continued over the years “culminating in the 1995 assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.” Yigal Amir, Rabin’s killer, was no Jabotinskyite Revisionist. He was a religious Zionist with links to the religious settler movement. Lebrecht then suggests, again, without hard evidence, that it was Nazi agents who murdered him on orders from Joseph Goebbels, whose half-Jewish wife had been Arlozorov’s one-time lover and had secretly met him in Berlin in 1933.

Why focus on Arlozorov? He hardly changed the world. Nor was he a genius driven by anxiety, notwithstanding the author’s claim, again with no evidence, that when Hitler rose to power “Victor Arlozorov [was] the only man on the Zionist Executive who [knew] what need[ed] to be done.” Why, then, write about the man? Surely it is not because his name graces a major Tel Aviv thoroughfare. More likely, it is because of the author’s self-described “romantic involvement” with the niece of a man who resented the acquittal of two Revisionists accused of the murder.

Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld was a British activist who saved many Jews both during and after World War II. He was not the only rabbi who did so; many American rabbis, and not only rabbis, likewise devoted Herculean efforts to save Europe’s Jews. The Americans are not mentioned at all; Schonfeld’s exploits command two separate discussions. Is it because Lebrecht writes, “two of my sisters work as his teachers. I, my children, and four of my grandchildren attend his schools?”

THERE ARE other examples. To cite but a few. Is Lebrecht’s case for Rabbi Schneerson any stronger because Lebrecht “spent Shabbat in Shanghai ... heard the Purim reading in Beijing ... danced at a Chabad wedding in the poshest hotel in Venice ... and prayed for the Rebbe’s health in Melbourne,” among other things? What does the reader gain by learning that when Primo Levi, Auschwitz survivor and author, committed suicide, Lebrecht reports that the news “stuns me like the roof falling in”? Or that Lebrecht had registered for a course at the Hebrew University with the Hebrew poetess Leah Goldberg?

Lebrecht has produced a volume that at times fascinates, at times overreaches. He covers a tremendous amount of ground in succinct, well-crafted prose. His brief sketches introduce readers both to Jews they have probably never heard of, as well as to the private lives of Jews who are better known—and in some cases, universally recognized.

As Lebrecht would have it, anti-Semitism drove these Jews to achieve unusual levels of achievement. With the recrudescence of anti-Semitism in Europe, and its spread to the United States, Lebrecht would have us believe that Jews once again will expand the envelope of excellence and creativity. As he asserts on his final page, “The Jewish Question reopens. What is to be done about the Jews? As the anxiety rises, so, too, does the flood of invention.”

Perhaps. It is true that over the decades and centuries, well before Lebrecht’s starting point of 1847, presumably chosen so that he could cover a neatly rounded century prior to the creation of the State of Israel, some Jews certainly have been geniuses. Many, indeed, most, were not—no matter where or when they lived. Some Jews changed the world. The overwhelming majority did not. Some Jews were driven by anxiety to overachieve. Most were not. Ultimately, Lebrecht fails to demonstrate that there somehow is a link between Jews, genius, and anxiety. As the Scottish courts might rule: his case simply is “not proven.”

Dov S. Zakheim was an Under Secretary of Defense (2001–2004) and a Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (1985–87). He is Vice Chairman of the Center for the National Interest.