Antisemitism and Modernity: Innovation and Continuity (Routledgecurzon Jewish Studies Series)

ANTISEMITISM AND MODERNITY The subject of antisemitism has acquired a new urgency because of the conflict between Isra...

Author: Hyam Maccoby

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ANTISEMITISM AND MODERNITY

The subject of antisemitism has acquired a new urgency because of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. This renders topical a new discussion of the origins of antisemitism, especially its development in the modern world. How was it that many of the most admired Enlightenment figures retained a virulent antisemitism? Are the roots of antisemitism religious? Why is it that while Christian medieval antisemitism was so much more vicious than the Islamic variety, the modern world has seen a reversal of roles, and even the actual modes of propaganda employed (blood-libel, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, etc.) transferred from Christendom to the Islamic world without change. What is the paranoid power of the antisemitic myth? What is the psychological force that shapes it into so many forms? How did that force lead to mass murder in Europe and to violent forms of opposition (including suicide bombing) in the Middle East? This book shows how antisemitism has the ability to adapt itself to new circumstances, and particularly how it changed in accordance with the changing ideas of the modern world, without, however, changing in its essence. It is essential reading for those with interests in the development of antisemitism and its manifestations in the contemporary world. Hyam Maccoby was Emeritus Fellow of the Leo Baeck College, London and Research Professor at the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Leeds. He published many books and articles and they include The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1986; Harper & Row, New York, 1986; Harperbooks, San Francisco, 1987), The Philosophy of the Talmud (RoutledgeCurzon, 2002) and Ritual and Morality: The Ritual Purity System and its Place in Judaism (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

ROUTLEDGE JEWISH STUDIES SERIES Series editor: Oliver Leaman University of Kentucky

These are studies which are interpreted to cover the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, culture, politics, philosophy, theology and religion as they relate to Jewish affairs. The remit includes texts which have as their primary focus issues, ideas, personalities and events of relevance to Jews, Jewish life and the concepts which have characterized Jewish culture both is the past and today. The series is interested in receiving appropriate scripts or proposals. MEDIEVAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHY An introduction Dan Cohn-Sherbok

JUDAISM, PHILOSOPHY, CULTURE Selected studies by E.I.J. Rosenthal Erwin Rosenthal

FACING THE OTHER The ethics of Emmanuel Levinas Edited by Seán Hand

PHILOSOPHY OF THE TALMUD Hyam Maccoby

MOSES MAIMONIDES Oliver Leaman

FROM SYNAGOGUE TO CHURCH: THE TRADITIONAL DESIGN Its beginning, its definition, its end John Wilkinson

A USER’S GUIDE TO FRANZ ROSENZWEIG’S STAR OF REDEMPTION Norbert M. Samuelson ON LIBERTY Jewish philosophical perspectives Edited by Daniel H. Frank REFERRING TO GOD Jewish and Christian philosophical and theological perspectives Edited by Paul Helm

HIDDEN PHILOSOPHY OF HANNAH ARENDT Margaret Betz Hull DECONSTRUCTING THE BIBLE Abraham ibn Ezra’s introduction to the Torah Irene Lancaster

IMAGE OF THE BLACK IN JEWISH CULTURE A history of the Other Abraham Melamed

ART IN ZION The genesis of national art in Jewish Palestine Dalia Manor

FROM FALASHAS TO ETHIOPIAN JEWS Daniel Summerfield

HEBREW LANGUAGE AND JEWISH THOUGHT David Patterson

PHILOSOPHY IN A TIME OF CRISIS Don Isaac Abravanel: defender of the faith Seymour Feldman

CONTEMPORARY JEWISH PHILOSOPHY An introduction Irene Kajon

JEWS, MUSLIMS AND MASS MEDIA Mediating the ‘Other’ Edited by Tudor Parfitt with Yulia Egorova JEWS OF ETHIOPIA The birth of an elite Edited by Emanuela Trevisan Semi and Tudor Parfitt

ANTISEMITISM AND MODERNITY Innovation and continuity Hyam Maccoby

ANTISEMITISM AND MODERNITY Innovation and continuity

Hyam Maccoby

First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2006 Hyam Maccoby Typeset in Garamond by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0–415–31173–X

(Print Edition)

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO ITS AUTHOR HYAM MACCOBY (1924–2004) ZICHRONO LIVRACHA

CONTENTS

Preface Acknowledgements

xi xiv 1

Introduction PART I

The historical background

5

1 Antisemitism: an historical overview 2 Pure blood: the beginnings of racial antisemitism in fifteenth-century Spain

7 30

PART II

From theology to philosophy

39

3 The Reformation: Luther (1483–1546)

41

4 The Enlightenment and Voltaire (1694–1778)

51

5 Karl Marx (1818–83)

63

6 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

73

PART III

The Jews in myth and imagination

83

7 The Delectable Daughter

85

8 Shakespeare and Shylock

97 ix

CONTENTS

9 The antisemitism of T.S. Eliot

108

10 The antisemitism of Ezra Pound

120

PART IV

The Holocaust and after

137

11 Hitler and Nazism

139

12 Muslim antisemitism

148

13 Conclusion: the causes of the Holocaust

154

Appendix: an interpretation of ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’

165

Notes Bibliography Index

174 180 183

x

PREFACE

The subject of antisemitism has acquired a new urgency because of the questions raised by the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Ostensibly, antisemitism does not enter into this question at all. However, although dormant because of the shock of the Holocaust, antisemitism has actually been revived, and is playing a large (if disguised) part in the present controversy, as it is being waged in sections of the Western media. This renders topical a new discussion of the origins of antisemitism and especially its development in the modern world. How is it that this medieval prejudice proved so lasting and potent? By what means did it bridge the gap between medievalism and Enlightenment? How was it that many of the most respected Enlightenment figures (such as Voltaire), dedicated as they were to tolerance and pluralism, retained a virulent antisemitism? Are the roots of antisemitism religious? If so, how do these roots differ in Christianity and Islam? Why is it that while Christian medieval antisemitism was so much more vicious than the Islamic variety, the modern world has seen a reversal of roles, and even the actual modes of propaganda employed (blood-libel, Protocols of Elders of Zion, etc.) have been transferred from Christendom to the Islamic world without change. We are concerned here, also, with the protean ability of antisemitism to change its outward form without changing its inward essence. Thus in the Western world, medieval religious antisemitism ( Jews as Christ-killers) changed to racialist antisemitism under the influence of pseudo-scientific Darwinist theory, by which the Jews were poisoning the blood of mankind. In right-wing politics, the Jews became the archetypal Communists, whereas in left-wing politics, the Jews became the archetypal Capitalists. Wherever a theory, however non-religious or anti-religious, required a satanic force supposedly working against it, the Jews were elected to be that force. We have to ask the question: what is the paranoid power of the antisemitic myth? What is the psychological force that shapes it into so many forms? How did that force lead to mass murder in Europe and to violent forms of opposition (including suicide bombing) in the Middle East?

xi

PREFACE

This book traces antisemitism to religious origins. Antisemitism arises from the very fact that the two great religions, Christianity and Islam are both derived from Judaism, and therefore have an Oedipal relationship to Judaism. I argue that non-religious antisemitism is all the more potent because of its unacknowledged religious roots, and that in fact the only way to exorcise non-religious antisemitism is to uncover and explore these religious roots, so carrying out a kind of psychoanalysis through the recovery of forgotten societal memories. The modern world never quite emerged from the medieval world, and one of its unwanted legacies is its burden of antisemitism. A curious result of this process of inheritance is that, in very recent times, the chief weight of antisemitism has shifted from the Right of politics to the Left (though in fact left-wing antisemitism has a history of its own). Zionism began as an attempt to cure antisemitism through the normalization of the Jews; instead it has produced a new kind of antisemitism in which the Jewish State is seen by many left-wingers (though by no means by all) as a colonialist outpost of the great imperialist power, America, which is oppressing the Third World by its wealth and power. As a hangover from the Cold War, America remains the arch-enemy, but the Jews have become the emblematic Americans. This attitude is fashionable among people ignorant of Jewish history and of the millennia-long attachment of the Jews to Israel. They are convinced that the Jews are recent arrivals in the Middle East, and therefore colonialists. As for the Jews of ancient times, there is still a widely believed myth that the Jews were expelled by the Romans 2000 years ago from Palestine (a myth that has religious overtones connected with the alleged killing of Christ by the Jews). In historical fact, the Jews continued to form the majority of the Palestinian population for many centuries after that date. The Arabs, on the other hand, are romanticized as age-old inhabitants of the region, direct descendants of the aboriginal inhabitants.In fact the Arabs arrived there as imperialist conquerors at the time of the Arab Conquest, in the seventh century AD, at a time when the Jews had already inhabited Palestine for 2000 years. To see the Jews as powerful imperialists is a curious reversal from the time, not so long ago, when the Jews were regarded as natural serfs and slaves, and the idea of Jews as rulers and fighters was regarded as laughable, or even as a blasphemous reversal of the destined role of the Jews as meek sufferers. Such are the reversals that characterize the chequered history of antisemitism. An improved understanding of Jewish history is one of the chief desiderata for the combating of antisemitism. Antisemitism should be sharply distinguished from legitimate criticism of the policies of any particular government of Israel. Moreover, I support fully the right of the Palestinians to an independent state of their own, alongside Israel and enjoying peace and economic cooperation with Israel. The problem is how to detach this legitimate aim from antisemitic demands for the destruction of Israel based on religious fanaticism and denial of the Jewish xii

PREFACE

past. Antisemitism is one of the main obstacles to prosperity and national fufilment for all in the Middle East. In this book, then, I aim to show how antisemitism has the ability to adapt itself to new circumstances, and particularly how it changed in accordance with the changing ideas of the modern world, without, however, changing its essence. The countless and apparently contradictory manifestations of antisemitism have a common historical origin which accounts for the specific timbre of hatred, fear and contempt that antisemitism presents. Only by recognising this fact can we hope to provide an effective therapy for what is, in the last resort, a pathology. Hyam Maccoby March 2004 *** Hyam Maccoby died shortly after he finished this book. He began to study the origins of Christianity because he wished to discover the aetiology of the avalanche of hate directed against the Jews, which culminated in the Holocaust. The record of the persecutions and massacres suffered by the Jews in Christendom is well documented. Hyam Maccoby’s work involves a twofold enterprise. First he wanted to recover the historical Jesus as a Jew and a member of the great Pharisee reforming movement. Jesus died on a Roman cross because he claimed to be the (human) Messiah who would free the Holy Land from Roman rule, and inaugurate the Kingdom of God on earth, as foretold by the prophets, when war and military conquests would cease. Hyam Maccoby wrote about this in his books Revolution in Judaea (1980), The Mythmaker (1986), Paul and Hellenism (1991) and Jesus the Pharisee (2003). The second part of the enterprise is to deconstruct the Christian myth, in which the Jews, through the eponymous figure of Judas Iscariot, played the role of Sacred Executioner: the one who performs the sacrifice that saves mankind but also bears all the guilt and infamy. Hyam Maccoby stressed the necessity of understanding the myth and its ramifications in folklore and the paranoid delusions of antisemites, who see the all-powerful Jews as engaged in a plot to dominate the world. He discussed this in his books The Sacred Executioner (1982), Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil (1992) and A Pariah People: The Anthropology of Antisemitism (1996). In the present book he shows how the myth affected even post-Enlightenment figures: there is no neat split between medieval religious Jew-hatred and modern, racial antisemitism. Both are best seen as among the ever-shifting protean disguises of the ancient myth. Cynthia Maccoby September 2004

xiii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank Professor Oliver Leaman and Joe Whiting for their help and encouragement to me in preparing this book for publication. Extracts from The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (1969) and T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land: a facsimile and transcript ed. by Valerie Eliot (1971) are reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber. Extracts from The Cantos of Ezra Pound by Ezra Pound (copyright ©1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1966, 1968 by Ezra Pound) are reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber and New Directions Publishing Corp., USA. Grateful acknowledgement is given for permission to use material adapted from articles originally presented in the following journals: Midstream (USA), February and November 1970, May 1973 and March 1976; TLS 25 June 1999; The Critical Survey vol. 3:3, 1967. My deepest thanks go to our dear children David Maccoby, Deborah Maccoby and Melanie and Alan Craig, for their loving support; and my special gratitude to Deborah Maccoby for her help in the preparation of this book for publication. Cynthia Maccoby October 2005

xiv

INTRODUCTION

Modern antisemitism produced many new themes, and yet also preserved a surprising degree of continuity with the antisemitism of the Middle Ages. To what extent then, should we regard modern, racial antisemitism as a separate, distinct phenomenon from its medieval predecessor? The Jews had been increasingly treated as a pariah people during the Middle Ages because of their role in the Christian myth as deicides, and their perceived threat to the Christian claim to be the true Israel. From the eleventh century onwards, the Jews were expelled from normal professions, deprived of human rights and treated with contempt and persecution. Their image was degraded by artistic means, the Passion Plays being a particular source of popular hatred and contempt. Folklore, taking its cue from the teaching of the Church, produced fantastic images of the Jew as a demonic, subhuman creature. In Spain, theological antisemitism was already transforming itself into racial antisemitism by the doctrine of limpieza de sangre. It is my contention that the legacy of the medieval diabolization of the Jew was the chief ingredient in the antisemitism of the Enlightenment and postEnlightenment period. It was not to be expected that a hated, despised pariah group would easily be accepted as equal and normal in accordance with Enlightenment principles. Even liberal thinkers (with some exceptions such as Rousseau) who advocated Jewish normalization show strong traces of antisemitic prejudice. Those who could not accept a radical change in the status of the Jews, but considered themselves too enlightened to continue the theological antisemitic stance of the Middle Ages, found new rationalizing, pseudo-scientific reasons for refusing the Jews their entrance-ticket into the modern world. Demagogues discovered that they could make political headway, especially in hard times, by exploiting popular irrational hatred of the Jews. Attempts by the Jews to exercise their new rights by entering the professions were treated with panic and resentment. The object of the book is to explore the minds of some important post-medieval figures and show how they adapted medieval antisemitism to the new ways of thinking. These essays are thus exercises in exploring a unique fusion of innovation with continuity, which demonstrate that the 1

INTRODUCTION

often alleged dichotomy between religious antisemitism and modern, racial antisemitism did not in fact exist; religious antisemitism was transposed into a modern idiom and the crimes of which the Jews had been accused in the Ages of Faith found their modern equivalent. Luther, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche and T.S. Eliot were men of genius. All of them moulded antisemitism into something new. They applied insights derived from modernity and mingled them with an ancient mythological symbol, the Jew, in such a way as to enlist support for their cause, or add a dimension of thrilling hate to an artistic pattern. Hitler and the Nazis used every slander that had been made against the Jews in the Christian past: the blood-libel, the medieval picture of the Jewish usurer, the conspiracy theory of the Elders of Zion, the later medieval portrayal of the Jews as subhuman, the Spanish fear of Jewish racial taint. Hitler’s favourite reading was Luther’s rantings against the Jews. The Nazi concept of the German state as a holy, pure organism that had to be protected from the Jews was a racialist version of the Christian concept of the Body of Christ attacked by Jewish host-desecrators. Hitler himself, as embodiment of the national organism, was a modern Christ Triumphant, embarking on the thousand-year reign that was a verbal echo of the millenarian Christian scenario of the defeat of Antichrist. Nazism was a secular, blasphemous version of the Christian myth in which the Jews played their ancient role of satanic adversary. Thus, the ancient myth of the demon Jew, transmuted in the Middle Ages into a sociological reality of a class of pariah usurers, became, in the modern world, a counter in political and artistic games: wherever a villain was needed, whether for aesthetic or social or political purposes, the Jew was at hand to play the part in the imaginative constructions of the intelligentsia and the demagogues. But these games had a terrible, tragic outcome: the Holocaust. The genocidal note was struck many times in the modern development of antisemitism. From Luther to Wagner and Dühring, especially in Germany, we find the longing for the elimination of the Jews; the conviction that the so-called ‘Jewish problem’ was so intractable, that the evil was so ineradicable, that the only solution was a Final Solution. In the Middle Ages, there were many factors making against such a drastic response to the alleged demonic power of the Jews. It was not that extermination as such was unthinkable, for it was applied without hesitation in the case of the heretical Cathars or Albigensians. But the Jews, however hated, were protected by their position as a religio licita (a legacy of the Roman Empire), and by their position in the religious scheme of Christianity as the people of the Old Testament and as the fated executioners of the necessary divine sacrifice. So necessary were the Jews to the Christian schema, that it was believed that until the Jews were converted, the culmination of human history – the Second Coming – could not happen. 2

INTRODUCTION

In the modern world, belief in the demonic power of the Jews remained, but the Christian safeguards of the Middle Ages were swept away by the new rationalism. The result was that the position of the Jews, instead of being improved by the advent of the Enlightenment, became far more precarious, at least in certain areas. Where there were strong factors favouring integration (America, for example, where a melting-pot of immigrants created an ethos of integration), the Enlightenment was indeed a great boon to the Jews. But where there was instability caused by an insecure emerging nationalism complicated by military defeat and economic collapse, as in Germany, the desire for a scapegoat coalesced with the half-suppressed medieval image of the demonic Jew and the perceived societal stigma resulting therefrom. The Jews were then elected, in an atmosphere of agonized hysteria and paranoia, to the position of an international conspiracy plotting against everything conducing to national salvation. This blindly irrational hatred, disguising itself as scientific, lost all medieval restraints and became genocidal. In historical fact, the Jews were emerging from a position of pariahship and powerlessness and vulnerability which had paralysed them throughout the Middle Ages and had become even more pronounced towards the end of the Middle Ages and the approach of emancipation. There was actually no Jewish problem, but only a problem of non-Jews who saw every slight amelioration in the position of the Jews as a frightening threat. If a few Jews, such as the Rothschilds, achieved personal power and wealth, this was experienced as a threat from the Jews to take over the whole world. If some Jews (or even ex-Jews) such as Mendelssohn or Meyerbeer achieved fame in the cultural world, this was a takeover in which Germanic values were being swamped by a Jewish conspiracy. If Jews obtained places in the universities beyond what might have been expected statistically, this meant that Germany was being dominated by the Jews and would soon be a province in a Jewish world empire, unless drastic measures were taken. Already the note of genocide was being sounded (by Dühring and Marr) as the only solution to the threat. From where does this paranoia derive? It seems clear that it derives from the Christian myth, which was no longer believed in its original form by many intellectuals, but was assuming various unconscious disguises. In the Christian myth, the Jews are very powerful. They are the powers-that-be, stern father-figures, who judge and condemn the young Jesus, who is emblematic of the helplessness of the young. No matter how powerless the Jews might be in reality, they remain powerful in the fantasy that still dominated the world that had once been Christendom. This accounts for the strange fact that the Nazis, in their campaign of genocide of unarmed men, women and children, regarded themselves as being very brave. They were pitting themselves against the greatest and most dangerous world power, that of the Jews. They were not oppressors but the army of the oppressed, freeing themselves from slavery to the Jews. 3

INTRODUCTION

The Jews have experienced centuries of oppression. But this is a strange, unassimilable fact to many people of Christian background, because the myth that dominates their inner mind is not one of Christians persecuting Jews, but of Jews persecuting Christians; that is, the alleged persecution of Jesus and his disciples and of the early Church by the Jewish establishment – a persecution that modern research has shown to be almost entirely unhistorical. The Holocaust brought a greater consciousness to both Jews and Christians of the nature of Christian responsibility for antisemitism. Christians, looking back in horror to the failure of the German Christian churches to combat Hitler’s murderous antisemitic policies, began to reflect on the way in which Christian teaching had dehumanized the Jews. The writings of Rosemary Ruether, Roy Eckardt, Friedrich Heer, Frank Littell, Malcolm Hay, John Gager, James Carroll and many others have expressed Christian realization of the antisemitism of the Gospels and Christian tradition. Jews too have come to a new realization of the Christian origin of antisemitism. There has been a great increase in Jewish – Christian dialogue in many different forms. The long record of indifference on the part of Jews towards the study of Christian mythology and doctrine is giving way to a realization that Christian antisemitism is not just one more persecution, but a myth of peculiar potency. Though the study of the New Testament by Jews began in the early middle ages, this was undertaken for apologetic or polemical purposes, not in order to analyse the roots of Christian antisemitism. There is hope now of an effective radical analysis of Christian and post-Christian antisemitism. The demise of antisemitism can be hastened only by continued study of its religious origins and of its manifold disguises. The necessity for this has received a new urgency with the use now being made by Islamist groups of material derived from Christian sources such as the blood-libel and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. However painful this may be to students whether of Christian or Jewish background, the study of the Christian origins of antisemitism must be deepened. Studies of antisemitism should concentrate on the elaboration of stigma through theological – folkloric mythologizing, and on its morphology in the modern world. Until this aetiology of antisemitism becomes paramount, Holocaust study will remain superficial, and the possibility of radical remedy will be remote. The great mistake, however, is to study the protean and ever-shifting disguises as if they, in themselves, can reveal the solution to the problem of antisemitism.

