It’s only been available in the U.S. for a few days, but Hebrew University professor Bernard Avishai got a UK copy of the new Bernard Madoff book, The Believers: How America Fell for Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion Investment Scam, and reported in his (terrific) blog that author Adam LeBor dips into Jewish history to explain Madoff.
Avishai relates what LeBor came up with.
“LeBor believes Madoff may have been warped somewhat by class animosity, the century old hatred of insurgent, immigrant Polish and Russian Jewish shtarkers for the well-heeled snobs, the Yekkes, who had come from Germany before them and dominated Jewish social life in midtown.”
Avishai’s take on that? “Perhaps.”
That’s too polite by half.
Jewish railroad barons?
LeBor’s opening pages trot out the Guggenheims, Lehmans, Warburgs and Schiffs and how horrified they were at the arrival of Polish Jews like the Madoffs. Unfortunately, it isn’t clear how Bernard Madoff’s tailor grandfather David would have experienced such disdain in the Bronx of the 1920s, surrounded as he was by hundreds of thousands of Yiddish-speaking Jews like himself. And LeBor, a British author based in Budapest, calls the Bronx of the 1920s “a tough working-class area,” apparently unaware that the Grand Concourse and other attractive neighborhoods made the Bronx a destination for Jews on their way up.
Besides, who did Madoff steal from, Jewish railroad barons? Carl Shapiro “built a fortune selling women’s clothing in the 1950s,” according to Bloomberg. And economist and financier Henry Kaufman fled Nazi Germany as a child refugee in the late 1930s — just about the time Madoff was born in Queens. Martin Rosenman? His family’s New York heating oil distribution company was started in 1934 by his grandfather to deliver ice.
No. Antique class antagonism toward the now vanished German Jewish elite of the mid-19th century does not explain Madoff’s swindling of these Jewish investors, never mind the Korea Teachers Pension and the Royal Bank of Scotland.
No-goodniks Studies
But LeBor should be given some credit for attempting to look at Madoff from a Jewish historical angle, to understand him as a product of Jewish history. Because talking about Jews and money makes people nervous.
A “cloud of embarrassed silence has persistently hovered over the topic of Jewish commercial livelihoods,” wrote Jonathan Karp, associate professor of Judaic studies at SUNY-Binghamton, in the Fall 2009 issue of AJS Perspectives: The Magazine of the Association for Jewish Studies. “Shylock has cast a long shadow of defensiveness over Jewish self-perceptions.”
But that defensiveness has eased enough to allow a few Madoff-like scoundrels into the Jewish historical record. The index to LeBor’s book shows he missed them, but they’re around.
Historian Todd M. Endelman encouraged research on such Jewish “no-goodniks” and demonstrated what he wanted with a look at London’s late 18th century “Jew” King — a ruthless and slippery moneylender. People got the idea. Bernard Wasserstein tracked down the chameleon, spy, and financial swindler Trebitsch Lincoln, writing about him in The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln.
But it is Identity Theft, Harriet Murav’s book on Avraam Uri Kovner, a late 19th century Russian-Jewish forger and embezzler — and Seize the Day’s Dr Tamkin, a Saul Bellow character apparently based on Kovner — that LeBor should have looked at for what his website calls a “psychological investigation into the Madoff fraud.”
Numbed nerves of a killer
Like Madoff, Kovner viewed crime as a family business. In April 1875, he enlisted his maternal uncle in a plot to embezzle 168,000 rubles from the Moscow Commercial Bank. The uncle would cash a rubber check that Kovner, a clerk at the issuing bank, would vouch for as good. And the Madoff parallels go further. The bank where Kovner worked — and that would be on the hook for the money when the check bounced — was owned by a Jewish financier. Like Madoff, Kovner’s plan involved a kind of criminal recycling of money within the Jewish community. It would travel from those who had it to him.
The plan worked. The Moscow bank paid, Kovner and his uncle split the money, and then Kovner exhibited the characteristic that most astounds Avishai about Madoff: his pathological calm.
“You have to have something like the numbed nerves of a professional killer to be mishpocha to Mr. and Mrs. Simon Levy for thirty years, share bouillabaisse with them every few months, and knowingly position them to lose their life’s savings just when they are growing old,” writes Avishai.
That’s hard to top, but Kovner comes close. Dr Tamkin comes even closer.
Icy sliminess
While Kovner was escaping with the embezzled bank money he dispensed with a low profile and took time to get married in the middle of a train station. Then, when he and his new missus stopped in Kiev on their way to Lithuania, he marched into a police station to complain against regulations that prevented him, as a Jew, from staying in the city.
For Murav, this “sheer hutspa” (sic) suggests “a man too arrogant to believe anyone could detect him–or a man who actively courted detection.”
But Kovner lacks the icy sliminess that Avishai sees in Madoff. Bellow bestows just that on Dr Tamkin. Tamkin has the predator’s gift, which Madoff also apparently possessed. “Perhaps he could put people in a trance while he talked to them,” Bellow wrote of Tamkin.
Tamkin uses this gift to develop a relationship with the hapless Tommy Wilhelm, befriend him, share meals with him, give him personal advice, and solve Tommy’s money troubles.
“I’d be so grateful if you’d show me how to work it.”
“Sure I will. I do it regularly. I’ll bring you my receipts if you like,” said Tamkin.
When the money disappears, Tommy experiences a moment told by many Madoff victims. ”His heart, accustomed to many sorts of crisis, was now in a new panic. And, as he had dreaded, he was wiped out.”
Zelig type
For Murav, Kovner is a product of an historical moment when Jews were beginning to escape traditional roles but were not yet accepted as equals in non-Jewish society. Such a time rewarded the ability to cross boundaries as needed, and Kovner developed “a Zelig-like ability to transform himself” into whatever surrounded him. Tamkin has the same ability. He “had everything it was possible for a man to have” and so he “blends with the background.”
Kovner and Tamkin can only manage this superhuman blending through a surrender of self. The irony is, once that self is gone they are less than human. Then comes Avishai’s Madoff with the “numbed nerves of a professional killer,” and also Tamkin’s “loose nails, almost claws, and those brown, soft, deadly, heavy eyes.”
LeBor was on the right track. Madoff is a Jewish type. But not one proud of his shtarke roots. Madoff wanted to transcend the ordinary limitations that govern investment returns and roam freely above humdrum human boundaries, wooing and winning over Jew and gentile alike to prove himself a superior being of another order. As Murav and Bellow show, this is a very Jewish desire. But Madoff, like others who tried it, ended by becoming not greater than human but much less.
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