The first troubling thing about Yuri Slezkine’s “The Jewish Century” (Princeton, 424 pages, $29.95) is its title. The 20th century was the most eventful and terrible in the last two millennia of Jewish history. But to call it “the Jewish century,” as though the experiences of the Jews were uniquely influential or representative in world history, is to engage in an intellectual maneuver that that very century should have taught us to eschew: the use of the Jews as a metaphor. When the Jews, or any people, are turned into an emblem of some grand abstraction – modernity, or capitalism, or socialism, or alienation – the actual lives and destinies of individual Jews are figuratively obliterated. This makes it possible for those lives to be obliterated in fact: No one was more committed to making the Jews “stand for” something else than Hitler. Indeed, the rhetorical exploitation of the Jews is one of the major reasons why, since World War II, the Western humanities, from philosophy to history to literature, have been extremely wary of such abusive metaphors.

Yet here comes Mr. Slezkine, energetically turning the Jews back into a metaphor on every page of his agile, frustrating book. In fact, “The Jewish Century” is a hybrid of two related but very different books. The first is an enlightening and copiously researched work of historiography, which explores the reasons why so many Jews participated so vigorously in the Russian Revolution. On this subject, Mr. Slezkine – a native of the Soviet Union whose previous works dealt with 20th-century Russian history – is instructive and usefully speculative. The other book contained within “The Jewish Century,” however, is a work of historiosophy, glib and often irritating, in which the Jewish experience in Russia, Israel, and America is reduced to a play of vacant stereotypes. In a sub-Hegelian mode, Mr. Slezkine replaces the full reality of Jewish experience, especially in America, with a few immutable, abstract principles and categories. As so often with this kind of history writing, the result is superficially exciting and plausible but actually deeply distorting.

Mr. Slezkine’s chief metaphor for 20th-century Jewish history is borrowed from the well-known Tevye stories of Sholem Aleichem. One of Tevye’s daughters, Beilke, left Poland for America, and she becomes Mr. Slezkine’s emblem of American Jewry. Another, Hodl, married a revolutionary and went into Siberian exile; she is the emblem of Soviet Jewry, especially its true-believing Communist contingent. A third, Chava, married a non-Jew and was temporarily banished from the family, only to come crying home in the end; with characteristic arbitrariness, Mr. Slezkine chooses to make Chava a proto-Zionist, and turns her into an emblem of Israeli Jewry. The Jewish 20th century, Mr. Slezkine argues, can be seen as a choice between these three promised lands. (Tsaytl, who stayed at home and married a poor Jewish tailor, is the missing sister, the matriarch of those slaughtered by the Nazis.)

It is “Hodl’s children” who really concern Mr. Slezkine, and since the experience of Jews in Communist Russia is comparatively unfamiliar in America, his investigation of their fate is much the most valuable part of “The Jewish Century.” The exodus of rural Jews from the Tsarist Pale of Settlement to the cities of the Soviet Union, Mr. Slezkine reminds us, was comparable in scale to the great Jewish immigration to America: It was “one of the most important, and least noticed, landmarks in the history of Russia, European Jews, and the Modern Age.” More than a million Jews left their ancestral homes in Poland to start new, largely secular lives in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and other cities. And among those Jews were a small, but highly disproportionate, number of committed Bolsheviks.

It is no secret that the first generation of Soviet leaders included many Jews: Hitler’s favorite term of abuse, after all, was “Judeo-Bolshevism.” There was Trotsky, born Bronshtein, the creator of the Red Army; Kamenev, born Rosenfeld, and Zinoviev, born Radomyslsky (Stalin’s colleagues and later victims); Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s chief deputies; Yagoda, head of the NKVD; and many others. Mr. Slezkine supplements these familiar names with copious statistics. Jews were 1.8% of the Soviet population, but 15.5% of those with a higher education, and 19.4% of delegates to the First Congress of Soviet Writers; in Leningrad, they accounted for 69.4% of all dentists and 38.6% of all doctors. No wonder Mr. Slezkine concludes that “of the many Russian Revolutions, the Jewish version was … one of the most implacable and most successful.”

Before 1917, Jews were an educated, underemployed, and deeply disaffected part of the Russian population; the Bolsheviks welcomed them as natural allies against Tsarism. “The Jewish elements,” Lenin declared, “saved the revolution at a difficult time. It was only thanks to this pool of a rational and literate labor force that we succeeded in taking over the state apparatus.” The mutual embrace of Communists and Jews lasted until the late 1930s, when Stalin’s purges eliminated many of the Jewish Old Bolsheviks, and the approach of war led the Soviet Union to re-emphasize its Russianness. After the war, a renewed Soviet Jewish consciousness, fueled by the Holocaust and the founding of Israel, led to increasing persecution by the paranoid Stalin: At the time of his death, the dictator was preparing what could have been a massive campaign of terror against Soviet Jews.

By analyzing a wide range of memoirs, poems, and novels, Mr. Slezkine is able to go beyond statistics to show the inner motives that drew so many Jews to the Communist revolution. He portrays a generation of Jews alienated from their religion, contemptuous of their parents, besotted with Russianness and especially Russian literature. Early Soviet-Jewish writing is full the most violent familial repudiations: “You’re disgusting,” the hero of a Boris Levin story tells his father, “Do you understand – disgusting. I hate you!” The flip side of this self-hatred was a self abasing adoration of Russianness, equated with violence and instinct, as in the stories of Isaac Babel’s “Red Cavalry.” The revolution offered such Jews the opportunity to become powerful and violent; as Mr. Slezkine shows, the ruthless Jewish commissar was a stock hero in early Communist literature.

If “The Jewish Century” had restricted itself to a study of Jews in the Russian Revolution, it would have been a more coherent and successful book. Unfortunately, the chapter on what Mr. Slezkine calls “Hodl’s Choice” is bracketed by his glib, Jewish-centric theory of the 20th century. In this scheme, the history of modernity is a struggle between “Mercurians” – i.e. Jews, all intellect and alienation – and “Apollonians” – i.e. everyone else, all peasant instinct and territoriality. These archetypes – or, better, stereotypes – are manipulated to “explain” everything from Freud and Marx to the Holocaust and the State of Israel, in a kind of Spenglerian sleight-of-hand. The less said about this theory, the better – and the same goes double for Mr. Slezkine’s superficial notions of American Jewish life (based largely, it appears, on his reading of Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral”). Unfortunately, it is the airy speculation, rather than the solid research, which is likely to draw most attention to “The Jewish Century.” The temptation to turn the Jews into a metaphor is still, despite all we have learned and seen, irresistible.