4

Part I THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

1 ANTISEMITISM An historical overview

Antisemitism is hatred directed against Jews, and we must first be clear what is meant by this entity ‘the Jews’. The term ‘Jew’ is derived from ‘Judah’ which was the name of a prominent tribe of the Israelites. In about 975 BCE, the Israelites became split into two kingdoms, the Northern (called Israel, containing ten tribes) and the Southern (called Judah, containing only the tribe of Judah and half the tribe of Benjamin, together with the priestly tribe of Levi, of which one section was the Kohanim or priests, descendants of Aaron). In 740 BCE, the Northern Kingdom ceased to exist, having been destroyed by the Assyrians. The ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom (or at least their upper classes) were sent into exile in remote regions of the Assyrian Empire, and their fate is unknown, though many legends about their continued existence in India, Africa and even England and America arose in the course of subsequent centuries. Only the Southern Kingdom of Judah remained as a national entity. Consequently, the nation that had been known for about 600 years as the Israelites now began to be known as Judahites, or Jews (Hebrew, yehudim; Greek, Iudaioi; Latin, Judaei). When the Southern Kingdom too was destroyed by the Babylonians in 588 BCE, the Jews who were exiled to Babylonia retained their identity; and when they returned to their land in the two migrations of 536 and 457 BCE, it became again the land of Judah. Even the remnants of the population of the Northern Kingdom, who eventually became reunited with the commonwealth of the South, were now known as Jews, and the name ‘Israelite’ fell into disuse (except for certain religious purposes), only to be resuscitated with the birth of Israel in 1948 CE. By a strange historical inversion, Israelites (or Israelis) are now a sub-class of Jews, whereas originally, Judahites (or Jews) were a sub-class of Israelites. Why then did this particular group of humanity give rise to a special kind of hatred or xenophobia that had to be given a specific name, antisemitism? The name ‘antisemitism’ itself is a modern coinage and is based on a particular theory according to which hatred of the Jews arises because of the alleged inferiority of their race, that is, because they are Semites. This theory was not taken very seriously even by people who called themselves racialist 7

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

antisemites. Hitler, for example, did not hate Arabs and made common cause with the Mufti of Jerusalem in opposing Jews. The word ‘antisemitism’, whatever the theory behind it, never meant anything but ‘hatred of Jews’. It is a pity that such an inexact word has become current for something that ought to be called ‘Jew-hatred’ or ‘Judaeophobia’; but ‘antisemitism’ has entered European languages and must be used for the purpose, even though every now and again someone professes to misunderstand it. Even the Jewhatred of the ancient world, which had no racialist theory behind it, is correctly called ‘antisemitism’, and even medieval or modern Arab hatred of the Jews has to be called by the same name. Of course, every nation excites hatred in its neighbours or rivals, and so we have the phenomenon of Anglophobia or Francophobia or USA-phobia. This hatred tends to be greater, the greater the pretensions of the nation in question to world-leadership in politics, commerce or culture. The hatred can then develop into a kind of paranoia, in which the target nation is regarded as plotting devilishly against the rest of mankind. The Jews have always been a small nation; but their pretensions to world-leadership, in the religious field, have been very great, since they have regarded themselves as the chosen people of the Creator of the universe. The hatred directed against them has been in proportion to the awesomeness of this claim. The Jewish notion of chosenness looks back to the event that was believed to have formed the Israelites as a nation: the Exodus from Egypt. The stupendous intervention of God in history, by which a slave-people was rescued, led through the desert, given a Law of freedom and launched into a Promised Land, was held to have marked out the people of Israel, later the Jews, as having special significance in the history of the human race. This was not because of any special merit on their part; on the contrary, the Bible, which gives the story on which Judaism is based, stresses the shortcomings of both the Chosen People and their leaders, who continually have to be upbraided by prophets to prevent them from straying from their mission. The fate of exile, first of the Ten Tribes of the Northern Kingdom, and then of the Judaeans, was interpreted by the prophets as a punishment for failure to live up to the role for which God had chosen them, but also as an opportunity for repentance and return to that role. This religious myth and sense of vocation was unique in the ancient world in that it marked out the Israelites/Jews as unassimilable by surrounding cultures. The God who delivered them from Egypt was regarded (certainly from the eighth century BCE onwards and possibly before) as not merely a national god, but as a universal deity, creator of all. Consequently, there was no possibility of the usual religious syncretism, by which other ancient nations pooled their gods. The Israelites/Jews refused to allow any validity to other gods and held aloof from all ‘idolatry’, refusing to intermarry with ‘idolaters’ on ideological, not racialistic, grounds (there was no bar on intermarriage with Gentiles, such as Ruth, who embraced the Jewish faith). 8

ANTISEMITISM

This attitude naturally aroused hostility from some members of other nations and religions, who saw the Israelites/Jews as sullenly unsociable and intolerant, rather than as spearheading a universalistic faith. Antisemitism, in its earliest form, concentrated on this alleged unsociability and inassimilability, the Jews being represented as hostile to the rest of the human race. This early form of antisemitism was especially strong when the Jews were faced with a surrounding culture which placed great value on its own civilizing mission, and therefore regarded Jewish resistance to assimilation as an insult to its own mission. It has often been misrepresented that the Jewish sense of being a chosen people was in fact a narrow insularism, rather than a sense of universal vocation. In particular, the time of the return from Babylon under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah is often regarded as the initiation of a period of isolationism in which the universalistic vision of the prophets was abandoned. Such an interpretation has usually been advanced in the interests of an historical scheme in which it was only the advent of Christianity that re-introduced universalistic ideas. Ezra, it is alleged, banned all intermarriage with Gentiles and made the Jews into a priestly caste.1 If this were true it would be most puzzling that the Judaism which followed the teaching of Ezra believed strongly in proselytism and gave canonical status to the books of Ruth, Jonah and Job. In fact, the ‘strange wives’ whom Ezra banned were those who refused to become converted to Judaism and who brought up their children in idolatrous faiths.2 Similarly, the refusal to allow the ‘adversaries’ to join in the rebuilding of the Temple was not because of considerations of racial or priestly purity, but because they were idolaters who joined worship of Jahweh with that of other deities. The ban on intermarriage with Gentiles was always motivated by the aim of preserving the faith, not the race, and was not essentially different from the later Christian ban on intermarriage with non-Christians. The expression ‘the holy seed’ used in Ezra has no racialist connotation; it refers not only to those born into the faith but also to those descended from converts (including the royal messianic house of David). Thus there is no ground for the common view that the reforms of Ezra prepared the ground for later antisemitism by strengthening Jewish isolationism. Ezra was merely putting into practice the usual Jewish defence against syncretism and adulteration of the faith at a time when these posed an especial threat. The same applies to the reforms of Nehemiah,3 in which the case of Solomon is explicitly invoked. Jewish isolationism was religiously and ideologically motivated and stemmed directly from the inability of a universalistic faith to compromise with polytheism. The Jews appear to have experienced little antisemitism during their subjection to the Babylonian and Persian empires, which were tolerant of all faiths and had little sense of cultural mission themselves. The biblical book of Esther might seem to portray a lively antisemitism in Persian times, but this book was actually written during the period of Greek domination and 9


what it portrays anachronistically is Hellenistic antisemitism, with its emphasis on Jewish resistance to assimilation.4 The birth of antisemitism, in its sense of settled antipathy to the Jews (as opposed to temporary hostility caused by events), can be traced to the period of Hellenistic domination and to the clash between Hellenism and Judaism. Both Judaism and Hellenism had a sense of mission, and they were therefore natural rivals. The Jews, however, did not hate Hellenism, but in many ways admired it. It was the assumption of the Jews that they could adopt or reject what they pleased from Hellenism, while continuing to regard themselves as possessing a superior wisdom, justifying a status as a dedicated, separate group, that infuriated many Hellenistic cultural figures and provoked a campaign of vilification against the Jews that anticipated most of the slanders and motifs of later antisemitism. A determined attempt to obliterate the distinctiveness of the Jews and reduce them to the level of just another Hellenistic nation came from the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes, who in 168 BCE forcibly converted the Jewish Temple to the worship of Zeus and forbade the practice of Judaism. He also supported an antisemitic campaign in which the Jews were accused of hatred of mankind and of performing cultic human sacrifices. This first appearance of official antisemitism foreshadows its subsequent history, in that antisemitism was inextricably tied to anti-Judaism: the Jews were an evil nation because they had an evil religion, and their only way to normality was to abandon this religion. In 133 BCE came the first mooting of a policy of genocide towards the Jews. This came from the advisers of the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Sidetes, who urged this policy on the grounds of the Jews’ alleged unsociability and refusal to assimilate to other nations, and of the failure of Antiochus Epiphanes’ attempt to force them to conform.5 It may have been the occasion of this advice that led to the composition of the book of Esther, which displaces the genocidal advice to the earlier Persian era. In the subsequent era of Roman hegemony, the chief antagonists of the Jews continued to be those who were fully committed to Hellenistic culture. While the Romans themselves were ostensibly Hellenists, their imperialist policy was, on the whole, practical and tolerant, more like the Persians than the Greeks. Only those few Roman emperors, such as Hadrian, who became apostles of Hellenism were antisemites, though others occasionally pursued antisemitic policies under the influence of Hellenistic advisers. Some Roman rulers (e.g. Julius Caesar) were pro-Jewish. The Romans recognized the right of Jews to practise their special worship and observances and to be exempt from what they regarded as idolatrous worship. It was in the first century CE, in Hellenistic intellectual circles, especially in Alexandria, that a coherent historical schema and even a theology of antisemitism was first developed. The historical schema can be seen in its most hostile form in the propaganda of Apion, as reported by Josephus. This builds on the biblical record, but gives it an antisemitic slant. The exodus 10

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from Egypt did take place, but not as a God-given deliverance. It was an ignominious expulsion of a rabble of lepers, who reacted by developing a misanthropic religion, the chief observance of which was human sacrifice. The theological antisemitism, stemming from Alexandria, also builds on biblical material, but with more knowledge of it, especially of the book of Genesis. This is the religious movement known as Gnosticism, which held that the Jewish God was in reality an evil or limited creator, or Demiurge, who had created this evil world and given an evil Torah to his followers, the Jews. The real heroes of the biblical story were marginal, non-Jewish figures such as Seth, Enoch or Melchizedek, who transmitted a genuine knowledge (gnosis) derived not from the Demiurge but from the High God against whom the Jewish God made his arrogant claims. The antisemitism of the Gnostic writings, such as the Apocalypse of Adam, is more contemptuous than virulent. The Jews are regarded as slavish adherents to a limited God and as deluded figures, rather than as diabolical murderers. Nevertheless, Gnosticism is significant in the history of antisemitism in that it gave antisemitism, for the first time, a cosmic dimension. The Jews were not just hateful outcasts who made a virtue of their isolation, as in Apion’s schema; they were the earthly minions of an evil figure of cosmic proportions, though not quite so frightening as the Devil of later Christianity. Gnosticism, as scholars have increasingly realized, did not arise out of Christianity, but was an earlier or at least an independent development, which only later joined Christianity as a tributary stream, adopting a Christian form. The biblical content of Gnosticism has led some scholars to see it as a form of Judaism; but its antisemitic trend, relatively mild though it is, points rather to the conclusion that it is a fringe phenomenon arising among Hellenists both attracted and repelled by Judaism. Its cosmic antisemitism is historically important since it contributed an essential ingredient to Christian antisemitism. Its technique of using Jewish materials in order to produce an antisemitic myth is also a foretaste of Christian antisemitism. Alexandrian antisemitism arose partly for social reasons, since the Hellenistic upper class, who had been displaced from influence by Roman rule, resented the competition of the upstart Jews. Chiefly, however, the rivalry was cultural. Alexandrian Jews, such as Philo, had mastered Greek culture but were using it to pursue a missionizing campaign for Judaism. Converts to Judaism were many throughout the Roman Empire and Hellenists felt threatened in their position as cultural arbiters. Also a class of Roman intellectuals arose, many of them aristocrats, who absorbed Hellenistic antisemitism and employed it to defend Roman tradition against Eastern religious inroads. Among these, the most bitter opponent of the Jews was the historian Tacitus, who wrote an ostensibly objective account of the history of the Jews. In this, he repeats every antisemitic libel current in the Greco-Roman world. In this antisemitic tract, Tacitus presents the Jews as a threat to the purity of the Roman Empire and as bringers of degeneracy. 11


The chief thrust of his argument is that the Jews, being antisocial, except within their own community, can never cooperate with the rest of humanity and are therefore always bound to be bad citizens in any overall political system. These antisemitic attitudes of Greek-influenced Roman intellectuals gained popular support during the period of Jewish rebellion against Rome. The basic Roman attitude, however, remained one of toleration. Jewish attempts to achieve independence were understood as natural in a proud nation that had been subjected to bad provincial government; and it was also understood that the Jews could be loyal and useful members of the Roman Empire (as they had been in previous empires) as long as their religion was not suppressed or insulted. The Jews were by no means silent in the face of Hellenistic antisemitic attacks. The voluminous works of the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo (c.25–40 CE) constitute a sustained defence of Judaism against the charge of narrow sectarianism. He demonstrates that Judaism is a universalistic religion, aiming at the conversion of all humanity to the worship of the One God and obedience to his Law of truth and justice; and that the separation of the Jews from the rest of humanity is not caused by misanthropy, but by their sense of dedication and vocation in their mission. He also attempts to show that Judaism is in harmony with the best of Greek thought, especially that of Plato. An important earlier defence against the charges of sectarianism and bad citizenship is the Letter of Aristeas, written in Alexandria in about 170 BCE, which portrays the admiration shown for Judaism by the ruler Ptolemy II Philadelpus at the time of the composition of the Septuagint (c.260 BCE). A systematic defence of Judaism against antisemitic charges is the treatise Against Apion, by the historian Josephus, replying with great effectiveness to the assaults of the leading Alexandrian antisemitic theorist, and showing Jewish history in a favourable light. Indeed, the great major works of Josephus, the Antiquities and the Jewish War can be regarded as sustained defences of the Jewish record on a broad historical scale, demonstrating Jewish loyalty to benevolent rulers, and the nobility and awesome antiquity of the Jewish religion. The earlier works are inspired by a desire for reconciliation between the Jewish and Hellenistic cultures: but there was also an angrier, more attacking, kind of Jewish response to antisemitism. These were the works which responded in kind by asserting the moral inferiority of non-Jewish religion and culture. Such were the Jewish Sybilline Oracles (written in the second century BCE and later in imitation of a non-Jewish genre of prophecy) denouncing the sins of paganism and foretelling a messianic age when Jewish ideas would prevail and the wicked would be punished. Even these works, however, adopted a cross-cultural stance, envisaging an age when Jews and repentant Gentiles would join in the worship of the One God. The form of antisemitism that was transmitted from the ancient world to medieval times, and so to the modern world, was Christian antisemitism. 12

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Behind Christian antisemitism lies the Hellenistic antisemitism discussed previously and also some other important factors. In its earliest form, as found in the Jerusalem Church, Christianity was a branch of Judaism and was not antisemitic.6 The leaders of the Jerusalem Church, James, Jesus’ brother, Peter and John, were observant Jews who were devoted to the Temple service, recognized the Jewish priesthood and practised circumcision, Sabbath and festivals, and dietary laws like other Jews. They regarded Jesus as the Jewish messiah, who had been crucified by the Romans but had been resurrected by a miracle of God and would soon resume his messianic mission of liberation. The devotion of the Jerusalem Church to Judaism creates a strong presumption that Jesus himself was a loyal Jew who did not intend to found a new religion. When, however, Jesus began to be worshipped as a divine sacrificial figure who was the centre of a new religion superseding Judaism and no longer concerned with Jewish aims of liberation, a split took place in the Christian Church. The Jewish-Christians continued to regard Jesus as a human messiah-figure, while those who worshipped Jesus as divine comprised a largely Gentile Church. When this split took place is a matter of controversy, but it seems reasonable to regard Paul as the initiator of the concept of the divine sacrificial Jesus, since Paul’s writings are the earliest containing this concept, and Paul claims the authority of direct divine inspiration, not of tradition, for his teachings.7 Paul’s converts to his teaching were almost all Gentiles, who eventually, after the split from Jewish Christianity, formed the Pauline Church. It was in this Pauline Church, from which later Christianity derives, that antisemitism arose. The earliest adumbration of Christian antisemitic attitudes are to be found in the writings of Paul himself.8 He denounces the Jews as having had a long career of murdering the prophets sent by God, culminating in the murder of Jesus9 an accusation with a long later history in Christianity. He also gives the Jews mythical status as the God-appointed enemies of Christ who are ‘treated as God’s enemies for your sake’10 a role of mystical evil foreshadowing the later development of the figure of Judas Iscariot (not found in Paul).11 At the same time, Paul looks forward to the eventual repentance of the Jews and conversion to Pauline Christianity; though he also provides an alternative scenario of the Jewish Antichrist who would oppose the true Christ in the Last Days.12 In general, Paul’s view of the Jews seems strongly influenced by Gnostic antisemitism. Whereas the Gnostics regarded the Jews as the unspiritual acolytes of a limited god, Paul regarded them as the slaves of a limited law which had been superseded by a higher spirituality. Whereas the Gnostics regarded this world as evil, having been created by an evil or limited deity, Paul regarded this world, though originally created good, as having fallen under the domination of Satan, God’s wholly evil adversary. Just as the Gnostics built their dualistic myth from biblical materials, so Paul radically 13


reinterpreted the Bible in an acosmic, spiritualized sense, replacing the political, utopian meaning of the Exodus by the notion of an individual spiritual exodus and rebirth through identification with a divine sacrifice. However, Paul’s myth, because of its sacrificial component, had much greater potential for antisemitism than that of Gnosticism. The Jews in Gnosticism were not killers; they were the uncomprehending opponents of enlightenment, and were the targets of scorn rather than hate.13 The bearers of gnosis were invulnerable figures; there was no unique central figure who underwent a violent agonized death at the hands of evil forces (this attitude was later imported into Christianity by the Gnostic heresies which denied that Jesus had died on the Cross). For Paul, however, there was only one figure, that of the deity Jesus Christ, whose violent death was essential to salvation, yet a horrible crime on the part of those who brought it about. Paul thus transformed Gnostic antisemitism by introducing the idea of the divine death – an idea which, it seems probable, he absorbed from Hellenistic mystery-cults such as that of Attis. The mystery-cults themselves had no antisemitic aspect; but when their chief motif was combined with Gnostic antisemitism, a myth of unprecedented antisemitic potency resulted. Paul himself came from Tarsus, a centre of both mystery-religion and Gnosticism. Paul’s claim of Jewish birth and Pharisee upbringing is dubious. He was probably of Gentile birth (as the Jewish-Christians alleged),14 became converted to Judaism, and then developed an amalgam of Gnosticism and mystery-religion, using Jewish materials in the Gnostic style of radical re-interpretation. Paul’s revelation on the road to Damascus ought to be regarded as the moment when Christianity, as a separate religion from Judaism, began. In the Gospels and Acts, edited from earlier Jerusalem Church materials in the spirit of Paul’s teaching and dating from c.70–110 CE, Paul’s vague outline of an antisemitic myth was given narrative elaboration. The Jews were portrayed as hostile to the higher truths brought to them by Jesus, as seeking his death, handing him over to the Romans on a false charge of sedition, and persuading and blackmailing a reluctant Roman governor into executing him. Denunciations are included of the alleged Jewish past record of persecuting divine messengers,15 so that the Jews appear to be destined from the beginning to perform the necessary crime. A new figure appears, Judas Iscariot, the Satan-possessed disciple whose fated role is to betray Jesus; his name ‘Judas’ marks him as representative of the Jews as a whole. The Jews thus play the role of the dark figure, such as Set, slayer of Osiris, Mot, slayer of Baal, or Loki, slayer of Balder, in myths of divine sacrifice and atonement. In all this the Jews act as the acolytes of the Opposer of God, Satan, whose machinations against the divine saviour bring unintended good to mankind. At the same time, enough material remains from the earlier Jerusalem Church records, both in the Gospels and in Acts, to show that the Pauline myth was superimposed upon a very different history, in which the Jewish religious representatives opposed neither Jesus nor the Jerusalem Church. 14

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Gamaliel, for example, gives support to Peter and his companions16 – which makes nonsense of the alleged opposition of the Pharisees to Jesus himself. The High Priest was indeed Jesus’ opponent – but the High Priest, regarded by the masses of the Jewish people as a Sadducee heretic, was appointed by the Romans and acted as their henchman in arresting political agitators such as Jesus. Jesus’ own teaching, as recorded in the Gospels was in no way opposed to Pharisaic Judaism; nor was his claim to messiahship blasphemous. His alleged Sanhedrin trial on these charges never happened, as indeed appears clearly from the gospel of John, which records no Sanhedrin trial. Why, then, were the Jews, rather than the Romans, made the villains of the story of the Gospel and Acts? The answer lies chiefly in the depoliticization of the story. As long as Jesus was considered a Jewish figure, concerned with fulfilling biblical prophecies about deliverance and a new Exodus from thraldom to foreign military power (combined with hopes for the end of military empires and the onset of a peaceful theocratic world era, the ‘Kingdom of God’), the Romans would remain the evil power, as they still do in Jewish–Christian writings that have survived, including portions of the book of Revelation. But when Jesus was made an apolitical figure, bringing personal salvation, not national deliverance, his appeal was to the Roman world generally, with its hunger for salvation-religion promising individual immortality and absolution. Jewish ideas of deliverance, whether for the Jews or for the world, became irrelevant, and Christianity became a religion which no longer clashed with Rome, and now sought an apolitical image. It was now an embarrassment and an irrelevance that Jesus, as a person crucified in Judaea, was presumably a Jewish rebel, like other messiah-figures such as Judas of Galilee and Theudas, to both of whom Jesus is likened in Acts 5. His death could no longer be explained as due to a conflict with Rome. It had to be the result of his mission of salvation, which was naturally opposed by the Jews, who had been long prepared for the role of opponents of enlightenment by the theories of Hellenistic antisemites, including the Gnostics, and who were, in any case, at the time of the composition of the Gospels and Acts, in deep disgrace with both Roman officials and Roman public, because of their attempt to achieve their independence in the war against Rome of 66–70 CE. Paul, in his diatribe against the Jews,17 used the familiar charge, basic to Hellenistic antisemitism, that the Jews are ‘enemies of all their fellow-men’. But he also introduced a new charge, that the Jews killed their own prophets; this was not characteristic of Hellenistic antisemitism, which, on the contrary, stressed alleged Jewish clannishness. In Christian antisemitism, this new charge became a prominent feature, which must be understood in the light of Pauline Christianity’s claim to have superseded Judaism. For, apart from the need to villainize the Jews arising from the depoliticization of Jesus’ message, there was also a deep-seated need to denigrate the Jews in order to justify ousting them from their position as the people of God, in order to make room for a new dispensation based on radical reinterpretation of the Jewish scriptures. 15


