In "The Ordeal of Civility", Cuddihy explicates the wrenching process of adjusting to modernity experienced by the shtetl Jews of the Pale in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who had to adapt quickly from a tribal culture to a modern Protestant civil culture rather than slowly adjusting over the centuries. It is in this context that he locates the efforts of Jewish intellectuals, such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Claude Lévi-Strauss to facilitate the transition by providing a cohesive narrative that attempts to universalize the experience and thus provide an apologia to both the in-group of Jews and the out-group of gentiles.