Yiddish Civilisation

Disappointing. Engagingly written, but draws wild conclusions based on limited evidence, often apparently choosing to follow threads that have limited support from actual scholars.

For instance, Kriwaczek cites Arthuer Koestler as a definitive authority on the question of the Jews of Khazaria, when Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe has been more or less debunked (based, as it is, on extremely thin and limited evidence).

Kriwaczek also seems (for lack of a better word) obsessed with the idea that Ashkenazi Jews are the product of vast numbers of European converts to Judaism, when this is not supported by science or genetics. He goes on at length about veritable legions of Roman, Greek, and other European converts, and to his credit it is true that during the heyday of Rome, there were a great number of “Sabbath-keepers”. But Kriwaczek himself admits that the Greco-Roman converts and their descendents mostly were reabsorbed into the ethnoreligious majority when Rome Christianized fully, and did not remain Jewish.

Kriwaczek likewise claims that “European Jews are almost without exception the progeny or proselytes”, but cites no sources that validate this claim – a declaration that is at odds with the consensus of population geneticists who have conducted studies of ethnic Jews (particularly of Ashkenazim). He asserts that “there is no gene for Jewishness”, and claims that “after several generations, ethnic Hebrews, descendents of Middle Eastern, Roman and Greek converts, German, Slav and Turkic proselytes would have been so intermingled that even modern DNA analysis would be quite unable to separate the different strands in their genetic inheritance.”

This is not in fact the case, and dozens of genetic studies have proven it. (This is such basic knowledge that I can confidently direct the reader to Wikipedia for further reading.) To bolster this claim, Kriwaczek cites something truly incredible. Not a geneticist, nor an historian – Kriwaczek cites Adolf Hitler's Politisches testament: die Bormann-Diktate, stating that “even Hitler, in spite of his psychotically racist anti-Semitism [sic], wrote that ... ‘we speak of the Jewish race only as a linguistic convenience ... from a genetic standpoint, there is no Jewish race”.

It was at this point that I had to stop reading. Not only is the Kriwaczek obsessed with the (false) notion that European Jewry is the product mostly of non-ethnic Jews, he is either ignorant of, or willing to ignore, the many genetic studies that have repeatedly shown that Ashkenazi Jews show far greater genetic affinity with other Jewish populations than with European non-Jews. This is common knowledge and has been affirmed by many subsequent studies at this point (showing that nearly all Jewish ethnic groups are more closely related to each other than to their surrounding non-Jewish populations). It's bizarre and alarming that Kriwaczek is so determined to obfuscate this, particularly since he doesn't cite anything that actually negates it. It's just his repeated assertions of something that has been credibly refuted, again and again and again, as though that constitutes scholarship.

I understand that for many Jews of his generation, particularly those who have personally brushed against the Shoah, acknowledging anything about Jewishness that is tied to genetic inheritance triggers the echoes of Nazi “race science”. I am sympathetic to this, but that sympathy goes only so far, and I cannot extend much sympathy to someone who has written a book, and supposedly done research to support his claims.

I can't even say this is poor scholarship or poorly researched; it is essentially a polemic being presented as popular academic-adjacent writing supported by research, which – to be clear – it is not. I am willing to countenance someone making claims I disagree with, provided they can cite material that supports their arguments. But Kriwaczek appears to have hardly tried.

Critics tend to agree with me:
Review in Jewish Book Council: “a fas­ci­nat­ing and ener­getic, but sig­nif­i­cant­ly flawed, effort . . . The book is pecu­liar­ly doc­u­ment­ed . . . and there are numer­ous mis­spellings and mis­trans­la­tions . . . Sad­ly, one can­not rec­om­mend this book.”

Review in Publisher's Weekly: “Charming but frustratingly rambling . . . the book [is] more of a rumination on a number of related issues than a concise examination of a culture and a language.”

Review in Literary Review : “Indeed, it is hard to see the point of [this] book. [Kriwaczek] opens with some recollections about his post-war childhood in north London and intersperses his narrative with half baked travelogues, yet the bulk is a straightforward, if poorly researched, history of the Jews in Europe.”