In Gnosticism, there had already been an element of supersession, for the Jewish claim to chosenness had been rejected in favour of the line of gnosisbearers, beginning with Seth; the Jews had been chosen, but by the wrong God, the Demiurge. But this supersessionary scheme consisted of providing an alternative tradition, comprising a line of figures who, in the Bible, were marginal. The supersessionary claim of Pauline Christianity, as elaborated in the Gospels, was bolder: it annexed the Jewish prophets themselves as protoChristians who had been misunderstood and persecuted by the Jews. This was a take-over of the main line of Jewish authority, and it involved a greater villainization of the Jews than was necessary in Gnosticism, since the Jews were now charged with wilful disobedience and direct persecution of God’s messengers, rather than of short-sightedly ignoring them. This picture could claim support from denunciations of the sins of the Jews in the Hebrew Bible, especially the (otherwise unsupported) charge of prophet-killing in 2 Chronicles 36:16, but these denunciations were premised on the election of the Jews, directing them to repentance, and explaining their sufferings as expiation for their sins which would eventually be forgiven. The Bible’s severe programme of self-criticism was now used to justify not the election, but the rejection, of the Jews. Hellenistic antisemitism, as a reaction to Jewish claims to a special mission, thus took two major forms. One was simply to reject these claims, substituting some caricature of Jewish history as a nation of outcasts rather than apostles; this was the line adopted by Apion and other antisemitic writers. The other reaction, prompted by jealousy rather than scorn, was to oust the Jews from their mission and take it over; this was the reaction of those who were deeply impressed by the Jews’ awesome claim, yet also deeply resented it. The two major religious schemes arising from this attitude are Gnosticism and Christianity, both of them built out of Jewish materials taken from the Hebrew Bible. Gnosticism impugned the Jewish mission by alleging that it came from an inferior source; Christianity declared, however, that the Jews had been given truly inspired information, but they had never understood it and had persecuted the messengers sent to them by God, the prophets (regarded as proto-Christians rather than as Jews) and had now, by their ultimate crime, ceased to be God’s people, which continued, however, in the form of the Christian Church. Christian antisemitism, as found in the Gospels, can be understood best, therefore, as the most highly developed form of Hellenistic antisemitism, in which not only the Jewish claims are rejected, but the Jews are made the baleful villains of a new scenario constructed out of Jewish materials. Instead of being the people of God, the heroes of a religious–historical drama from the creation to the messianic age, the Jews become the arch-villains of history, climaxing their career of crime and disobedience by murdering God, and thus putting themselves under a curse, which the New Testament even portrays them as pronouncing against themselves at the climax of their rejection of 16

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Jesus, in the words, ‘His blood be on us and on our children’.18 These terrible words presage the sufferings of the Jews under Christendom. The antisemitic aspects of the New Testament writings hardly impinged on the Jewish consciousness for a long time. After Jesus’ crucifixion by the Romans, he was regarded by Jews generally as just another failed messiahfigure, and, like Judas of Galilee and Theudas (neither of whom is mentioned in the rabbinic writings), he was forgotten. It was only when Christianity began to be a missionizing force, in the second and third centuries, that any Jewish responses to Christian claims began to be made, and these are found in sparse references to Jesus in Tosefta and Talmud, and are confined to rebuttals of the claims made for Jesus. In general, the consciousness that Christianity, in its main religious texts, gives the Jews an evil role productive of antisemitism of special intensity did not arise among Jews until modern times. Before this, Christian manifestations of hostility were simply regarded as a continuation of the tribulations experienced by the Jews throughout their history, at the hands of conquerors from Egypt to Rome. The alleged Jewish persecution of the early Church is first found in the New Testament book of Acts. This is not portrayed as a response to Christian criticism of the Jews, but as simply a continuation of the alleged Jewish hostility to Jesus himself. In fact, there was no persecution of the Jerusalem Church, except on political grounds by the High Priest and the Herodians, who saw the Jerusalem Church as continuing Jesus’ campaign against the Roman occupation and as stirring up hopes of deliverance. The support of Peter by Gamaliel19 shows that the Pharisees were not hostile to the Jerusalem Church, and Ananias, a follower of Jesus, is described as ‘well spoken of by all the Jews of that place’.20 The picture in Acts of the ‘Jews’ as persecutors of the early Church is thus inconsistent and theologically inspired. The persecutor Saul’s alleged Pharisaism is suspect, in view of his association with the Sadducee High Priest21 and the contrary attitude of the entire Pharisee movement led by Gamaliel. The Church Fathers developed antisemitic theories that were essentially based on the charges made against the Jews in the New Testament. The Greek Fathers were particularly strong in their denunciations of the Jews, since they preached in areas where there was a large Jewish population, and competition for converts between Jews and Christians was keen before the conversion of the Empire to Christianity stopped Jewish missionary activities by force. The antisemitic schema of the Church Fathers may be summarized as follows. The Jews, after a long career of crime, including the murder of prophets, finally forfeited God’s grace by their deicide of Jesus. As a punishment for this, their Temple was destroyed, and they themselves were exiled. They were doomed to suffer as slaves and exiles until the Second Coming of Christ, when they would finally see the light. Christians should regard the Jews as an accursed nation, and should refrain from friendly intercourse with them. 17


To support the picture of the Jews as a criminal nation, the Church Fathers used passages from the Hebrew Bible as well as from the New Testament. Every specific kind of habitual crime was attributed to the Jews, especially idolatry and sexual vice.22 On the basis of Psalm 106:37, the Jews were declared to have been practising infanticides. Chrysostom even accuses them of cannibalism, on the basis of Deuteronomy 25:56. The explicit object of this cataloguing of alleged crimes was to show that the Jews’ alleged murder of Jesus was foreshadowed in their whole history. These charges against the Old Testament Israelites were regularly taken to apply to contemporary Jews too, since their refusal to worship Jesus was regarded as a continuance of their previous depravity.23 In particular, charges of Jewish persecution of Christians in contemporary or recent times were regularly based not on factual evidence, as James Parkes has shown,24 but on Hebrew Bible texts bizarrely interpreted to refer to contemporary Jewish–Christian relations. Thus Origen interprets Deuteronomy 32:21 to mean that Jews hate Christians – though he himself had received much help and friendship from Jews in his studies. Historians down to the present day have taken such exegetical antisemitism as evidence of persecution of the Church by the Jews in the second to fourth centuries, though abundant documentary evidence disproves this. To emphasise the allegedly foredoomed rejection of the Jews by God, biblical opposed pairs such as Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, were interpreted as symbolic of the rejected Jews and the accepted Church,25 a kind of exegesis that already existed in the New Testament.26 The Jews were thus represented as playing a fated evil role in history. Frequently quoted were the main New Testament texts of Jewish reprobation, John 8:44–47 and Matthew 27:25. Church Councils, meanwhile, attempted to enforce an antisemitic attitude in everyday life. The Council of Elvira (305 CE) and other Councils forbade Christians to have friendly social relations with Jews. Antisemitic attitudes at this time were largely confined to the Christian clergy, and there is much evidence that ordinary Christians fraternized with Jews, attending their weddings and even enjoying Jewish sermons. It took centuries of haranguing by the clergy before the ordinary Christian acquired the hatred of the Jews that later seems to be almost inborn. Two Christian teachers were especially influential in this respect, St Chrysostom and St Augustine. The diatribes of St Chrysostom against the Jews were rivalled only by Hitler. He accused the Jews of cannibalism and every other crime, but chiefly of the crime of deicide. He declared also that the Jews worshipped demons in their synagogues. St Augustine, the great theorist, laid down the lines for the treatment of the Jews in future centuries. They were to be regarded as Cain, because of their deicide, but, like Cain, they were to be exempt from extermination, as their misery testified to the judgement of God upon them, and so they acted as ‘witnesses’ to the truth of Christianity. This attitude of partial toleration was a kind of protection to the Jews even during the worst persecutions of later years. 18

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It should be noted that there was an almost obsessive concern with the Jews in this early period of Christianity’s development. Almost every writer of note composed a book ‘Against the Jews’. In contrast, Jewish literature of the period hardly concerns itself with Christianity. The reason is that Christianity could only define itself in terms of its split from Judaism, while the advent of Christianity was not, from the Jewish point of view, a significant theological event. The Jews were mainly concerned to develop their own tradition in the Mishnah, Tosefta, Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds and in the Midrashim. Thus the impression given by Christian writers, of this and later periods, that hatred of Christianity was an important factor in the mental life of the Jews is very far from the reality, which was largely one of indifference. Christianity itself had suffered much from Roman persecution, before it eventually became accepted as the official religion of the Roman Empire. This was because Christianity, for a long time, had no legal standing to protect it from the charge of impiety towards the gods. Judaism was recognized by Rome as a national religion, and as such was given toleration, which included the right not to sacrifice to pagan gods or to the Emperor. Christianity, as a non-national religion, was counted as an illicit society, and its refusal to take part in public worship was considered disloyal. Christians were accused of being atheists, and they were even accused at times of sacrificing and eating children, an accusation that, much later, was made by Christians against Jews. Thus the great struggle of Christianity in its early years was to convince the Roman authorities that Christians could be loyal citizens – a struggle which contributed, as we have seen, to the depoliticization of the story of Jesus and the substitution of the Jews for the Romans as his enemies. Persecutions of Christians by Romans took place under the emperors Domitian, Nero, Trajan,27 Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Maximinus, Decius, Valerian and Diocletian (284–305 CE). The only Jewish persecution of Christians that has an historical basis is that of Palestinian Christians by the rebel Bar Kokhba in 138, largely on the political ground that they did not support his messianic claim. The accession of Constantine in 312 led to the Edict of Milan (313 CE) in which Christianity was given legal recognition. The conversion of Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, a decision sealed by the Council of Nicaea (325 CE). Under the influence of Sylvester, Bishop of Rome, Paul, Bishop of Constantinople and Eusebius of Caesarea, the historian, Constantine had issued an edict in 315 forbidding Jews to make converts – the first of many Christian edicts directed against the Jews. The Christian Church thus changed from a persecuted to a persecuting body, through its influence on Christian emperors. The rights enjoyed by the Jews under the pagan Roman Empire were increasingly eroded. The real persecution began under Constantius (327–30 CE), when the teaching of Judaism 19


was forbidden, intermarriage and conversion became punishable by death, and the Jews of Palestine were burdened with impossible taxation, causing a revolt that was put down with ruthless massacre. From this time, the Jewish culture of Palestine declined, and Babylonia, outside Christian influence, became the Jewish cultural centre. There was respite for the Jews during the reign of Julian the Apostate (361–3 CE), who was friendly to the Jews and Judaism, and his policy of toleration was continued for a while after his death (364–408 CE), much to the disgust of the antisemitic churchmen Chrysostom and Ambrosius. But then came a long period of anti-Jewish legislation which destroyed all Jewish rights, and reduced the Jews to the status of slaves and aliens, in accordance with their theological status in Christian theory. Theodosius II, Emperor of the East (408–50 CE), a weak ruler who succumbed to Church pressure, made many anti-Jewish enactments, and these were consolidated in the Code of Justinian, who reigned over the East (including Palestine) from 483 to 565, and was himself an anti-Jewish bigot. In Palestine, Jews were excluded from Jerusalem, and subjected to every kind of oppression. Now for the first time it ceased to be a Jewish land and became Christianized. Justinian decreed that Jews were not allowed to give legal evidence against Christians, only against each other. Samaritans, because of their rebellious record, were not allowed to give evidence at all or perform any legal act. Jews were excluded from all honourable offices. Justinian also interfered with Jewish worship by banning the Shema (the declaration of the Unity of God), and prescribing the use of Greek instead of Hebrew in the synagogues. Previous enactments such as the ban on the building of new synagogues were rigorously enforced. In the fifth century, the Western Empire, unlike the Eastern Empire, crumbled under barbarian assault. This brought relief to the Jews of the Western Empire, for though the anti-Jewish legislation remained on the statute-books, the chaotic condition of the times ensured that it was not, on the whole, enforced (except during a short period when Justinian reconquered Italy). Consequently, it was not until the eleventh century in the West that the antisemitic programme laid down by the Church in its early years of rule was fully put into operation. Though the barbarians adopted Christianity, they often did so in the less fanatical form of Arianism, which held a modified view of the divinity of Jesus, and thus did not regard the Jews as deicides. Moreover, a succession of Catholic Popes insisted that Jews should not be forcibly converted to Christianity, though this doctrine was often unwelcome to other members of the Catholic hierarchy. Gregory I (590–604 CE) held that Jews should be converted only by persuasion (or bribery), but he protested vigorously against the laxity of the Frankish empire in allowing Jews to own Christian slaves. Though certain Merovingian Kings oppressed the Jews, the succeeding Pepin dynasty favoured the Jews as highly useful citizens. Charlemagne even created a Jewish dukedom, ruled by a Babylonian Jew (known as Duke William) 20

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who was descended from the royal house of David. In Spain, the Jews were well treated, and were so popular among the ordinary people that the rabbis were asked to bless the Christian fields. This had been banned by the Church at the Council of Illiberis (c.320), but for a long time without much effect. Churchmen, such as Isidore of Seville, who sought to re-introduce antiJewish legislation were ignored by noblemen who protected the Jews. There were short periods of persecution during the reigns of the fanatical Visigothic Catholic monarchs Sisebut and Chintila, but their deaths brought the persecution to an end. The successors of Charlemagne, Louis (814–40 CE) and Charles (840–77 CE), rulers over France and Germany, continued his policy of toleration and even favour towards the Jews, despite the efforts of the prelates Agobard and Amolo to have the anti-Jewish laws enforced. In Spain, meanwhile, the Jews prospered under both Muslims and Christians. Here a great Jewish culture developed, reaching its zenith in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Both Muslims and Christians, fighting for control of Spain, found the Jews useful, and the fulminations of the Church went unheeded. It was not until Christian power triumphed in the thirteenth century that the Church also exerted full influence and the position of the Jews deteriorated. The deterioration began earlier in Germany and France. In the eleventh century the long propaganda of the Church finally bore fruit. The friendliness towards the Jews on the part of ordinary Christians evident in previous centuries now at last turned to hate, under the ceaseless influence of teaching, stressing the deicidal guilt of the Jew and the sinfulness of allowing them to prosper or enjoy a measure of equality. The trigger was the conflict between Christendom and Islam. Rumours of ill-treatment of Christians in Islamic countries was somehow blamed on the Jews, especially as the distinction between Muslims and Jews was not too well understood. The legend of Antichrist, based on Paul’s cryptic remarks in 2 Thessalonians 2, and fostered by the Church Fathers Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Lactantius, now began, for the first time, to exercise popular appeal, with tragic results. The Muslims began to appear as the army of Antichrist, occupying the Holy Places as prophesied by Paul, and the Jews were now seen as allies or even members of the Islamic conspiracy. Persecutions and expulsions of Jews began, in Rouen, Orleans, Limoges and Mainz. Then, in 1096, came the great turning-point that changed the whole position of the Jews, the First Crusade. A wave of millenarian excitement swept the Christian world. As the crusaders set out to liberate Jerusalem, they massacred Jews in the towns on their way in both Germany and France. Such massacres seemed to be part of the crusade itself. From this time on, Christians saw the murder of Jews as an act of piety, and Jews developed a philosophy of martyrdom that made them die in large numbers rather than accept the proffered forced conversion that would have saved them. 21


Every new crusade gave rise to ecstatic preaching that resulted in massacre of Jews by an inflamed crowd. This essentially popular phenomenon, kindled by lower clergy or unofficial charismatics, was actually against the wishes of the higher clergy and aristocracy, who saw populism as a danger to their own authority; yet without the long propaganda of higher clergy in the past about the Jews’ deicidal guilt, the popular paranoia about the Jews would never have taken root. The nightmare that now began for the Jews contained a variety of elements, reinforcing each other. The Jews had already been increasingly channelled into the profession of money-lending, since the taking of interest was forbidden to Christians, whereas Jews, being regarded as lost souls, were even encouraged to take up an activity which society needed. Consequently, some of the greatest achievements of the Middle Ages, even including the building of cathedrals, were financed by Jewish money-lending. Now however, all other professions were steadily closed to Jews. The growth of the guilds, which excluded Jews, ended their long association with international trade. Jews had been farmers, or vine-growers (like the great scholar Rashi), and had practised every skilled profession, especially medicine; all were now closed to them. But the practice of ‘usury’ reinforced the image of the wicked Jew; the Jews, in fact, were compelled to conform to the Christian image of them, and usury itself became the excuse for Christian oppression, such as massacres, confiscations and expulsions. Eventually, however, Christians themselves legitimized ‘usury’ (since banking had become so obviously necessary to the growing economy) and in the thirteenth century, the Lombard Christian banks began to oust the Jews from large-scale banking. Jews, still excluded from the professions, sank to pawnbroking and peddling, which further degraded their image. Yet through their continuing practice of their religion and learning, the Jews were never so demoralized as they appeared. By this combination of paranoia with deliberate debasement, Christians increasingly demonised the Jews. The chief result of this was the growth of the horrifying ‘blood-libel’, by which Jews were accused of murdering Christian children in order to drink their blood or use it to make unleavened bread. The first case was that of William of Norwich (1144), and the most famous was that of Hugh of Lincoln (1255) which inspired Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’. The rise of the blood-libel coincided with the rise of Mariolatry, and the depiction of Jesus as a child at Mary’s breast. The Jews thus appeared as the murderers of the child, rather than of the adult, Jesus, and this contributed considerably to their demonization. Whereas before they had been thought of as wicked humans, they now assumed the image of vampires and devils. Many thousands of Jews died as a result of the blood-libel, which also became a convenient resource for those wishing to evade debts to the Jews. Moreover, the Jews were blamed for all catastrophes. At the time of the Black Death, massacres of Jews occurred. The relative immunity of Jews to the disease because of their cleaner habits brought them under suspicion of having caused it. 22

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The Middle Ages lasted for most European Jews until the eighteenth century, when, for the first time, Christians, in appreciable numbers, began to see them again as human beings who ought to be reclaimed from their degradation. The advent of the Reformation brought little relief to the Jews, who continued to be diabolized by Protestants, with the possible exception of Calvin. Luther, after a short period of defending the Jews, when he was still hoping to convert them, descended into a rabid antisemitism, anticipating the policies of Nazism. In England, Jews were excluded by law until the seventeenth century, when Puritan attitudes of Hebraism and millenarianism produced a climate in which they could be reluctantly allowed to enter in small numbers. One important Jewish response to the sustained Christian medieval campaign of antisemitism was simply flight. Many Jews fled to Eastern countries, where, under Islam, they were much better treated. Many fled from bitter German persecution in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to Poland, where Jews were valued as bringing enterprise and energy to the building-up of a nation from barbarism (though, once their contribution had been made, the Jews found themselves the victims of medieval hate in Poland too). After the catastrophic expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1492), some found refuge in Holland, the pioneer of attitudes of toleration. Another common response was conversion to Christianity. About 100,000 Jews in Spain, for example, submitted to the pressure of constant harassment and threatened expulsion and became converted. Then followed a new phenomenon – racial antisemitism. The Jewish converts, or New Christians, as they were called, became a despised lower caste in Spanish life, and the compulsion to prove one’s ‘purity of blood’, that is, freedom from Jewish descent, became a Spanish obsession. Another response was martyrdom. Thousands of Jews chose death rather than conversion. At York, for example, in 1190, the Jews suffered massacre rather than conversion to a faith that demonstrated to them its untruth by its behaviour to them. The chief response, however, was endurance. The Jews had the resources in their own tradition for weathering the storm. They continued their studies, honoured their rabbis, sought peace on sabbaths and festivals whenever these could be celebrated without interruption, and developed a code of living in the Jewish quarters based on Talmudic principles of equality and justice. So, far from succumbing to Christian ideas of Jewish inferiority, the Jews typically regarded themselves as a civilized people condemned to endure in surroundings of barbarism and primitive ignorance. It was the decay of Christian belief that led to the release of the Jews from medieval oppression. The first person to propose the emancipation of the Jews was the freethinker John Toland in 1714. He was followed by other freethinkers and deists, notably Montesquieu, Lessing and Rousseau. The first actual emancipation was that of the Jews of France in 1791, under the 23


influence of anti-religious Emancipation ideas, strongly opposed by Christian religious establishments everywhere, which continued to hold the medieval view of the Jews as an accursed nation which should be denied political and social rights and status. Emancipation gradually followed in other European countries, though the Russian Empire retained a medieval stance towards the Jews until the Revolution in 1917. Even the advocates of Jewish emancipation, however, were not without antisemitic attitudes. Some of them, notably Voltaire, must be regarded as outright antisemites. While Montesquieu and Lessing showed respect for the Jewish culture and religion, which they declared to have been unjustly maligned, most Enlightenment thinkers had nothing but contempt for Judaism and for Jewish history and culture. They regarded the Jews as a backward, superstitious people, who could nevertheless (with some difficulty) be recognized as human, and who could even possibly become civilized, though the process would be long and difficult. This patronizing attitude, held by Dohm, Mirabeau and others, made the emancipation of the Jews dependent on their abandoning their own identity. It was a great shock to such people, when the Jews finally achieved some measure of emancipation, to find how quickly they threw off the dilapidation of persecution and, within a few years, leapt to the fore in all the professions. An attitude of toleration, predicated on patronising presumptions, tended to change to resentment when the Jews falsified all predictions by their swift success, for which, in fact, centuries of hard study in a subtle, rational and humane Talmudic tradition had well qualified them. Extraordinary figures like Moses Mendelssohn and Solomon Maimon, who moved from a Talmudic background into the forefront of advanced European philosophy, were paralleled, in a lesser way, by a mass of professional Jews. Thus Enlightenment tolerance had its own intolerant side, contemptuous of Jewish values and demanding that they should be shed as the price of emancipation. This contempt was often so bitter, that it can only be regarded as the survival, in a new form, of medieval contempt and hatred of the Jews. Here we meet for the first time the phenomenon of post-Christian antisemitism, which was to have such a fateful history. The question of Jewish emancipation, by which Jews were to become full citizens of Christian countries, became a matter of keen debate after the lead given by France and the United States of America. The debate turned on the question of assimilability and loyalty: were the Jews too alien ever to become good citizens? The issue of religious difference was given a political slant. As a ‘chosen people’, it was argued, the Jews could never give true allegiance to any political entity but their own. Lord Macaulay, in England, argued eloquently that Jewish messianic hopes were no bar to their attaining English citizenship, any more than Christians were disqualified by belief in the Second Coming of Christ. But the new ground had been broken: the question had moved on from Jews as deniers of Christ to Jews as essential strangers and 24

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aliens, their religious difference now being regarded chiefly as a symptom of their alienness. This shifting of ground, however, allowed the re-introduction of attitudes of hatred and contempt that were merely continuances of medieval diabolization in a rationalized garb. The analysis of Jewish alienness became the chief preoccupation of post-Christian antisemites, and the various analyses produced the varieties of modern antisemitism. In fact, Judaism was well equipped to adapt itself to a situation of political emancipation, by its long-held doctrine of loyalty to civil authorities, as formulated by the Babylonian Amora, Samuel, in his well-known dictum, ‘The law of the kingdom is law’ (itself based on much biblical precedent, including Jeremiah 29:7). Jews, in fact, always tended to be enthusiastically loyal to any state that showed them kindness; but this very enthusiasm aroused resentment in antisemites who saw it as one more impudent disguise of the essentially alien Jew. In the political and ideological divisions which appeared in the nineteenth centuries, the alleged alienness of the Jews assumed both a left-wing and a right-wing form. By left-wingers, the Jews were often identified with capitalism, because of their history of usury and commerce and the contemporary prominence of the Rothschilds. This antisemitic identification takes a virulent form in the writings of Karl Marx, himself an uprooted Jew, and appears also in the thought of Proudhon, Werner Sombart and others. Right-wing antisemites, on the other hand, saw the Jews as the spearhead of change and revolution, and as plotting to take over the world by fomenting revolutionary movements. This fantasy began with the French Revolution and the work of Abbé Barruel, which served as a model for the later Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Others, less ideologically extreme, merely saw the Jews as subversive of established order by their social and professional ambition. The villainizing and scapegoating of the Jews on such contradictory lines shows that there was a predisposition to blame the Jews for all ills, and this derives from the theological past. The basic concept of the Enlightenment was the unity of man, based on a common rationality, and the charge against the Jews was not that they were essentially different, but that they were backward. The Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, however, questioned this basic unity and rationality, seeing mankind as divided into impermeable traditions, based on emotional and racial ties, and resistant to the incursions of aliens. Jews could never be ‘real’ Germans, or Frenchmen or Englishmen. It was this Romantic reaction against rationality that produced the most dangerous threat in all Jewish history, racialist antisemitism. There was a beginning of racialist antisemitism in the sixteenth century in Spain, when the New Christians were regarded as racially tainted. The earliest manifestation, however, must be traced to the thirteenth century and the rise of the ‘blood-libel’. Before this, Christendom had in general retained the principle that Jews were fully human, and that, therefore, a Jewish convert to 25


Christianity became a full and equal Christian. Now, however, the demonizing of the Jews began to reduce them to subhuman status. Legends arose about the foetor judaicus, or distinctive Jewish smell, and about the menstruation of Jewish men which necessitated the imbibing of blood, and even that Jews had tails or cloven feet. Though conversion was still held to remove these traits miraculously, the way was open to the view that Jews were a different species. Accusations that Jews poisoned wells and desecrated the host also debased and dehumanized the image of the Jew. The ground was thus fully prepared for modern theories in which the Jews were declared to be subhuman or at least radically alien. The image, having become ingrained, only needed, in a non-theological age, to be grounded in philosophy or ‘science’. The philosophy of Hegel, with its concept of the nation as the embodiment of an ‘idea’, became the inspiration of German nationalism, seeking unity and morale after the humiliations of the Napoleonic era. The writings of Herder and his school stimulated a Germanic mysticism. These developments were echoed in France, especially after the defeat of 1870. Nationalism throve on defeat, and the Jews were ideally cast for the role of insidious plotters and traitors, so necessary to explain defeat. Instead of the decay of nationalism envisaged by the Enlightenment, the nineteenth century saw a new intensity of nationalism that excluded the Jews as aliens. The work of Gobineau on alleged racial inequality was combined with concepts taken from Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection in order to produce a pseudo-scientific theory of antisemitism. According to this theory, the races of mankind are in competition with each other for survival. Only the Aryan race deserves to triumph, because it alone has noble qualities of creativity and altruism. Other races are doomed either to extermination or to servitude to the Aryan race. The Jews, as Semites, can never become true citizens in an Aryan nation. The term ‘antisemitism’ was thus coined28 as an expression of the biological theory of the inferiority of the Jews. In theory, this inferiority ought to extend to Arabs too, but Jews were the only Semites living in Europe in any appreciable numbers, and it was not until the rise of consciousness of the Arab world in the present century that the hollowness and hypocrisy of the term ‘antisemite’ became widely apparent, in that it was never regarded as applying to Arabs. Essentially, the racialist theory is a continuation of medieval hatred of the Jews in a modernist guise. The racialist theory was developed first in Germany, and even the great cultural figures Nietzsche, Wagner and Treitschke must be regarded as contributors to it. In Germany, the theory became the inspiration of an anti-liberal political movement, which received respectability through the support of Bismarck. His cynical opportunism foreshadowed the use of antisemitism by later politicians as the exploitation of an ever-present fund of popular hatred. The Christian Socialist movement of Adolf Stöcker attracted both religious and racialist antisemites, and, though it became discredited, it provided the groundwork for twentieth century German political antisemitism.29 From 26

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Germany, racialist antisemitism spread to Central Europe and France. In Austria–Hungary, nationalist and racialist antisemitism developed under the influence of both Germany and Russia. The religious antisemites, with their organ the Vaterland joined the racialists in the Christian Socialist movement, which made great gains in the 1896 elections. Liberal thinking then prevailed, but the foundation for the twentieth-century Austrian political antisemitism which produced Hitler had been laid. In France, the influence of German racial antisemitism was felt somewhat later, with the publication of the influential book, La France juive devant l’opinion, by Edouard Drumont (1886), attacking the alleged corruption of French public life by the Jews. The Boulangist movement, led by General Georges Boulanger, paralleled the racialist political movements of Germany and Austria. French army circles were particularly antisemitic. In the years 1894–1906, the extent of French antisemitism was revealed to the world by the Dreyfus affair. Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, was accused of treason because of a letter, allegedly in his handwriting, to the German military attache. It was subsequently discovered by Colonel Picquart that the letter was written by an officer called Major Esterhazy and that Dreyfus was totally innocent; but he had been condemned, and the military and political establishment fought by every means, including the banishment of Picquart and the forging of further evidence, to prevent the matter from being reopened. Even when a retrial was forced, Dreyfus was found guilty again. Meanwhile the country became divided into pro-Dreyfus liberals, and antiDreyfusards who identified the cause of traditionalism with antisemitism. After twelve years of ceaseless agitation (including the intervention on Dreyfus’ side of Georges Clemenceau and Emile Zola, who was sentenced to a year in prison) Dreyfus was acquitted. As in other countries, antisemitism had been temporarily discredited, but the course of the twentieth century had been mapped out. In Russia, where the Jews lived in mostly medieval conditions, traditional Christian antisemitism was reinforced by a Romantic, mystical nationalism derived from German ideas, as in the work of Dostoievsky. Massacres (‘pogroms’) began in 1881 and blood-libel accusations proliferated. Further antisemitic laws were passed in May, 1882 (‘the May laws’), by which Jewish property was confiscated and new Jewish ghettos were created in order to combat ‘Jewish exploitation’. The Jews were thus blamed and punished for the pogroms. A great exodus of Jews out of Russia began, mostly to the United States of America. Some of the Jews who remained became a powerful force in the anti-tsarist revolutionary movement. In 1905 came the first appearance of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was to play a fateful role in the history of antisemitism. This was an addendum to a religious tract written by Serge Nilus, a tsarist civil servant.30 It purported to be a Jewish document outlining a plot to enslave the 27


Christian world. This was to be done by the manipulation of liberal and socialist movements. All the capitals of Europe would then be blown up. The Protocols, were taken with the utmost seriousness in tsarist circles, and were published under the auspices of Tsar Nicholas II by the secret police. They have figured in antisemitic propaganda everywhere until the present day. The antisemitic organisation the Black Hundreds stirred up pogroms in 1903 and 1905, with the direct encouragement of the Tsar. The government again, in 1911, supported the blood-libel accusation against Mendel Beilis in Kiev. He was finally acquitted in 1913, and his trial, like that of Dreyfus in France, produced an alignment of the forces of liberalism in Russia that proved of historic importance. The picture of the Jews as plotting against the world through liberal and revolutionary movements had gathered force since the French Revolution. The Jews, who clearly benefited by liberal reforms, were conceived as manipulating events to produce them, and thus as subverters of all traditional values. In fact, in Germany and elsewhere, Jewish intellectuals were in the vanguard of liberalism. This was a strange reversal: for Enlightenment antisemites like Voltaire had based their antipathy on the alleged impossibility of educating Jews into liberal values. The advent of the Bolshevik Revolution brought to a focus all the fears felt about the Jews as destroyers of established society. In historical fact, only a tiny minority of Jews supported the Bolsheviks. The Bund, the best organized Jewish political movement, supported Kerensky’s liberal programme which would have furthered their socialist and nationalist aims, and found Lenin’s extremism and bigoted opposition to Jewish nationalism repugnant. Those few Jews who did support the Bolsheviks, such as Trotsky, Zinoviev, Litvinov and Kaganovitch, had repudiated all Jewish connections. The mass of the Jewish people were too sunk in misery and oppression to be politically active at all. Yet the Bolshevik Revolution was seen throughout the world as a Jewish phenomenon. Even Winston Churchill was quite convinced of this. Antisemitic movements in Germany, Poland, and France now focussed on the alleged responsibility of the Jews for the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet the experiences of Russian Jews during the Russian civil wars of 1918–21 were horrific. The Ukrainian patriots under Simon Petlura who fought against the Soviet annexation of the Ukraine perpetrated massacres of Jews, whom they identified both with Antichrist and the Revolution. More than 70,000 Jews died in these massacres. Then when the White Russians under Denikin moved into the Ukraine, another 50,000 Jews were massacred by these forces. About 30,000 Jews were also massacred by the invading Polish army of Pilsudsky in 1921. The abolition of antisemitism by the Soviet Government was enough to identify it to Denikin’s men as Jewish. The final blow was the merciless expropriation of the Jewish middle classes by Lenin, which brought the whole of Russian Jewry to paupery. Both to the right and the left, the Jews represented the forces of Satan. 28

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The chief Jewish response to the growth of racialist and nationalist antisemitism was to develop their own nationalism in the form of Zionism. It was the Dreyfus case, and even more, the Polish blood-libel accusations of the nineteenth century, that convinced Herzl that Enlightenment hopes for the solution of the Jewish question by emancipation alone were illusory. The Jews, for whatever reason, could not be assimilated into Christian countries, where they were regarded as irredeemably alien. The Zionist hope, as expressed by Leon Pinsker, was that the Jews, by acquiring a land of their own, would be ‘normalized’. This hope too, however, proved illusory. The alienness of the Jews in Christendom was not, as Zionist thinkers theorized, due merely to the Jewish condition of exile, which made them into uncomfortable ‘ghosts’. It arose from the role given to the Jews in the Christian myth, a role that survived even into the post-Christian era, and remained potent even after the Jews regained their land. It is a vital historical problem that the pathological antisemitism of the half-educated and apparently pathetic Adolf Hitler, instead of being dismissed as mere raving, became the moving force of a world upheaval. Germany, a nation that prided itself on its culture, found itself able to turn over its scientific and academic establishment to the elaboration of theories of race of an infantile kind. The answer lies in the whole past history of antisemitism outlined earlier, which predisposed the German nation, at a particular juncture in its history, to succumb to madness. All the strands in the growth of antisemitism met in Germany in a potent mixture. The nineteenth-century theories of race had arisen from German philosophy, especially Hegel and Nietzsche. Mystical nationalism was the product of Herder, in reaction against the Enlightenment, and the alien blood of the Jews appeared to threaten the purity of the Germanic organism. Bourgeois capitalist success, resented by the lower middle class, crystallized in the internationalist figure of the Rothschilds, while the fear of Bolshevist anarchy and cosmopolitanism fastened on the Jewish figures who seemed to dominate the Russian revolution. Everywhere the Jews seemed to threaten the integrity of the mystical organism which brought salvation. All this mass of irrationality could lead to moral disaster only at a time of severe national debility. Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and the ensuing inflation, produced a breakdown of morale, and the progress towards democracy in the twenties did not sufficiently heal the trauma. Germany was vulnerable to a madman who could strike the right psychotic chord. Hatred of the Jews, deeply embedded in the Western mind, was the key. The chief historical factor that made the Holocaust possible was the centuries-long preparation of the Jews for the role of victim by Christian diabolization. The Nazi movement was not Christian but pagan. But its paganism was post-Christian, not pre-Christian. It was a paganism that had shed every dogma of Christianity, but unconsciously retained its myth.

29

2 PURE BLOOD The beginnings of racial antisemitism in fifteenth-century Spain

In theory, Christianity is a non-racist, or even anti-racist doctrine. Paul’s famous pronouncement stresses this: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’.31 This pronouncement entails that any Jew who becomes converted to Christianity loses altogether his Jewish identity, which is obliterated entirely by his new Christian identity. How did this ideal work out in practice? There have been many individual Jewish converts to Christianity who have indeed been fully accepted as genuine Christians, whose descendants sank to the point of invisibility into the main body of Christendom. But there have been more cases when the genuineness of their conversion of Jews has been doubted, and they have existed in Christendom under a stigma, and their descendants, even if the offspring of unions with non-Jews, have been treated as belonging to a pariah sub-class. The possession of ‘Jewish blood’, in these cases, means relegation to the rank of second-class citizens, deprived of full rights and socially despised. Social rejection has implied a denial of marriageability, so that isolated groups consisting of the descendants of Jewish converts have tended to appear in the Christian communities to which they belong. These isolated groups, though practising Christianity in every way, are regarded with contempt and suspicion. But even where intermarriage has taken place on a large scale, the taint of Jewish blood has bedevilled social relations. The most striking example of Christian racism, uncannily foreshadowing the racist antisemitism of Germany in modern times, was fifteenth-century Spain, which formulated a doctrine of ‘purity of blood’ (limpieza de sangre) which excluded from public office and other positions of honour all those who were known to have an admixture of Jewish blood, however pious they might be in the practice and belief of Christianity. This phenomenon counters the view of those (such as Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism) who wish to assert a total discontinuity between pre-modern and modern antisemitism. Even a manifestation that might seem characteristically modern (since it bases itself ostensibly on racial theory and neo-Darwinism) turns out to have its pre-modern antecedents. 30

ANTISEMITISM IN SPAIN

In Spain, the doctrine of limpieza de sangre stems from the mass conversion of Jews to Christianity in 1391, when a massacre of Jews took place. The doctrine of blood-purity was reinforced by the great addition to the body of converts at the time of the Expulsion of 1492, when Jews were given the choice of expulsion or conversion. At this latter time, it is reckoned that about 100,000 Jews remained loyal to their ancestral religion and chose exile. About another 100,000 Jews bowed to the Christian ultimatum and accepted conversion. Here there is a significant difference between Jews and Muslims. The Muslims were not given the choice of expulsion or conversion, but all converted by force. They never overlooked the fact that this was a forced conversion, and they made no effort to educate their children in Christian doctrine or practice. The Christians, recognizing this, eventually expelled from Spain all the Muslim ‘converts’ (known as ‘Moriscos’) in 1609. This was an essentially different expulsion from that of the Jews in 1492, when only non-converted Jews were expelled. The converted Jews, on the other hand, took their conversion seriously, and became practising Christians, if only (in many cases) as a form of emancipation and entry into the professions. Yet they remained under a cloud of suspicion. Many of them were dragged before the Inquisition on a charge of secretly continuing to practise Judaism, or at least minor Jewish customs. Denunciations by Christian neighbours on this ground were frequent, so that Jewish converts became the chief victims of the cruelty of the Inquisition. There is thus some doubt whether the original impulse to stigmatize the Jewish converts was actually racial. It only became racial in the course of a persecution of Jews suspected of insincere conversion. This persecution gradually became extended to all of Jewish origin and their descendants, and thus became de facto a racist persecution with a racist vocabulary. It developed into a dogma that Jews were really, by virtue of their ‘blood’, incapable of sincere conversion. This dogma is different from Nazi racism, since it regards the Jews as imbued with the sin of Judas from which they can never escape, because it is in their blood, rather than as creatures of subhuman status. Yet the upshot is the same; a belief in the incorrigibility of the Jews and the impossibility of their ever being included in true humanity. It may be asked whether the suspiciousness shown by the Christians of Spain towards Jewish converts stemmed from their awareness that so many of the conversions had been secured by force. Christian canon law forbade the conversion of Jews by force, though it appeared to forbid also the return of Jews so converted to Judaism when the threat of force had been removed (nevertheless there is record of certain more enlightened rulers who did permit return in such a case). The Christians knew that the choice presented to the Jews, conversion or exile, was in fact a threat of death to any Jew who attempted to remain in Spain while adhering to his own religion. Actually, in the period before the massacres of 1391, some Jews who had clearly converted for sincere reasons were treated with honour, and even promoted to high positions in the 31


Church. If the consciousness of the wrongness of forced conversion was at the root of this matter, the assertion of the corruption of Jewish ‘blood’ was itself insincere. This consideration may reduce the similarity I have alleged between the theory of limpieza de sangre and the Nazi racist doctrine of purity of blood. However, I suggest that most Christians of Spain were far from blaming the alleged untrustworthiness of the conversos on Christian disloyalty to the canon law forbidding forced conversions. This consideration was never allowed to develop into a sense of Christian acknowledgement of guilt. The dominant feeling was that the Jews were essentially evil and that this evil was stamped into their blood. As this feeling became stronger and stronger, the conversos came to occupy a standing in the Spanish Christian mind that was hardly distinguishable from the standing of the Jews in Nazi racism. A turning-point was a massacre of conversos in Toledo in 1449, after which a decree was issued banning all conversos as ‘unfit, inept, and unworthy of holding any office and public or private benefit in said city of Toledo and in its lands . . . to give witness and faith as public notaries or as witnesses . . . to have domain over Old Christians’. This decree (so similar to the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws) was widely copied in other cities and incorporated into civil law. Of course, it can be argued that there is a simpler explanation of the whole matter. This is that there were just too many converted Jews to be assimilated. Christian society, though in theory willing to accept very large numbers of converted Jews (and indeed aspiring to convert the whole Jewish community, whose conversion was regarded as an essential preliminary to the Second Coming of Christ) was in fact able to digest only a limited number. Beyond a certain number, the Other becomes indigestible. This is a phenomenon that appears in all societies that attempt to integrate immigrants in large numbers. In the case of the Muslims the problem was insoluble and the attempt was abandoned by the expulsion of the Moriscos. In the case of the Jews, the problem showed itself in the form of hostility and relegation to second-class status. This explanation, however (though it forms a valid part of the total picture) is superficial. The Jews were a special case, because they were a focus of fantasies of evil dating from many centuries before the attempt to assimilate them began. In particular, the fantasy of Jewish power was operative. The Jews of Spain, freed from their disabilities by conversion, had begun to use their natural talents to occupy important positions in Spanish society, rising high in the professions, and even taking leading roles in the Church. This aroused alarm: the Jews were taking over, as had always been feared. Here sixteenth-century Spain shows a remarkable similarity to the situation set up by the emancipation of the Jews in the Enlightenment era, when the Jews were ostensibly freed but in fact continued to be regarded with fear and suspicion. In fact, in Spain a prologue was played out foreshadowing the whole course of development of antisemitism in the modern world: with the exception that, in an age of faith, no new theories (other than Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus) were required to explain the origin of Jewish evil. 32


It was in the fifteenth century, long before the Expulsion of the Jews who were loyal to their faith, that the doctrine of limpieza de sangre32 was first formulated. The doctrine took more than one form. In a less extreme form, the alleged Jewish loss of purity of blood began with the crucifixion. In a more extreme form, Jewish racial impurity existed already long before that point; the Jews were evil throughout their history. One theory even postulated that the reason why Jesus decided to be born amongst the Jews was precisely because they were so evil: he hoped to redeem by his presence even the most evil people on earth. This was in a way an acknowledgment of the fact that Jesus was born as a Jew, while at the same time discounting this fact. Yet the doctrine contained some startling contradictions: one Spanish family was declared exempt from the stain of Jewish descent because it was thought that they were descended from the family of the Virgin Mary. The doctrine of blood-purity took particular hold in Spain because it was a country which was obsessed with the concept of aristocracy. The ordinary people had long felt oppressed by a sense of inferiority to the old aristocracy, who regarded themselves as having an inherent god-like status which exempted them from all toil or need to earn a living. Against this, the ordinary people were now able to set a new form of aristocracy: that of those free of the taint of Jewish blood. In actual fact, very few of the old aristocracy could claim limpieza, because they had intermarried extensively with the so-called New Christians or conversos, in the days when high status in the professions and commerce was still granted to these newcomers (one is reminded of the extensive intermarriage of the English aristocracy with the Jewish newly-rich in the nineteenth century). The old aristocracy kept accurate records of their family descent and alliance, so that it was impossible for them to hide their possession of some Jewish blood. The lower classes, on the other hand, kept no such records, so that they could easily claim limpieza without contradiction. There now arose a peculiar situation: a country possessing two aristocracies, one consisting of the old proud families, and the other consisting of those claiming freedom from Jewish blood. Just as the old aristocracy claimed exemption from the degradation of toil, so the new aristocracy made the same claim, with the result that necessary labour was neglected and the economic situation continually declined. The acquisition of huge quantities of gold from the New World did not at all solve the economic decline, but rather accentuated it, for the gold was used not for any purpose of development but as a confirmation of the needlessness of work and a reinforcement of the general idleness of a nation now regarding itself as consisting almost entirely of aristocrats. The stigmatization of the Jews and the horror of intermarriage with the ‘New Christians’ had unexpected consequences on Spain as a whole. In fact, however, intermarriage had taken place on a very wide scale in earlier times, so that hardly a single family in Spain, whether of the upper or lower classes, was free of the ‘taint’ of Jewish blood. This was well known 33


throughout Christendom, so that in other Christian countries, Spaniards were often referred to as ‘Jews’. The extreme sensitivity of Spain to ‘impurity’, and its strict caste-system, arose partly from its reaction to this taunt. Thus Spain constituted a refutation of Christian claims to have a religion that was indifferent to racial distinctions. The religion that was indeed indifferent to other distinctions of colour, tribal background, or previous history, making converts gladly from the black, yellow and red races, failed miserably to assimilate its Jewish converts, despite the fact that ostensibly its main missionary effort was directed to the Jews. It is interesting here to note the Spanish attitude to intermarriage with Muslim converts, which had taken place to a not inconsiderable extent. This was not regarded with anything like the same horror. The Muslims were regarded as mere pagans, on a par with worshippers of Wotan, and converts of this background did not have tainted ‘blood’. The Jews, on the other hand, were regarded as a mystically accursed race, which defiled everyone with whom they came in contact, even after conversion. This contrast illustrates the point made earlier that the phenomenon of limpieza de sangre cannot be explained on grounds of mere xenophobia or antagonism to the Other. Yet there were some Christians who could not help noticing the contradiction between Christian basic principles and the denial of full Christian status to converted Jews. Ignatius de Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit movement, was totally opposed to the concept of limpieza de sangre, regarding it as unChristian. He admitted New Christians to his movement, even giving them prominent positions. He even said once that he wished he had Jewish blood himself, so that he could be a relative of Jesus. The Jesuits continued on these lines for over 30 years after de Loyola’s death, but finally fell into line, renounced the standpoint of their founder, and became strong supporters of the doctrine of Jewish defilement, excluding conversos from their movement altogether. There were a few other admirable Christians too who endeavoured to set their face against the racism of limpieza, even though, by doing so, they put themselves into the category of opponents of the law. For, the distinction in status between Old Christians and New Christians was quickly incorporated into Spanish civil law (first on a local basis, and finally, in 1536, on a national basis). The law forbade the appointment of New Christians to any position of authority, or even to membership of the guilds which governed all regular commerce (this decree was not repealed until 1876). The Dominican Domingo Baltanas, who wrote a pamphlet denouncing the decrees against the New Christians, was condemned to lifelong isolation on a charge of heresy in 1563. What were the stages by which Jewish converts to Christianity in Spain changed in the eyes of Christians to a despised and hated sub-class? There was a time at first when they were welcomed and even courted. In the thirteenth century, the Dominican movement, under its great leader Raymund de Peñaforte, 34


devoted their efforts to convert the Jews, in the belief that this was a holy and blessed activity.33 They did not, at this time, hold the view that the Jews, once converted, would have to be treated with contempt and persecution. At this time, conversion was a process of persuasion, not of compulsion. The Dominicans devoted much of their time to study of the Jewish rabbinic writings, the Talmud and the Midrash, with the aim of finding material within Judaism itself to support their case. The apex of this activity was reached in the work of Raymund Martini, whose voluminous book Pugio Fidei was a compendium of the Dominican missionary research on rabbinic sources. This book contained extracts from Midrashic books which were unknown to his Jewish interlocutors (and therefore thought to be spurious), but modern scholars, especially Saul Lieberman,34 have vindicated their authenticity. The Disputations, or public debates, which took place between Christians and Jews were headed, on the Christian side, by converted Jews, who were certainly not treated as pariahs by their Christian companions but regarded with honour as precursors of the hoped-for mass conversion of the Jews. It is true, however, that the Disputations varied greatly in quality. Only the Barcelona Disputation of 1263 was conducted in an atmosphere of respect for the Jewish participant. The others (Paris, 1240 and Tortosa, 1413–14) were conducted in a bullying spirit that was more in keeping with the way the missionary movement eventually evolved, and also reflected the contempt and hatred for the Jews that existed alongside more enlightened attitudes and in the end swamped them. In general, in the thirteenth century and early fourteenth century, Jewish converts were eagerly sought and treasured when obtained. Those Jews who did convert were regarded with respect as sincere converts, given opportunities to rise in society and regarded as highly marriageable. It was in this period that the Spanish aristocracy engaged quite extensively in intermarriage with Jews. Moreover, such intermarriage was frequent also in the lower classes. The turning point was the later fourteenth century, when a wave of antisemitism culminated in the terrible massacre of 1391, which was directed against practising Jews, not converts, but which also affected deeply the status of converted Jews, especially as the number of converted Jews now rose sharply by the addition of those who chose conversion rather than death by massacre. The causes of the intensification of antisemitic feeling were various. The attempts to convert the Jews by peaceful means such as Disputations had been disappointing and the patience of Christian missionaries had become exhausted. At the same time, millenarian expectations were on the rise, and the Jews were felt to be obstinately holding up the imminent Second Coming by their intransigence in clinging to Judaism. The only remaining solution was to convert the Jews by force; but this solution too was known to be unsatisfactory, since (apart from the canon law prohibition against forced conversions) forced 35


Christians could not be trusted to be sincere in their practice of Christianity. The solution eventually reached was to convert as many Jews as possible by force and then to subject the New Christians to constant supervision to ensure that they did not relapse into Judaism. This was the background to the Spanish Inquisition (formally instituted in 1481, but informally in existence ever since 1391), a bureaucratic mechanism of supervision, denunciation by informers, torture and execution by burning at the stake, directed (for its first 50 years at least) almost exclusively against the New Christians or conversos. In its development of these methods of bureaucratic control, Spain again foreshadowed the twentieth century, with its Nazi and Stalinist torture chambers and its networks of informers for suspected dissidents. Even the great Expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was dictated by the problem of the New Christians, for the chief reason given for expelling practising Jews was that they exerted an influence over the New Christians, tempting them back to the Jewish fold – and of course the Expulsion itself was a renewal of the policy of forced conversion and resulted in substantial addition to the numbers of New Christians. Spain was the country that violated in the most extreme way the Christian principle that forbade conversion of the Jews by force; and this violation led to the dislocation and stagnation of the whole country, and its descent into a barbarity that was surpassed only by the Nazis. The common people of Spain were drawn into the spirit of this barbarity, regarding the burning of ‘heretics’ as a holy spectacle which it was a religious duty to enjoy, and, worst of all, regarding it as their duty to denounce their New Christian neighbours for such shocking infringements as cooking their meat in oil, rather than lard, or avoiding the eating of pork, or lighting candles on Fridays. The proceedings of the Inquisition have been preserved in detailed records, and they show a shocking indifference to all principles of justice and humanity, since all denounced persons were assumed to be guilty and protestations of innocence were simply treated as cases of obduracy, necessitating continuance of torture until a confession was obtained. Yet Spain had at one time been the most tolerant of all Christian countries, allowing more liberty to the Jews than any other land. It was in Spain that the Jews enjoyed, in the twelfth century, what has been called their ‘Golden Age’, when Jewish learning flourished, Hebrew poetry was cultivated by such figures as Judah Halevi (in metres derived from the literature of the previous Arab rulers), and the sciences received notable contributions. The Jews of Spain developed a great love of the country, which they carried in their hearts even after their expulsion and exile (moreover Jews of Spanish descent tended to apply to themselves a very Spanish sense of aristocracy). Here again there is a twentieth century parallel, in the ineradicable love of German culture (and scorn for other cultures) shown by the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. As in Germany, the dream of Jewish–Spanish symbiosis proved illusory. The Jews were tolerated as long as they were deemed useful in acting as 36


a middle class, or as helping the Christians in their Reconquest of the land from the Muslims, but they outlived their usefulness when a Christian bourgeoisie developed, and when the Reconquest was complete and the underlying hatred of the Jews as Christ-killers came to the surface. Then Spain (which had taken no part in the massacres of Jews associated with the Crusades) ceased to be a haven, and became the chief torturer of the Jews. The blood-libel (accusing Jews of using the blood of Christian children in ritual), previously banned in Spain, became rife. There have been books arguing that the fearsome reputation of the Inquisition is based on prejudice and is fiction. One of the contentions of the apologists is that the Spanish Inquisition (which should always be distinguished from the Papal Inquisition which was relatively mild: the Papacy actually disapproved of the Spanish Inquisition) never persecuted Jews. In a sense this is true: but this contention is a matter of semantics. The victims of the Spanish Inquisition were formally not Jews but Christians; but the persecution of Christians simply because they had a Jewish background can hardly escape the accusation of antisemitism. It was the business of the Inquisition to root out Christian heretics, and practising Jews never came before it (unless charged with abusing Christianity). The Papal Inquisition did, in one respect, persecute practising Jews by its attacks on the permissibility of Talmudic study; Jews were permitted to practise and study Old Testament Judaism, but (starting in the thirteenth century) it was questioned whether this permission extended to post-Biblical authoritative Jewish writings. As a result of this form of persecution, the Talmud was at first banned altogether, but eventually merely subject to censorship and the removal of offending passages. But this kind of literary and spiritual persecution did not involve torture, the main feature of the Spanish Inquisition, which carried torture to a fine art, or the public burning of alleged offenders, as in the Spanish auto de fe. Despite the best efforts of the apologists, the Spanish Inquisition remains one of the most abominable institutions in history and the deep disgrace of the Spanish nation. Whatever contributory causes may be adduced (use of forced conversion, excessive numbers of Jews involved in the assimilation attempt, etc.) the root cause of the relentless and ever-increasing persecution of the Jews, both converted and unconverted, in a country once remarkable for its tolerance, is the deep loathing of the Jews that stemmed from the mythical role of the Jews as Christ-killers. In a way, the relative tolerance of Christianity to the Jews only served to make this loathing more and more acute as time passed by. For Jews were the only heretics who were allowed to live at all. The Albigensian heretics, though believing Christians and far less heretical than the Jews, were exterminated to the last man, woman and child. But the Jews could not be exterminated. They had to be preserved, in the well-known formula of Augustine, to act as witnesses to the truth of Christianity by their sufferings and as the ‘librarians of the Church’ (i.e. as transmitters of the prophecies of 37


the Old Testament, on which Christianity based its claims). If some such formula had protected the Albigensians from extermination, they would have lived within Christendom under a stigma, and gathered, generation by generation, an increasing load of repulsive folklore. This is just what happened to the Jews; their continued existence under a stigma produced in time a demonic image in the minds of ordinary people (who were at first inclined to regard them as normal human beings). Among the myths that grew and were believed popularly about the Jews were the blood-libel (the most damaging of all), the belief in the foetor judaicus (a special Jewish stench), the belief that Jews poisoned wells, the belief that the Jews were responsible for the Great Plague and many others. These myths were reinforced by Christian art and drama, especially the Passion Plays. It is not surprising that when the time came, under the influence of Enlightenment ideas, to emancipate the Jews from their social and political disabilities, this centuries-long demonization was not dispelled overnight, but gave rise to new rationalizations which perpetuated the stigma even among those who had discarded the original religious basis for it. Spain was the rehearsal for this later development of Enlightenment antisemitism; the proof that it could survive its original setting. A striking example of the persistence of stigma in Jewish converts to Christianity is the case of the Chuetas of Majorca, whose suffering as despised persons has persisted to the present day. The Chuetas are believing, practising Catholics, but their descent from Jews means that they are social outcasts. Marriage with any of them is out of the question, and they are discriminated against whenever they apply for a job. Their children are taunted and bullied in the schools. The Inquisition has long ceased to exist, and the last auto de fe was held in Majorca in the seventeenth century. But the loathing and contempt for Jewish ‘blood’ remains as strong as ever, even though Spanish law now condemns discrimination against people of Jewish descent as criminal. In the rest of Spain, the new laws seem to have had a salutary effect, preventing the occurrence of ghetto-like islands of conversos, isolated from the rest of the nation. Nowadays one even finds Spaniards who profess themselves proud of their admixture of Jewish blood. The Chuetas, however, remain as a vivid reminder of Spain’s past. Spanish racism was not exactly racism in the modern sense of the term, but it provided a precedent for the wholesale repudiation of the concept of conversion as a remedy for Judaism. The Nazis did not believe in conversion. A Jew could never be converted into an Aryan, and remained a Jew whatever changes of belief he underwent. Judaism was not a belief but an ineradicable mode of being. Classical Christianity rejects such a doctrine and asserts the possibility and desirability of the conversion of the Jews. Yet classical Christianity also sets up the conditions for the subversion of this anti-racist doctrine by its placement of the Jews in its central myth as playing a demonic role.

38

Part II FROM THEOLOGY TO PHILOSOPHY

3 THE REFORMATION Luther (1483–1546)

The modern era has been one of great hope for the Jews, and also one of great disappointment. In many ways, Luther, the great initiator of the Reformation, is a symbolic figure, prefiguring what was to come. He stands at the boundary demarcating the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern world. While he was undoubtedly a great innovator, he also preserved and transmitted much that was evil in the world that he aimed to supersede. For the Jews, this pattern was to become familiar in the succeeding ages of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and modernity. We have to ask why, amid such enormous changes, one thing remained constant, the hatred of the Jews; even though it took so many different forms in response to new ways of thinking. In the light of this overall pattern, we may begin to understand how a highly civilized country in the twentieth century could carry through a programme of the utmost barbarism, the Holocaust, in which more than 6,000,000 Jews were cruelly and contemptuously murdered. The Jews entered the modern world with a legacy of hatred and contempt deriving from the Middle Ages. This hatred had actually increased and broadened considerably during the course of the Middle Ages, so that by the time the Middle Ages had run their course (and this took longer in some countries than others) the Jews were burdened with a stigma that rendered them hardly human in the eyes of the common people. In addition to the basic theological stigma of being branded as deicides and as obstinate deniers of the divinity of Jesus, the Jews had become the subject of folkloric fantasies of various kinds, chief among which was the blood-libel asserting that the Jews were child-murderers who used the blood of their victims for ritual purposes. It was hardly to be expected that a people so targeted by paranoiac fears could achieve normality in a more rational (or would-be rational) society without severe struggle and setbacks. Further, during the Middle Ages, the Jews had been gradually barred from all honourable professions, so that they had been allowed to make their living only by moneylending, for which, however, they were vilified. Moneylending became part of their image in Christian eyes, so that it seemed impossible that they could do anything else. That Jews could enter normal honourable professions, such as medicine, 41

FROM THEOLOGY TO PHILOSOPHY

law, manufacturing, university teaching, farming, seemed an intolerable impertinence. Thus, in a way, the gradual normalization of the Jews in a more open society only added to the hatred felt towards them. A similar phenomenon can be seen in India, where the removal of legal disabilities from the Untouchables has led to violence against them when they have sought to exercise their new rights. The contradictory strains felt by European society at the prospect of the normalization of the Jews are well evidenced in the life and work of Luther. He began by seeking a new, favourable attitude towards the Jews, repudiating the demonization of them, and pointing out that their moneylending activities had been forced upon them by Christian society, which had excluded them from all other professions. Yet later he reverted to an antisemitism so intense that it even outstripped its medieval model. Luther’s later diatribes against the Jews formed some of Hitler’s favourite reading, as we see from Hitler’s Table Talk. A study of Luther’s regression from philosemitism to antisemitism throws much light on the extraordinary persistence of anti-Jewish attitudes even in movements of revival and reform, including the Enlightenment, and socialism. Luther’s attack on the corruption of the Catholic Church included a vigorous defence of the Jews. He wrote For our fools – the popes, bishops, sophists, and monks – the coarse blockheads! have until this time so treated the Jews that to be a good Christian one would have had to become a Jew. And if I had been a Jew and seen such idiots and blockheads ruling and teaching the Christian religion, I would rather have been a sow than a Christian. For they have dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs and not human beings . . . . If we wish to make them better, we must deal with them not according to the law of the pope, but according to the law of Christian charity. We must receive them kindly, and allow them to compete with us in earning a livelihood, so that they may have a good reason to be with us and among us and an opportunity to witness Christian life and doctrine; and if some remain obstinate, what of it? Not every one of us is a good Christian.35 Note that the underlying thought here, despite the humane approach, is still that the Jews must be converted to Christianity. Luther is saying in effect that the attempts to convert the Jews have failed because Christians have given an example of hate, not love. If Christians were truly Christian, Jews would be attracted to Christianity and become converted. As it is, the Jews are quite right to despise Christianity. When, however, Luther found that his reformed Christianity still did not attract the Jews, who persisted in their allegiance to their own religion, his tolerance soon collapsed, and he reverted to the traditional picture of the Jews as an inherently wicked people. In fact, his 42

THE REFORMATION

previous tolerance even fed his new hate, for the Jews could no longer be excused as rejecting a religion that had become corrupt. How wicked they must be if they rejected even the pure unsullied doctrine of Lutheranism! Here is a sample of Luther raging against the Jews after his hopes of converting them had been shattered: First, their synagogues or churches should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a cinder or stone of it. And this ought to be done for the honour of God and of Christianity in order that God may see that we are Christians, and that we have not wittingly tolerated or a approved of such public lying, cursing and blaspheming of His Son and His Christians. Secondly, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed. for they perpetuate the same things there that they do in their synagogues. For the same reason, they ought to be put under one roof or in a stable, like the gypsies, in order that they may realise that they are not masters in our land, as they boast, but miserable captives, as they complain of us incessantly before God with bitter wailing. Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer-books and Talmuds in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught. Fourthly, their rabbis should be forbidden under threat of death to teach any more . . . . Fifthly, passport and travelling privileges must be absolutely forbidden to the Jews. For they have no business in the rural districts, since they are not nobles, nor officials, nor merchants, nor the like. Sixthly, they ought to be stopped from usury. All their cash and valuables of silver and gold ought to be taken from them and put aside for safe keeping. For this reason, as said before, everything they possess they stole and robbed from us through their usury, for they have no other means of support . . . . Such evilly acquired money is cursed, unless, with God’s blessing, it is put to some good and necessary use. Seventhly, let the young and strong Jews and Jewesses be given the flail, the axe, the hoe, the spade, the distaff, and spindle, and let them earn their bread by the sweat of their noses as is enjoined on Adam’s children. For it is not proper that they should want us cursed Goyim to work in the sweat of our brow and that they, pious crew, while away their days at the fireside in idleness, feasting and display. And in addition to this, they boast impiously that they have become masters of the Christians at our expense. We ought to drive the rascally lazy bones out of our system. 43


If however we are afraid that they might harm us personally . . . then let us apply the same cleverness as the other nations, such as France, Spain, Bohemia, etc., and settle with them for that which they have extorted usuriously from us, and after having divided it up fairly let us drive them out of the country for all time. For, as has been said, God’s rage is so great against them that they only become worse and worse through mild mercy, and not much better through severe mercy. Therefore, away with them.36 These proposals of Martin Luther did not figure in the celebrations of the five hundredth centenary of his birth when he was extolled as the greatest spiritual leader of the Reformation. In Germany, where naturally the celebrations were greatest, especially in the Evangelical Church which is the centre of Lutheran Christianity, little was said about Luther’s attitude to the Jews. Yet Luther’s proposals for the Jews foreshadow in almost every particular the measures taken by the Nazis. Luther’s proposal to expel the Jews from Germany was the policy adopted by the Nazis at first. The majority of Germany’s Jews, in fact, were expelled or fled before the closing of the frontiers (both by other countries and by the exigencies of warfare) made this impossible, and the Nazis embarked on the Final Solution. The burning of the synagogues advocated by Luther was performed by the Nazis. The impounding of Jewish silver and gold advocated by Luther was performed in full by the Nazis, who did not even spare the gold fillings in Jewish teeth. The herding of the Jews into ghettos and concentration camps (euphemistically named work-camps) by the Nazis is foreshadowed in Luther’s proposals. In his earlier writings, Luther had acknowledged that the moneylending activities of the Jews arose from their exclusion from the professions. He advocated that Jews ‘should be allowed to compete with us in earning a livelihood’, by which he presumably meant that Jews should be admitted to the professions. Now, however, he advocates a strict confinement of the Jews to the most physically arduous tasks: Jews are to be peasants and diggers of the earth. They were not to be allowed to be parasites by adopting the sedentary professions, to which Luther himself, for example, belonged. This too was part of Nazi theory. Any Jews who made their living by study or teaching or brainwork, Einstein for example, were parasites. Even in Luther’s earlier formulation, he saw the entry of Jews into the professions in terms of competition, not of a Jewish contribution to the advancement and welfare of German society. Christians were to be saintly enough to allow competition from Jews in, for example, the profession of medicine. That such application of an ancient Jewish skill might be of benefit to the health of the German people is not a consideration. Jews themselves at a later period, when they were sickened by the response to their attempts at normalization, were to value a return to the cultivation of the land (when the Zionist halutzim voluntarily adopted the life of peasants); but this was a very different thing 44

THE REFORMATION

from Luther’s contemptuous insistence that the Jews ought to be confined to living by ‘the sweat of their noses’. Luther, foreshadowing the enactments of the Nazis, was actually harder on the Jews than the Catholic Church, which he despised as reactionary. Luther advocated the burning of synagogues and the suppression of the teaching of the Jewish religion both in the home and in the school. He advocated also the burning of Jewish prayer-books and copies of the Talmud. This amounts to a total ban on the practice of the Jewish religion. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, had not banned the Jewish religion, but had given it the status of a permitted religion, though within certain limits. Synagogues were allowed to stand, though restrictions were put upon their number and size. This tolerance stemmed from the pronouncements of Augustine, who (in his City of God) set out the terms on which Jews were allowed to live in Christian countries. They were to be allowed to practise their religion, provided that they did not publicly oppose Christianity. They were useful to Christians in being the ‘librarians’ of the Church; that is, they had preserved the so-called Old Testament, which testified by its prophecies to the authenticity of the Christian claim to be the true Israel, heir to promises given to Abraham. Further, the Jews, by living as exiles and slaves as a punishment for their rejection of Christ, were evidence of the truth of Christianity. Thus they should be preserved, but in suitable misery. This Augustinian toleration sometimes helped to save the Jews from annihilation, as in the time of the Second Crusade, when St Bernard of Clairvaux invoked the principles enunciated by Augustine to save the Jews from further massacre. Unlike outright heretics, such as the Albigensians, the Jews were preserved from annihilation, and Augustine’s formulation was echoed by Church Councils and Popes. This was due not merely to the influence of Augustine, but to the historical links between the medieval Church and the Roman Empire, which had given Judaism the status of religio licita, and despite its political clashes with the Jewish nation in two great wars, continued to tolerate Judaism and even give it certain privileges, such as permission not to take part in the worship of the Emperor as divine. Luther’s break with the Roman Church was also a significant break with the traditions of the Roman Empire. A further protection to the Jews was the belief (based on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, ch. 11) that the Jews were necessary in the scenario of the Last Days. The Second Coming would be preceded by the conversion of the Jews to Christianity; the Jews, therefore, must not be annihilated, or the Second Coming of Christ would never take place. Luther, apparently, did not subscribe to this belief, as he did not place any emphasis on protection of the Jews from annihilation. He must be credited at least with not actually advocating the annihilation of the Jews, but only their enslavement or expulsion. Here he was not entirely a precursor of the Nazis, though his totally negative attitude towards the Jews was a strong step in the direction of annihilation. Another scenario of the Last Days, current in Luther’s time, did indeed 45


include the annihilation of the Jews. This was the scenario of the Antichrist, based on another of Paul’s pronouncements (2 Thessalonians 2:5). According to this, the Jews would recover their land and rebuild the Temple and dedicate it to the Antichrist, or Jewish messiah. Jesus Christ himself would return and lead a Christian army against the Antichrist and his people the Jews. In this last battle, the Jews would be annihilated to the last man, and Christ would then reign over the faithful for a thousand years (this doctrine was therefore known as ‘millenarianism’, an expression echoed in Hitler’s term ‘the thousand year Reich’). Luther, however, was an opponent of millenarianism, because it tended to turn into movements of this-worldly rebellion against existing political authority, as in the cases of Thomas Münzer, Luther’s contemporary, the Anabaptist leader of the Peasant War (1525), and later of Johann Bockholdt, whose revolt was suppressed in 1536. So this strand of Christian thought, which tended towards thoughts of a Final Solution of the Jewish question in the context of a Utopian ordering of society, was alien to Luther’s mind, which was politically quietist and submissive to secular authority. Luther was content to advocate the expulsion of the Jews from Germany (or alternatively) their confinement to labour camps, without advocating a programme of extermination. Thus Hitler, in his apocalypticism and his advocacy of a Final Solution, derives from Luther’s millenarian contemporaries of the Reformation rather than from Luther himself. Yet these millenarians too exhibit the same paradox as Luther: they were forces for reform and progress, in that they made the first abortive efforts to remove the feudal oppression of the aristocracy; yet these progressive tendencies went along with a ferocious programme of antisemitism in accordance with the Antichrist scenario by which the Last Days could proceed only through the disappearance of the Jews. While Luther’s programme of oppression of the Jews went beyond previous Catholic policy, his advocacy of suppression of the Talmud had considerable precedent in Catholicism. From the thirteenth century, the Catholic Church had attempted to suppress the Talmud. Christians had previously hardly been aware of the existence of the Talmud. They thought of the Jews exclusively as the people of the Old Testament, and they were not aware of the fact that the rabbinic writings, especially the Babylonian Talmud, formed the working reality of Judaism. When the Christian authorities realised this, they denounced the Talmud as heretical and sought to suppress it. Judaism had been declared a permitted religion (religio licita), but only on the understanding that it was a kind of fossil, arrested at the stage of the Old Testament. That Judaism had its own development beyond the Old Testament in the form of the Talmud came as a shock. The Catholic Church, while extending toleration to Judaism, retained the right to regulate Judaism as a form of Christianity. This was the task of the Inquisition, which undertook to prove that Talmudic Judaism, unlike Old Testament Judaism, was heretical. In 1240, after the Disputation of Paris, 40 cartloads of copies of the Talmud 46

THE REFORMATION

were burnt. Later, however, a less drastic method of dealing with the Talmud was adopted, censorship. Large portions of the Talmud were excised by the Christian censors, and have been restored to the printed Talmud only in our own day. Luther now reverted to the older and more severe way of dealing with the Talmud, for he advocated its total suppression, together with the impounding of Jewish prayerbooks and a ban on Jewish education. This is in a way surprising, because, in some ways, Luther belongs to the sixteenth century Christian movement which advocated the study of Jewish texts in their original language. This movement has been named neo-Hebraism and has even been called philo-semitism. It included figures such as Arias Montano and Pietro Galatinus, and the brilliant Christian Kabbalist Pico della Mirandola. It even included some genuine philo-semites, such as Jean Bodin (1530–96) who was suspected of conversion to Judaism because of his sympathetic portrayal of Jewish religion. Christian Hebraism is a phenomenon of the Renaissance, rather than the Reformation, but Luther was in some respects a Renaissance figure, taking part in the revival of culture and the return of the languages and literature of the ancient world. Luther had been an admirer of Johannes Reuchlin, who had defended the Talmud against those who wished to suppress it. Luther himself studied Hebrew, and though no great Hebrew scholar was responsible, with the help of others, for the German translation of the Hebrew Bible which is still in use today and is regarded as a classic. In this translation, Luther made use of medieval Jewish commentators, especially Rashi, David Kimhi and Ibn Ezra, who themselves relied largely on the previous expositions of the Talmud. How then did Luther, taking part in this revival of Hebrew learning, call for the suppression of the Talmud, thus falling in line with the illiberal opponents of Reuchlin? This question too, however, can be answered by reference to the contrast between the early Luther and the later Luther. Luther was a Renaissance figure in his youth, but not in his later years. His knowledge of Greek was good, but his interest in Greek literature, other than the New Testament became less and less. Instead, he became totally absorbed in theological questions. He was thus far from the temper of scholars such as Erasmus, whose study of ancient authors gave him a broad literary perspective and even a sceptical polish and equanimity. Luther, on the contrary, was raw with theological polemics and constantly in a state of anxiety about the salvation of his own soul. Some Christian scholars, such as Sebastian Münster, acquired sufficient knowledge of Hebrew to abandon the crude stereotypes current in Christendom about the Talmud and the rabbinical tradition of scholarship. Luther never reached this stage. Although he actually used rabbinic exegesis in his translation of the Hebrew Bible, he was mostly unaware of this, since he took this material from Nicholas de Lyra, not directly from Jewish sources. This enabled him to vilify the rabbinic sources, while at the same time unconsciously making use of them. 47


The other great figure of the Reformation was Calvin, and it may be asked how far Calvin differed from Luther in his attitude towards the Jews. Calvin himself was by no means friendly to the Jews whom he derided as ‘profane dogs’. His knowledge of Hebrew was far greater than that of Luther, but he denounced the Talmud, of which he knew very little. But he did lay the foundation for a later friendliness between Calvinists and Jews by his humanistic, realistic approach to the Old Testament. Whereas Luther saw no value in the Old Testament except as containing allegorical Christian truths, Calvin saw merit in the Old Testament for its own sake, as an enthralling record of historical events and a focus of literary power. Calvin’s way of interpreting the Old Testament thus made an important break from previous Christian interpretation and released the Jews from the role of mere blind carriers of allegorical truths they did not understand. The realistic Jewish way of interpretation found in Rashi, Kimhi, Ibn Ezra, Rashbam and others began to be appreciated as a true response to the text, instead of being despised as a crass literalism. Thus in the seventeenth century, a generation of Calvinists arose that was capable of real discussion with Jewish scholars, and showed sympathy with Jewish aspirations. For example, the New England Puritan Cotton Mather developed a pro-Jewish version of Christianity that continues today in some American evangelical groups which support Zionism. Though even these scholars retained prejudices against the Jews, they were free of the grosser forms of hatred, which, under Luther’s influence, were rife in the Lutheran churches. In Calvinism, if not in Calvin himself, the potential of the Reformation for improving the lot of the Jews was to some extent realized. The Reformation was after all a great advance in civilization. Its leading figures had strong links with the Renaissance, which, on a secular level, was countering the barbarism of medieval Christianity by restoring the literary and philosophical insights of the ancient Greeks, and was incidentally approaching Hebrew civilization with a more open and appreciative eye. The Protestant revolution made possible many of the more positive features of modernism: democracy, science, capitalist enterprise, new literary and artistic forms, and many others, not to mention more double-edged developments such as nationalism. But it is part of my thesis here that advance always brings with it new dangers. While Calvinism eventually led the way to an amelioration of the pariah status of the Jews and a softening of their demonized image, Lutheranism transmitted from the sixteenth century to the time of Hitler a hate-filled, murderous concept of the Jews that was even more dangerous and explosive than that of the Middle Ages. Yet even in Lutheranism there were influences other than Luther that made for pro-Jewish attitudes. We should not forget that it was Denmark, a Lutheran country, that gave the finest example in Europe of support for the Jews hunted by the Nazis. The Catholicism of the Middle Ages contained certain safeguards for the Jews. In a way, the Jews were necessary figures in the religious scheme. 48

THE REFORMATION

They were needed to carry the blame for the murder of Christ, which was conceived as a great crime, yet utterly necessary for the salvation of Christians. It is typical that in many areas, the Jews were compelled to act as hangmen in public executions. This symbolizes the role of the Jews generally: to do the dirty work of society. In India, the pariahs did the physically or ritually dirty work, while in Christendom, the Jews did the morally dirty work. The chief example of this is the role of the Jews as moneylenders. Moneylending at interest (or as it was called ‘usury’) was forbidden in Christian law, but Christian society could not get on without it. So the Jews were deputed to do it, since they were damned souls anyway. Jews, however, unlike the pariahs of India, did not accept inwardly the role of performers of necessary evil. Their own law permitted lending money at interest (the highly respectable role today known as ‘banking’) and they were glad to find that Christian society, having excluded them from the professions and even from trade, allowed them one way, at least, of making a living.37 Yet this relegation of the Jews to pariah status did give them a guaranteed place in Christian society. Luther broke down the medieval system, and among the institutions that disappeared was the guaranteed, if despised, place of the Jews. Luther, by his attack on the medieval system, opened the way towards the enfranchisement of all the oppressed, including the Jews. But he also helped to set up a situation of deadly danger to the Jews, in which the restraints of the medieval system were lost. In this book, I am concerned with various movements of modernity, all tending towards liberty and toleration. There is no doubt that the Jews benefited greatly from these movements, to which they were able to contribute from their own tradition of humanism and educational values. The Reformation loosened the grip of centralized dogmatism. The Renaissance aroused sympathetic curiosity about the various cultures of mankind, however far removed in time or space. The Enlightenment set up a model of rationality in the light of which ancient prejudices and fears dissolved. Yet all these movements, and later ones too, brought their own special varieties of antisemitism. Each of these movements did in fact advance the position of the Jews, but somewhere in each movement the old hatred was preserved, taking a special colouring derived from the thinking of the movement itself. An example is the Reformation, which we have been studying. Are we to blame the Holocaust, then, on the personality of Luther? I do not think so, any more that we should blame it on the personality of Hitler or on the character of the German people. These were factors, but not the chief cause. The root cause of the Holocaust was the deep hatred of the Jews which was the legacy of the Christian Middle Ages to the modern world. This was originally a theological hatred, but it was deepened and complicated by folk-paranoia until it became so embedded as to seem instinctive and independent of religious belief. I have mentioned the restraints which existed in medieval Christendom against the extermination of the Jews; but I am far 49


from minimizing the murderous hatred which made these restraints necessary and even so, could not prevent periodic massacres and expulsions. Modern movements of rationality might temper the hatred, but it survived in the background and some representatives of these modern movements were able to give it rationalizing forms in keeping with the thinking of their movements. In times of prosperity, such rationalizings would be regarded as eccentric (one thinks for example of the antisemitic ravings of Richard Wagner). But in times of political or economic stress, the eccentrics come to the fore, and become accepted as guides. The lunatic fringe becomes the centre, as in Germany in the thirties. Then comes an explosion of violence against the Jews, who are held responsible for what has gone wrong. The solution lies not in the combating of secondary rationalizations, such as racialist theory of the Jews as subhuman, or Communist theory of the Jews as archetypal capitalists, or right-wing theory of the Jews as archetypal Communists, but in the analysis of the real cause of the hatred, the medieval Christian demonizing myth about the Jews and its roots in early Christianity.

50

4 THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND VOLTAIRE (1694–1778)

Voltaire personifies the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. He was opposed to every form of obscurantism. He opposed in particular the Catholic Church, which he saw as a survival of the benighted Middle Ages; but he also fought against political reaction and in favour of democracy. He was a great admirer of the political system of England, which he visited, and he wished his native France to follow England’s limitation of the power of the monarchy and its representative institutions. He is considered one of the greatest influences on the movement that produced the French Revolution. His influence is due, to a large extent, to the brilliant wit of his literary style, by which he dismantled established views and institutions through ridicule. Voltaire opposed not just the Catholic Church but Christianity in general. He was not an atheist but a Deist; that is, he believed in God but not in any established religion. One might have thought that his emancipation from Christian belief might have induced in him a feeling of sympathy with the Jews, who had been for so long victims of Christian dogma and myth. On the contrary, Voltaire hated the Jews and Judaism even more than he hated Christianity. The case of Voltaire and other Enlightenment antisemites (such as Baron d’Holbach and his circle) raises a very painful question. Why did antisemitism survive the Enlightenment? This great movement of rationalism and science and liberalism dazzled the Jews with the prospect of toleration and acceptance and the end of prejudice and fanaticism. Many Jews welcomed the Enlightenment with delight and rushed to make their own intellectual contribution to it (Solomon Maimon, Moses Mendelssohn, for example). Yet in the heart of the Enlightenment (though by no means pervading it entirely) was vicious hatred and denigration of the Jews and of their religion and culture. Even the greatest thinker of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, was affected by this specifically Enlightenment contempt for the Jews. This also poses a problem for the view I am propounding in this book, that antisemitism is explicable as the product of medieval demonization of the Jews as the Christ-killers and allies of the Devil. Voltaire considered himself emancipated from the Middle Ages and from its Christian attitudes. 51


Does this prove that antisemitism is not rooted in Christianity after all? The same question arises in later forms of antisemitism with which I shall be dealing: the antisemitism of Marx, Nietzsche and of Hitler, all of whom considered themselves anti-Christian. One of the central questions in the study of antisemitism and modernity is the relation between modern antisemites (who were sometimes anti-Christian) and the Christian antisemitism of the Middle Ages. My answer to this problem, in general, is as follows. The anti-Christian antisemites, of whom Voltaire was one of the first, were not so independent of the medieval demonization of the Jews as they thought. In fact, their negative picture of the Jews was almost entirely derived from that source. The novelty, however, was that they turned this medieval antisemitic picture against Christianity itself. Their contention was, ‘You Christians may vilify the Jews, but your own religion is just as bad as theirs, and is indeed merely another form of Judaism.’ The culminating charge in the critique of Christianity was that it was just Judaism in another form. The force of this charge derived from a prior condemnation of Judaism as a primitive, uncivilized and nauseating religion. This meant that the attack on Judaism by Voltaire and his successors was not the primary aim. It was a means to an end, namely the deconstruction of Christianity. Yet, in effect, by their tactic of using contempt for the Jews as a weapon against the main target, Christianity, these writers added to the negative image of the Jews and contributed to the hate and contempt that finally produced the Holocaust. Another important point is that Voltaire and other Enlightenment antisemites were seeing the Jews at a point in their history when they had been deprived of dignity by centuries of deliberate degradation. As we saw earlier in this book, the economic position of the Jews in Christian society deteriorated from the thirteenth century onwards as a result of their exclusion from all dignified, honourable professions. The effect of the Enlightenment eventually was that Jews were readmitted to the professions, but of course this did not happen immediately. In some countries the Enlightenment was very slow in arriving, as far as Jews were concerned. In Russia, for example, it was not until quite late in the nineteenth century that Enlightenment ideas began to rescue the Jews from medieval conditions. In Germany, the conquests of Napoleon led to an improvement in the position of the Jews in the early nineteenth century, but when Napoleon was defeated, the German states revoked his new laws, and the Jews went back into the Middle Ages, and could only retain their newly acquired professional status by conversion to Christianity (as happened in the case of Karl Marx’s father, who was a judge). In the early years of the Enlightenment, the Jews were economically in a parlous state, being mostly pedlars, petty pawnbrokers and second-hand clothes dealers. They were regarded even by those who wished to improve their conditions, as backward, uneducated and even primitive. Some Enlightenment figures who championed the cause of the Jews nevertheless 52

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much exaggerated their backwardness, saying daringly, that even the Jews, in enlightened conditions, would eventually, perhaps in two or three hundred years, catch up with the standard of civilization of their Christian fellowcitizens. In the surprising event, the Jews actually caught up, when given the chance, in about one decade, and even forged ahead, and soon the complaint changed from allegations of Jewish backwardness to expressions of dismay about alleged Jewish monopolization of the professions. Thus even those who wished the Jews well did not understand the extent of Jewish cultural resources. Jews might be pawnbrokers or second-hand clothes dealers, but they were still highly educated and intellectually subtle in their own literature and culture. A Jew like Solomon Maimon, who was an expert in Talmud and the writings of Maimonides, could come from a Polish stetl to Berlin, and in a few years become one of the leading philosophers of the Enlightenment, the man who was declared by Immanuel Kant himself to understand him best (though strangely this, and even the eminence of Moses Mendelssohn, did not seem to diminish Kant’s contempt for the Jews in general). My remarks about the apparent degradation of the Jews applies particularly to Germany. In France many Jews, especially those of Sephardi origin, had emerged into conditions of Enlightenment even before these conditions were enacted legally. Thus Voltaire encountered two kinds of Jew: those who presented a picture of medieval degradation, whom he despised as backward; and those who had emerged into respectable professional life, whom he hated even more as upstarts. In the first years of the Enlightenment, however, most Jews presented a sorry sight for those who did not sympathize with their history of oppression and degradation. Voltaire certainly did not do that, and he determined to use the popular contempt for the Jews for his own ends. His main enemy was Christianity, and especially the Catholic Church, against which he fought with great courage. But, like Hitler in later years, he saw how he could utilize the popular hatred of the Jews to enlist the masses on his side against the Church. If he could somehow identify the Church with the Jews, his battle would be won. His tactic, therefore, was to show how Jewish Christianity was. It was rooted in the Old Testament, which formed part of the Christian canon of Scripture. If he could ridicule the Old Testament, attacking it as barbarous, primitive, tribal rubbish, he would be condemning Christianity too which claimed all its authority from this rubbish. Moreover, ridiculing the Old Testament was far less dangerous than would be a direct attack on the New Testament, which would invite prosecution for blasphemy. It is wrong therefore to claim that Voltaire’s antisemitism is not derived from Christianity. For Voltaire’s whole approach depends on the contempt in which the Jews were held because of their demonization during the Christian Middle Ages. However much Voltaire might assert his opposition to Christianity, one thing he derived from Christianity was his assessment of the 53


Jews. Voltaire was not different from all the demagogues of the modern world, whether of the Right or of the Left who have used popular hatred and contempt of the Jews as their chief weapon in a campaign, and all these campaigners have relied on the fact that hatred and contempt of the Jews lies at hand as a weapon because it has been instilled over a period of centuries by Christian teaching. A strong reason why the Enlightenment did not produce the beneficial results for the Jews that might have been expected was that the reservoir of contempt for the Jews left by the Middle Ages was so inexhaustible that it proved a constant temptation for campaigners, even when campaigning for a progressive cause, to use this reservoir of stigma as a source of popular support. But it would be wrong to think that Voltaire was merely cynically using popular hatred of the Jews to help his own campaigns. Voltaire genuinely hated the Jews, as the very thorough researches of Arthur Hertzberg38 into Voltaire’s published writings and private papers have shown. Many different theories that have been offered to account for this, ranging from the psychological (his mother died young leaving him to the mercies of a severe father) to the biographical (he was cheated by some Jews). A similar range of explanations has been offered in the case of Adolf Hitler. Certainly, Voltaire’s hatred of Jews was an obsession, like that of Hitler, and he was in a position to influence others profoundly. His hatred no doubt had a psychological component, but it can best be explained as deriving from his anti-Jewish environment and education. Like later secular antisemites, he could not give this as his reason, since this would be to acknowledge the influence of Christian teaching, which he rejected. Post-Christian antisemitism, of which Voltaire is one of the first exemplars, has to find non-religious reasons for a hatred which actually derives from a religious origin. Later antisemites found this rationalization in the biological theories of race. Voltaire found his rationalization in history; he argued that the Jews had always been despised, even before Christian times. He constantly adduced pagan writers, such as Tacitus, Juvenal and Cicero, to prove this point. But his motivation came before his researches into pagan writings. His citation of non-Christian writers was merely his way of escaping from the Christian origins of his anti-Jewish obsession. My explanation of Voltaire’s antisemitism, then, is that it was the residue of Christian antisemitism, which he disavowed, yet retained, by recourse to a non-religious theory, which he substituted for the usual theological grounds for abhorring the Jews. Here I part company with Arthur Hertzberg, who shies away from this uncomfortable conclusion, despite the fact that he presents much of the evidence for it. Hertzberg prefers to think that Voltaire’s antisemitism was not of Christian origin, but arose from his study of ancient pagan writings. Eighteenth century antisemitism, according to Hertzberg was of two separate kinds: religious antisemitism, found in Church circles, and also among the masses, being a continuation of medieval demonization 54


of the Jews, and non-religious antisemitism, which was a new phenomenon owing nothing to medieval sources. I find this bifurcation most unconvincing. Voltaire, despite his claims to total originality, was the product of his surroundings, and he did not leap over the previous centuries to achieve linkage with people 2000 years before him, leaving all the Christian years as a vacuum. It is true, of course, that antisemitism was not a Christian invention, but existed before Christianity, arising from the cultural rivalry between Judaism and Hellenism as explained in Chapter 1. But Christianity was the conduit by which this ancient Hellenistic antisemitism was transmitted, in an enhanced and mythicized form, to the medieval and modern worlds, and also to Voltaire. It is time now to give some samples of Voltaire’s invective against the Jews. He wrote ‘You will . . . find in the Jews an ignorant, lazy, barbarous people who for a long time have combined the most undignified stinginess with the most profound hatred for all the people who tolerate them and enrich them.’ This diatribe, from his famous Dictionnaire Philosophique (1751), contains many traditional elements. The accusation that the Jews are lazy recalls the remarks of Luther, quoted in Chapter 3 about how the Jews never engage in manual labour but instead exploit the hard labour of the Goyim. Luther’s solution was to put the Jews in labour camps, a solution adopted by the Nazis who also labelled the Jews as parasites exploiting non-Jewish labour. It delighted the Nazis to put the Jews to hard, unproductive pointless labour (such as building brick structures which were then destroyed) just to exact revenge for the alleged Jewish parasitism. But there are also echoes here of the charge of laziness made against the Jews by ancient Greco-Roman antisemites when they derided the Jewish institution of the Sabbath. Voltaire’s accusation that the Jews are ignorant and barbarous is his comment on the Jewish lack of higher education, which resulted from their exclusion from Christian universities and Christian education generally. Voltaire does not see this as a form of victimization of Jews by Christians, and much less does he recognize that the Jews have had their own internal system of education which during certain periods of the Dark Ages and Middle Ages made Christians appear barbarous in comparison. But this accusation also links with Voltaire’s continual campaign against the Old Testament, which he pursued particularly in his Dictionnaire Philosophique. His main emphasis is on what he calls the barbarity of the Old Testament (an accusation still common among liberal and leftwing circles today). He concentrates on all passages that seem to show a primitive mentality and ignores all passages that show a lofty morality and spirituality. To Voltaire the spirit of the Old Testament is shown particularly in the massacre of the Canaanites and in the prophet Samuel’s hacking to pieces of the Amalekite king Agag (Voltaire even wrote a play about this, under the title ‘Saul’). Voltaire exulted in describing the misdeeds of the Jewish kings in the Old Testament, including David and Solomon, ignoring the fact that it is the Old Testament itself that 55


condemns these misdeeds and in fact provides a unique example of a national record that does not whitewash or adulate its leaders. An example of Voltaire’s treatment of the Old Testament is his accusation that the ancient Israelites practised cannibalism. This accusation is based on a passage which threatens punishment for failing to keep God’s commandments: one of these punishments is that foreign enemies will besiege the city, whose inhabitants will be so affected by starvation that they will be reduced to eating their own infants. It is remarkable that this same accusation was made on the same grounds by the early Christian father St John Chrysostom. A dire threat of terrible suffering is turned into an Israelite practice. Another argument of Voltaire’s that has a source in the writings of the Church Fathers is that the Israelites must have been practisers of intercourse with animals (bestiality). The alleged proof is that Leviticus forbids this practice, and such a ban would have been unnecessary if the Israelites had not been in the habit of practising it. The same argument is used by Tertullian, as part of his general argument that the law of the Torah, unnecessary for Christians, was necessary for Jews because of their ingrained sinful nature. Voltaire also charged that the ancient Hebrews had practised human sacrifice; this charge was also made by certain of the Church fathers, especially St John Chrysostom, but even more relevant is that Voltaire was here echoing the infamous medieval charge of the blood libel. Among secular antisemites following Voltaire, this terrible charge became common, and the alleged human sacrificial practices of the Hebrews acquired the specific name of ‘Molochism’, even though the name Moloch was only known to these antisemites because of the Hebrew Bible’s denunciations of the Phoenician god Moloch. We know that Voltaire was an assiduous reader of the writings of the Church Fathers. It has been assumed that this was only because he wanted to find ammunition there against the Church by pouring ridicule on the ideas of its revered Fathers. But we see that this reading undertaken by Voltaire had also another purpose: to find ammunition against the Jews. The twist is that having found in the Fathers useful diatribes against the Jews, he then turned these antisemitic Christian writings against the Church, by saying: ‘Your religion derives its authority from these very same barbarous Jews and their primitive scriptures.’ Let us return to the remarks by Voltaire which I quoted earlier. In addition to saying that the Jews are barbarous and ignorant and lazy, he says two more things: that the Jews are stingy in an ‘undignified way’, and that they hate those who ‘tolerate and enrich them’ with a ‘profound hatred’. These are charges that go very far back in the history of Christian antisemitism. The charge of stinginess is related to the picture of the Jew as a grasping miser, like Shylock. This picture was intensified by the medieval economic arrangement by which the Jews were forced into the role of usurers. Nobody likes someone to whom they owe money, and the request for repayment of the 56


money lent is regarded with the greatest resentment. Modern research has shown that the interest charged by Jewish moneylenders in the middle ages was very reasonable (usually 10 per cent), considering the high risk under which such money was lent. Christian usurers (operating at first against the law, and afterwards when canon law was adapted, within the law) usually exacted higher interest than Jewish moneylenders. Christian government practice was to charge Jews much higher taxes than the rest of the population. Also on the death of a Jewish moneylender, all the money he had accumulated through ‘usury’ was confiscated and went to the King, who also collected all money owed to the Jewish moneylender at the time of his death. Thus, in effect, the Jews were lending money on behalf of the King, who was the greatest usurer of all, but escaped censure and loaded the popular hatred for usurers on to the Jews. The Shylock image of the Jew was reinforced in Christian art, not only in the depiction of contemporary Jews, but in the mythic image of Judas Iscariot, who was never depicted without his moneybag. This image derives from the Gospel of John, which made Judas into the dishonest treasurer of Jesus’ band of apostles. Judas Iscariot was the only apostle who was depicted in art as having Jewish features and dress; the other apostles were given a nonJewish appearance. The channelling of the medieval Jews into usury was a policy of making them conform to the image of Judas Iscariot. Contrary to the view of many antisemites, the Jews had no reputation of moneylending in the pre-Christian world. This is one charge that was peculiar to the Christian world, not derived from Greco-Roman antisemitism. Indeed, as we gather from Josephus’ defence of the Jews against the attacks of the Hellenistic antisemites of Alexandria, such as Apion, the charge made against the Jews was just the contrary, that they were such a rustic agricultural nation that they were too barbarous and unsophisticated to engage in any kind of commerce. It is somewhat ironic that Voltaire charges the Jews with undignified stinginess, because this is a charge to which Voltaire himself was susceptible. He was often engaged in shady deals to increase his wealth, and narrowly escaped being drummed out of the court of Frederick the Great in 1751 for forging a paper by which he hoped to make an illicit profit. The victim of this dishonest trick was actually a Jewish businessman, called Hirsch. Later Voltaire invested in a firm that was engaged in the slave trade, and thereby became one the richest people in France. On the other hand, Voltaire’s charge that the Jews hated mankind is much older than Christianity. It was a commonplace of pre-Christian antisemitism to accuse the Jews of hatred of mankind, the charge being based on the Jewish refusal to become thoroughly Hellenized and their refusal to pay honour to any god except their own. This charge too was taken up into Christianity, for it is found in the New Testament in an epistle of Paul, I Thessalonians 1:15, which characterizes the Jews as ‘contrary to all men’. This whole passage has 57


been much discussed, as it reaches a level of antisemitism which is far beyond the norm in Paul’s writings. I am of the opinion that this passage was written not by Paul himself, but by one of his disciples who inserted it into the text of the epistle. But the passage shows that only one generation after Paul the clichés of Hellenistic antisemitism had entered into the discourse of the Pauline Christian Church. When however, Voltaire says that the Jews hate those who enrich them, he is firmly back in the Christian tradition of seeing the Jews as rich exploiters. Ancient pre-Christian antisemites, as we have seen, would be more likely to deride the Jews as impoverished agricultural labourers or artisans. We saw in Luther’s antisemitic diatribes the notion of the Jews as lolling in idleness on the wealth they had derived from exploiting the Goyim. Some Jews in the Middle Ages did acquire wealth, but it was most insecure; they were really holding this wealth on behalf of predators, including the King, who were waiting to take it away. They had wealth in exactly the same way as a fatted goose has fat. In Voltaire’s time, the vast majority of Jews were impoverished, but some Jewish families were beginning to acquire wealth, notably the Rothschilds, and these families were already subject to the charge that the Jews were taking over power. These charges were later to fuel the left-wing antisemitism of Proudhon and Marx, with whom I shall be dealing in the Chapter 5. Voltaire, seeing the Jews as exploiters, is continuing a medieval antisemitic tradition, but also prefiguring a new form of antisemitism in which the Jews are pictured as the archetypal capitalists. What was the Jewish reaction to Voltaire’s attacks on Jews and Judaism? One Jewish writer Isaac de Pinto, attempted to combat Voltaire in a pamphlet, but not very effectively, since he defended only emancipated Jews, or rather the capacity of Jews to achieve emancipation by adopting Enlightenment ideas. Another Jewish writer, Zalkind Hourwitz, wrote, shortly after Voltaire’s death in 1778: The Jews forgive him all the evil he did to them because of all the good he brought them, perhaps unwittingly; for they have enjoyed a little respite for a few years now and this they owe to the progress of the Enlightenment, to which Voltaire surely contributed more than any other writer through his numerous works against fanaticism. The man who wrote this forbearing judgment, Zalkind Hourwitz, was an extraordinary character. He was born in Poland, went to Berlin, where he was a friend of Moses Mendelssohn (like that other stetl-Jew, Solomon Maimon) and later went to France where he became a prominent figure in the French Revolution. He entered an essay for a prize offered for a solution to the Jewish problem, and shared the first prize with Abbé Grégoire. Hourwitz’s judgement on Voltaire was perhaps too forbearing. Voltaire’s anti-Jewish remarks were taken up by so many influential persons and movements both of the Left 58


and the Right that he must be reckoned as one of the greatest forces in the growth of modern antisemitism. It is an ironic circumstance that the nickname of Voltaire in his own circle of friends was ‘Goebbels’, though why he acquired this nickname is not clear. Voltaire, however, was by no means the only Enlightenment figure to use popular contempt for the Jews as a weapon against the Church. Even more extreme in his antisemitism was Baron d’Holbach, whom Voltaire disapproved of, as too open, direct and brutal in his attacks on religion. The Holbachians formed a considerable atheistic movement, which specialized in attacking Judaism as a means of denigrating its offshoot Christianity. An example of Holbachian invective is the following: Blinded by their legislator the Jews never had any sound ideas of divinity. Moses devised an image for them with characteristics of a jealous tyrant, restless and insidious, who was never restrained by the laws of justice and who owes nothing to men, who chooses and rejects according to his caprice, who punishes children for the crimes, or rather misfortunes, of their fathers . . . . What more was needed to make of the Hebrew people a troop of slaves, proud of the favour of their celestial sultan, prepared to undertake anything without examination to satisfy his passions and unjust decrees? This ignorant, savage people, imbued with the idea that its God was amenable to gifts, believed that it was enough to please him to make him many offerings, to appease him with sacrifices, to enrich his ministers, to work in order to keep them in splendour, to fulfil scrupulously the rites that their cupidity dreamed up . . . . These are the horrible features with which the legislator of the Hebrews painted the God that the Christians have since taken over.39 The Holbachians even blamed the Inquisition on the Jews. Commenting on the burning of heretics by the Inquisition, a Holbachian author wrote: ‘All the ferocity of the Judaic priesthood seems to have passed into the heart of the Christian priesthood, which since it has established itself on earth has caused barbarities to be committed unknown to humans before.’40 A similar argument was later used by Catholic authors to excuse the Inquisition, arguing that the Church had been influenced by Jewish converts to revert to Jewish barbarism. An interesting development was that some Catholic writers, in response to the attacks on Judaism and the Old Testament by Voltaire and d’Holbach and his followers, went into a phase of defending Judaism, which they now realized was essential to their own authority. While the traditional attacks on Jews and Judaism continued in Catholic Italy and Spain, the reverse occurred in France, where Catholics were so disturbed by the writings of Voltaire and others that they were forced to engage in the defence of Judaism. 59


Three churchmen in particular came forth as defenders of Judaism against Voltaire: the Abbés Guénée, Bergier and Grégoire. The latter, Abbé Gregoire was the very same person who later shared the prize with Hourwitz for the essay on the Jewish problem, and indeed Gregoire was influential in turning the French Revolution in a pro-Jewish direction, so that it embarked on a programme of legislation to free the Jews of their civil disabilities (though a little later, the Catholic authorities abandoned the friendliness of Gregoire and opposed this legislation). It can be said that Voltaire’s antisemitism directed as it was against the Church, had one good effect: it enlisted the Catholic Church’s support, for a short but crucial interval, on the side of Jewish emancipation. Perhaps the most effective Catholic defence of Judaism against Voltaire at this time came from the pen of Abbé Guénée. He laid bare all Voltaire’s mistakes and illogicalities in his attacks on the Old Testament. Guénée wrote: There are in the Mosaic legislation many laws in favour of the poor and insistent exhortations to succour all those in need. Other systems offer nothing comparable. When one recalls all these exhortations and these laws, where the humanity of the Legislator is sensed very keenly, can one without anguish see this great man Moses and all his legislation charged with ferocity and barbarism by a celebrated writer who calls himself impartial?41 Guénée even argues that the humane virtues of the Enlightenment are all anticipated in the Jewish scriptures. Such a defence is very heartening and just. But there were some who defended the Jewish record not because of the repercussions on the authority of Christianity, but out of the true spirit of the Enlightenment, which, in the case of the Jews, Voltaire betrayed. Gotthold Lessing for example, the great Enlightenment figure who was the close friend of Moses Mendelssohn, wrote his play Nathan the Wise to advocate equal status for Christians, Jews and Muslims. Montesquieu, the celebrated author of L’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws), treated Jews and Judaism with objectivity and fairness. Jean Jacques Rousseau, the author of The Social Contract with whom Voltaire quarrelled, was an admirer of the Jews. Here are his remarks on the historical record of Judaism: What a marvellous and truly unique spectacle it is to see an expatriated people having neither a place nor a land of its own for almost two thousand years, a people altered, burdened, mixed with strangers for even a longer period of time, having perhaps not a single offspring of the original race. A people spread, dispersed over the earth, enslaved, persecuted, despised by all the nations, that nevertheless preserves its customs, its laws, its manners, its love of country, and 60


its first social bond when all ties to it appear to be broken- Zion destroyed has not lost its children. They are preserved, they multiply, they are scattered over the world and yet they still recognize one another. They mingle with all peoples but are never confounded with them. They no longer have leaders and yet are still a people. They no longer have a fatherland and yet remain its citizens. How great must he the power of a legal code capable of effecting rich wonders, capable of braving the conquests, the dispersions, the revolutions, the centuries, capable of surviving the customs, laws, and dominion of all nations – a code of laws that, because of the trials it has already endured, gives promise of enduring everything, of overcoming the vicissitudes of human affairs, and of lasting as long as the world. The Jew and the Christian are in agreement in recognizing here the finger of God, who according to the one preserves his nation and according to the other punishes it. But every man, whoever he may be, must recognize here a singular marvel, whose causes, divine or human certainly merit the study and wonderment of the wise more than anything admirable that Greece and Rome have to offer us in political institutions and human establishments.42 This is a wonderful statement, because Rousseau shows here his independence not only of Enlightenment antisemitism such as Voltaire’s, but also of the general run of Enlightenment liberal thinking which was in favour of emancipating the Jews, but only on condition that they gave up their attachment to their own allegedly flawed and outmoded tradition. Rousseau realizes that the Jews have a community of their own based on a distinctive attitude to life, embodied in a legal code, and that any emancipation worthy of the name must recognize and respect this community and this code. Rousseau abandons the Christian antinomian tradition that regards law as intrinsically restrictive and cruel (the attitude that informs the speech of Portia in The Merchant of Venice) and in his conception of society, he places the law and the constitution at the centre of his theory of the civilized community: this leads him to admire the people who best exemplify his ideas, the Jews. He even realizes that this sense of community has nothing to do with race (since he rightly describes the Jews as ‘having perhaps not a single offspring of the original race’), and everything to do with the social contract, or covenant, contracted on Mount Sinai. Rousseau thus prophetically discounts the racialist theories that would arise later in the nineteenth century to prolong and increase the sufferings of the Jews and continue their medieval stigmatization as the embodiment of Evil. There is even an aspect of Zionism in Rousseau’s remarks, for he refers to the Jews’ love of their country, saying ‘They no longer have a fatherland and yet remain its citizens.’ This was before political Zionism had even begun, and bypasses the whole trend of Enlightenment thought that condemned all forms of nationalism as obsolete. Rousseau’s 61


thinking, on the contrary, links with the Romantic movement of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century, with thinkers like Herder and Goethe, for whom nationalism or patriotism or folk-identity was a revivifying force; though this trend too had its pitfalls, for it could turn easily into racialism. Rousseau’s attitude, however, sums up everything that was good about the Enlightenment, while Voltaire’s hatred and contempt foreshadow all the disappointments that the modern world, with all its promise of rationality and universality, would bring to the Jews. Voltaire symbolizes the failure of the modern world to transcend the murderous antisemitic fantasies of the Middle Ages. Even worse, Voltaire foreshadows the way in which ambitious and obsessed individuals could draw on the reservoir of hate to enlist the support of the masses. Voltaire never advocated violence against the Jews, as did Luther before him and Hitler after him. But his bitter contempt for the Jews and their role in history had effects far beyond intellectual circles, and must be considered one of the many factors in the long preparation of the Holocaust.

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5 KARL MARX (1818–83)

With Karl Marx, we come to the topic of Jewish self-hate. This is a phenomenon that belongs particularly to the age of Enlightenment. Before that period, Jews saw themselves in the light of their own tradition. They defined themselves as a nation and a religious community which had been exiled from its own land and suffered oppression in the lands in which it lived as aliens and sojourners. After the Enlightenment, however, Jews began to think of themselves as citizens of the world, with allegiance only to the nation in which they happened to find themselves. In these circumstances, the surviving traits of national and religious identity of a specifically Jewish kind took on the aspect of encumbrances and irrelevancies. Such remnants actually became hateful, and in the endeavour to shake them off, they were characterized in a manner that had become usual in Christian circles. In other words, Jews who wished not to be Jews adopted attitudes towards Judaism and other Jews that were antisemitic in the style of the society which they so ardently wished to join. In order to acquire credentials in the wider society as true enlightened citizens, it became necessary to vilify the Jews; and the materials for vilification were at hand in the shape of traditional Christian demonization of the Jews as usurers and materialists. A Jew could show his eligibility for enlightenment status by vilifying the Jews even more than his Christian co-citizens were accustomed to do. The antisemitism of Jewish self-haters often reached a hysterical pitch that arose from the attempt to disavow all remaining traces of Jewish identity. Thus Jewish self-hatred is a further manifestation of the negative image of the Jews built up during the Middle Ages out of the myth of the Jews as Christ-killers. Jewish self-hatred forms part of the history of Christian antisemitism. It is to be expected that a group that lives in a society which assigns it to a despised role will absorb to some extent this negative image by a process of introjection. What is remarkable is that the Jews of the Middle Ages suffered so little from self-hatred and self-contempt. We find self-hating Jews (such as the apostate Jews who took the lead in the Disputations in attacking Judaism), but in general Jewish culture was so strong that Jews retained their self-respect even in the most degrading circumstances. But in later circumstances when Jewish 63

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culture itself was represented as backward and primitive compared with the ideals of enlightened progressive society, it was easy for a Jew who was keen to enter the modern world to see denigration of Judaism and the Jewish role in history as the way forward. It was not easy to see that, far from being an expression of modernism, this was to succumb to stereotypes of Jews and Judaism that themselves derived from the Middle Ages. The Jewish self-hater prided himself on his modernism, and yet his assessment of Jewishness was in fact a throw-back to medievalism. This process is well exemplified in the antisemitism of Karl Marx. He came from a family that was determined to take full advantage of the new opportunities offered by the Enlightenment to Jews, even at the cost of abandoning Jewish identity. His parents (both from rabbinical families) became converted to Protestant Christianity, in 1816, to escape the anti-Jewish laws reintroduced after the defeat of Napoleon. Karl Marx’s father Heinrich Marx, of Trier or Treves, was originally Hirschel Halevi, a descendant of a long line of rabbis. He was a successful lawyer, who became a judge during the Napoleonic reforms, but when the reaction came, he was in danger of losing his position. He therefore became converted to Protestant Christianity, though the area was predominantly Catholic (this, it might be argued, was a last pathetic attempt to preserve his minority status). Karl was baptized at the age of 6, in 1824, and received a Christian education; indeed in his early youth he was a devout Christian. His Christian education, however, never prevented him from being regarded all through his life as a Jew, especially by his enemies, including even his opponents in the revolutionary movement. His right-wing opponents, indeed, blamed all the defects of Marxism on the Jewishness which Marx himself repudiated. Karl Marx himself was conscious of his own Jewishness only in the sense that he took pains to dissociate himself from it. He never made the slightest effort to acquaint himself with Jewish history or culture. He was a polymath, who covered the whole range of philosophy, history and science; the one total gap in his knowledge was Judaism. Even his ignorance, in such an enquiring person, is evidence of his self-hate. Marx’s early antisemitism is expressed in his article ‘Zur Judenfrage’ (1844), which he wrote in criticism of a book by his friend Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage (1843). Marx had already become prominent in the circle of the New Hegelians, who, unlike Hegel himself, were left-wing opponents of Church and State in Prussia, being atheists and radicals. Marx was appointed editor of the liberal paper, the Reinische Zeitung,43 where he supported liberal measures, including the emancipation of the Jews. Bruno Bauer, however, in his book on the Jewish Question, came out in opposition to the liberal standpoint that the Jews should be emancipated. His argument was that Jewish emancipation would mean nothing so long as the Prussian state remained Christian. What was needed was an emancipation from Christianity, when the Jews would be emancipated along with their 64


fellow-citizens. First, however, he advocated that the Jews should convert to Christianity, since this was a necessary stage on the road to atheism and freedom. Judaism, he contended, was so primitive that Jews could not attain freedom immediately, without undergoing such an intermediate stage. This concept of necessary stages in the road to freedom was derived, of course, from Hegel, and played a great part in Marx’s own theory later. The implication of Bauer’s argument was that when Jews finally achieved emancipation, they would cease to be Jews, and no other form of emancipation would be worth while for them. Marx’s critique of Bauer was not at all based on any criticism of Bauer’s assessment of Judaism. On the contrary, Marx argued that Bauer had erred in regarding Judaism as having any place at all in the ladder of spirituality. Marx rejected Bauer’s Hegelian schema, by which Judaism is transcended by Christianity which is transcended by atheism. On the contrary, Marx asserts, Christianity is itself merely a form of Judaism, and both are devoid of spiritual content. Christianity may have been once an improvement on Judaism, but in the modern world it has sunk back into the condition of Judaism, being merely a worship of money. Marx sees in the modern world, dominated by commercialism, the triumph of Judaism, which he claimed was a pseudo-religion, whose god is money. Here we see the legacy of Voltaire, whose attack on Christianity centred on its tie with Judaism. Just as Voltaire was able to assume a long history of contempt for Judaism, and to use this history in his attack on Christianity, so Marx, taking Judaism at the valuation which he found in traditional Christianity, was able to indict contemporary Christian society by applying to it the worst insult he could think of – that it was irretrievably Jewish. In this critique, Marx thought of himself as bringing the discussion down to earth. Instead of Bauer’s ladder of spirituality, on which Judaism occupied a place, however lowly, Marx was drawing attention to the brutal reality of contemporary commercialism. Here is a foretaste of Marx’s later inversion of Hegelianism, by which he rejected the categories of the spirit, evolving in the clash of ideas, and substituted the clash of economic forces. But in the process of his thought, the brute force of commercialism is identified with one people, the Jews, whom he saw as dominating the market and as divorced from any concept of human liberation from economic necessity. He writes What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, selfishness. What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular god? Money. Well then, an emancipation from haggling and money, from practical, real Judaism would be the self-emancipation of our age.44 Like other antisemitic thinkers of the time, Marx was mesmerized by the existence of a few rich Jews, such as the Rothschilds, and oblivious to the existence of the Jewish masses who suffered from oppression and poverty. 65

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Later, he managed to ignore the fact that working-class Jews, attracted by his own theories, were joining the socialist movement and even spearheading it. This was contrary to everything that he had taught about the Jews. The Jews whom he could not avoid meeting as socialist leaders, Ferdinand Lassalle and Moses Hess, he covered with ridicule and antisemitic jibes; the fact that they were Jews could be regarded only as an embarrassing anomaly. His own Jewishness was too embarrassing even to be mentioned. The idea that his own idealism, his concern for social justice and his messianic vision of a better world could owe anything to his Jewish background, would have been rejected by him with scorn, at least at this stage of his life. It has been argued by some apologists that there is something abstract about Marx’s denunciation of the Jews in his article. He is not condemning the Jews as such, but the principles of selfish materialism of which the Jews are the symbol. Even non-Jews who partake of these principles are characterized by Marx as honorary Jews. ‘Out of its entrails bourgeois society continually creates Jews.’ The whole of Christian society, in fact, is being condemned as Jewish, and thus the Jews are not being singled out as the sole exponents of selfish materialism and the worship of money. This defence of Marx (which can be paralleled in other contexts) is without merit. Anyone who takes the Jews as the yardstick of evil is being antisemitic. To say that Marx is condemning bourgeois materialism in general does not diminish his attack on the Jews; for what he is saying is that many Christians are as bad as the Jews and therefore deserve the final insult of being called Jews. Marx is working with the term ‘Jew’ as signifying everything evil; he is using the stereotype, derived from the Middle Ages, of the Jew as usurer and merciless materialist, an image deriving from the Christian exclusion of the Jews from all honorable professions. Being ignorant of Jewish history, Marx accepted without question that the Jews, in the Middle Ages, actually chose to be usurers, and that this had been their profession from time immemorial. It may seem surprising that Marx, at this stage of his career, stigmatized the Jews as arch-materialists; yet at a later stage, he himself embraced materialism as his philosophy, which he named ‘dialectical materialism’. This paradox is important in the understanding of how Marx’s attitude to the Jews underwent changes. A case can be made for saying that Karl Marx’s antisemitism was a feature of his early career only. Certainly, it was only in his early years, before he developed the views characteristic of Marxism, that he put into writing a generalized hostility to Jews and Judaism. Later, he confined his antipathy to private letters and conversation. A change definitely took place, but what kind of change is a subject of enquiry. There has been an intellectual fashion in recent years to extol the younger Marx, to the detriment of the older Marx, on the grounds that the younger Marx was more idealistic and had a more positive and defined view of the potentialities of human nature, if freed from 66


bourgeois values. It has not been mentioned in these discussions that Marx’s early idealism was combined with a virulent antisemitism. Marx found himself in conflict with certain socialist groups (leaders among whom were Fourier, Toussenel, Proudhon, Bakunin and Pierre Leroux) who adopted antisemitism as their central doctrine. These groups were characterized by Marx as ‘Utopian’, because they thought that the abolition of the bourgeoisie, identified with the Jews, would bring about the age of human emancipation and freedom from alienation. Marx, however, as his thought developed after 1845, found this doctrine superficial. He saw the capitalist class not as evil but as fulfilling a necessary function in the unfolding of the class struggle. He thought that attempts to prevent capitalism from developing in a society were ill-advised, because without capitalism there could be no Communism. Capitalism led to the growth of a working-class proletariat; a country without capitalism never developed a proletariat; and the future lay with this new class, the proletariat, which would eventually bring about the revolution. This theory (based on the dialectical pattern of Hegelianism) led to some modification in Marx’s attitude to the Jews. He began to think of Utopian antisemitic movements as ‘the socialism of fools’. Yet his own views as expressed in his early essay ‘Zur Judenfrage’ were indeed an expression of ‘the socialism of fools’.45 The unqualified condemnation of the bourgeoisie was replaced by a doctrine in which the bourgeoisie played an essential role in history, though this role was destined to be replaced by the triumph of the working class and the institution of communism. Consequently, Marx had to change his attitude towards the Jews and could no longer fuse his concept of the bourgeoisie with traditional demonizing antisemitism. In other words, he could no longer call on antisemitic currents in society as a useful political tool in his struggle. Antisemitism was too strongly identified with his political enemies, not only his enemies of the Left such as the Utopians Bakunin and Proudhon, but even more important, his enemies of the Right, the supporters of aristocracy and the Church, for whom antisemitism was a potent weapon and a reliable means of recruiting popular support. This did not mean, however, that Marx’s image of the Jews acquired any positive characteristics. They became far less central in his campaign, but they remained a highly unpleasant and retrograde group, destined to disappear from history for their own good and for that of the world. Marx saw the Jews not as a nation or even as a religion, but as an economic sub-class of capitalism, defined entirely by their ignoble economic role. His personal attitude towards individual Jews, indeed, underwent a deterioration; his antisemitism became merely vulgar Judaeophobia, evincing itself in racist remarks, such as his description of Ferdinand Lassalle, his gifted and heroic rival in socialist circles, as a ‘Jewish nigger’, speculating that he was descended from the negroes who joined Moses in his flight from Egypt. Marx’s great friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels joined him in this kind of jocular discourse by 67

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calling Lassalle ‘Baron Itzig’ and by describing him (in a letter to Marx) as ‘a greasy Jew disguised under brilliantine and flashy jewels’. It must be said to the credit of Engels, however, that he eventually emancipated himself entirely from his antisemitism, at least on the personal level. After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels became involved with the Jewish working-class movement in England, and much admired it. He opposed antisemitism, paying generous tribute to left-wing Jewish personalities who had contributed much to the development of the socialist movement. Marx himself, however, never changed his definition of the Jews as essentially bourgeois and capitalistic. His characterization of the Jews as an economic class rather than a nation or religion had baneful effects in later Communist history. In the Soviet Union, when dogmatic universalism gave way to the recognition of national and ethnic status, only the Jews were excluded. The organisation of Jewish workers, the Bund, was expelled from the Communist International largely through the efforts of Julius Martov, the Jewish friend of Lenin. Martov had previously been one of the Bundist founders and leaders. The expulsion of the Bund led to Martov’s own downfall, when he finally clashed with Lenin in 1903. The triumph of fanatical Bolshevism over the moderate democratic Menshevism which Martov supported might never have happened if Martov had retained the support of the Bundist movement which he betrayed. Thus the denial of Jewish ethnic identity played a great part in the triumph of extremism. Zionism too was never recognized by the Communist theorists as a movement of national freedom, but stigmatized as a facet of international capitalism and imperialism.46 There are some indications, however, that Marx, towards the end of his life, and too late to affect subsequent Communist attitudes, showed some recognition of Judaism as more than an economic sub-class, and as having made some contribution to the world’s spiritual progress. He recommended his daughter Eleanor to study the Hebrew prophets, whom he described as pioneers of the concept of social justice.47 Whether he ever recognized that this concept pervades not only the prophets but the legal sections of the Bible and Talmud must be left to speculation. One incident in Marx’s later life suggests a possible change of attitude. This was his meeting with the great Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz, who wrote the classic work, The History of the Jews. In the 1870s Marx went several times to Karlsbad to take the waters, a somewhat bourgeois thing to do. There he met many Jewish professional scholars, doctors and business men, whose company he even seems to have enjoyed. Most significantly of all, he met and became friendly with Heinrich Graetz, who of all people was most qualified to give him information and instruction about the history of the Jews as a national and cultural entity, rather than as a mere economic sub-class. We do not know what conversation took place between the two men, but we do know that they corresponded with each other in 1877. Marx sent a copy of his work Das Kapital as a present to Graetz. Upon this Graetz 68


replied thanking him, and wondering what writing of his own he should send Marx. ‘The content of my 12 volume history of the Jews lies far, far outside your horizon. Perhaps my work on the Preacher Solomon might be more to your taste.’ This is a reference to Graetz’s work on the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, a text which appears at times to express cynically worldly and secular sentiments such as ‘A man hath no better thing under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be merry’ (8:15). Perhaps Graetz thought that some aspect of Jewish studies that seemed remote from conventional religion would be to Marx’s taste. Even so, it must have been something of a shock to Marx to find at Karlsbad Jews like Graetz who did not at all conform to his picture of the Jews as vulgar money-grubbers. Marx’s dilemma as an Emancipation Jew fighting against his own origins is to some extent paralleled by the case of Heinrich Heine, the great German–Jewish poet. Marx actually knew Heine well, and visited him several times in Paris where they had long conversations, the content of which, unfortunately, has not been preserved. Heine was a Jew who voluntarily converted to Christianity in 1825 when an adult, unlike Marx, who was baptized in early childhood and never knew anything of Jewish religious or communal life. Heine retained nostalgic feeling for his lost Judaism. He never accepted Christianity as anything but (as he put it) ‘his ticket of admission to European culture’. His conversion, which he later bitterly regretted, was a cynical career-move which enabled him to qualify as a lawyer. This did not even succeed, as he never practised as a lawyer.48 Heine became disillusioned with the Enlightenment, realising that it afforded professional opportunities to Jews but did nothing to diminish antisemitism, even, in some respects, making it stronger. The same cycle of enthusiasm and disappointment was experienced in even stronger form by Moses Hess, who was a friend and colleague of Karl Marx. This extraordinary figure (whom Marx unjustly derided at times) played a great part in the founding of both communism and Zionism. He began by denigrating Judaism almost as much as Karl Marx did, but later switched to a whole-hearted support for Judaism as the origin of all concepts of social justice including communism. Hess announced that he was returning to the practice of Judaism. He asserted the nationhood of the Jews, the value of their national and religious culture, and the validity of their claim to the Land of Israel, based on their continued loyalty through the centuries to their ancestral home. Hess, having been one of the founders of communism, became the founder of Zionism. Moses Hess, like Marx, was subject to enormous strains of conflicting Enlightenment rationalism and Jewish loyalties, but in the end came to a very different conclusion. Marx, it could be said, belonged essentially to the earliest stratum of the Enlightenment which asserted a dogmatic universalism, and decried all ties of loyalty to individual cultures, traditions or national groupings as irrational. Hess, on the other hand, belonged to the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, which, as we saw in a previous lecture, was first adumbrated 69

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by Rousseau, and was developed particularly by Herder. Yet Marx did not entirely escape this trend, for he did see history in terms of communal groupings, rather than of individuals forming a world-wide citizenry. But instead of seeing nations or religions as the basic focus of loyalty, Marx saw history as the scene of class struggle. He wished to exorcise national or patriotic loyalties and substitute loyalty to the working class, the bearer of the next and perhaps final stage in the working out of human destiny. In the course of this programme of exorcism, all national loyalties were denounced as illusory, a mere exercise of propaganda by the ascendant but ultimately doomed bourgoisie in their bamboozling of the working class into conformity. In this deconstruction of patriotism, the chief casualty was Judaism, which was par excellence the ideology of a national grouping – one that was so strong and cohesive, bolstered by a constellation of sacred literature and ritual, that it had even survived the loss of its territorial basis. To debunk the spiritual pretensions of Jewish identity was to destroy the essence of national identity everywhere. For Marx, as his youthful essay shows, the debunking of Judaism implied the debunking of all bourgeois ideologies. No prediction has been so thoroughly falsified as the Enlightenment expectation of the withering away of national identities, even in its Marxist form of their supersession by class loyalties. In fact, the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been one of the strengthening of national identity. Zionism is only one of the movements which have sought to bring new life into nationalism. Every group with a common history, from Welsh nationalism to Palestinian nationalism, has sought to assert itself as a focus of pride and hope. Unfortunately, this propensity has also asserted itself in the false form of racism. The racism of the Nazis stems from the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment universalism. Moses Hess was by no means a racist, but he refused to be browbeaten by Marx into thinking that national loyalties were obsolete. A very different Jew, Benjamin Disraeli presented a sharply individual reaction to the clash of modernity with Jewishness, in which he also set his face against the denigration of the Jewish record and asserted the validity of Jewish identity. Disraeli, however, cannot be entirely absolved of racism. Disraeli was not as deep thinker as Marx, but he must be praised for his typically bold and high-spirited reaction to Jew-baiting, to which Marx succumbed, and in which he even joined. Disraeli, in his way, had a class theory, by which he turned the accepted picture of the classes on its head. Marx did this by exalting the working-class as the carriers of the future. Disraeli on the other hand did not attack the existing class structure in the least; no-one was more appreciative of the glamour of the nobility. His only modification was to put the Jews at the top of the class-structure instead of at its lowest rung, to invest the Jews with the glamour of the nobility. Disraeli was a converted Jew, who could have claimed exemption from antisemitism on the ground that he was a Christian. But, as a political realist, 70


he was well aware that this ploy would not work, because in the common perspective a Jew was always a Jew. In fact, Disraeli was constantly depicted in newspaper cartoons and articles as the archetypal Jew. Disraeli’s brainwave was to make a virtue of this. The proud boast of the English aristocracy was that it was descended from the Norman lords who accompanied William the Conqueror. Disraeli pointed out that this lineage was very recent compared with the awesome lineage of the Jews. Any Jewish peddler, he pointed out, could claim descent that put the English lords into the shade. ‘When the inhabitants of these islands,’ he said in a speech in Parliament, ‘were savages painted with woad, the Jews had their king, their High Priest, their Temple and their giants of literature.’ Unfortunately, however, Disraeli developed this insight into a doctrine of race. He could even be regarded as the pioneer of the racialist theories which later produced the Holocaust. In claiming racial superiority for the Jews, Disraeli actually betrayed his ignorance of Judaism, for Jews have never based their religious or political claims on pride of race. In the course of Jewish history, countless individuals and even whole nations have become converted to Judaism, and thus the ‘Jewish blood’ of which Disraeli boasted is actually very much a mixture. Nor have the Jews claimed aristocratic privilege on the ground of their ancient and noble descent. On the contrary, they have stressed their own upstart origin as a group of escaped slaves, who set up a new and revolutionary nation in opposition to the ancient cultures of Egypt and Babylonia. Disraeli’s attempt to recruit the Jews in the cause of his aristocratic racialist Toryism was a misrepresentation of Jewish history. One has to admire, however, the courage with which Disraeli cast defiance at the English class structure in which the Jews were the lowest of all the castes. Without attempting to subvert the class structure itself, he actually used its assumptions and prejudices to raise the Jews to the highest pinnacle of aristocracy. There may have been an element of mischievousness in this; Disraeli delighted in paradoxes and in causing distress to the pompous and self-satisfied. But he was serious enough to jeopardise his political career by supporting the 1847 bill for the admission of Jews to Parliament against the wishes of his whole party. Most important of all, he did not join the chorus of self-hate. Though he (or rather his father) had deserted Jewish allegiance by being converted to Christianity, he was determined not to contribute to the contempt and demonization of the Jews which derived (as he himself pointed out repeatedly and with great clarity) from the darkest superstition of the Christian Middle Ages, and which continued to endanger the Jews and even add to their insecurity in the so-called age of Enlightenment. Karl Marx, with far greater justification, might have claimed the Jews and their history as his inspiration. He was the image of a Hebrew prophet in his denunciations of social injustice. He was the image even of Moses, in his desire to lead an oppressed class out of slavery into a new Promised Land of classless liberty. The Jewish themes of the Exodus and of the messianic future 71

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were Marx’s daily preoccupation. Yet all he could feel for Jews and Judaism was a contempt derived from the very system which he was aiming to supersede. There is no more poignant example of the power of the antisemitic myth, with its portrayal of the Jews as the canker of society and as secretly manipulating a system of which they are in fact the chief victims. Karl Marx thought that he was the creator of the future by his new myth of the victory of the proletariat; but in relation to the Jews, he was as credulous as any medieval Jew-hater, and himself an uncritical believer in a malicious myth. His antisemitism bore fruit in the Soviet Union, where Marx’s disciple Stalin was a Jew-hater second only to Hitler. But Marx’s own antisemitism was caused not so much by genuine hatred as by embarrassment; the yearning of the emancipated Jew to escape from the stigma from which the emancipation had failed to release him. By contributing (together with other even more extreme left-wingers) to the survival of extreme medieval antisemitism, Karl Marx linked Communism with a deep religious element.

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6 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844–1900)

Friedrich Nietzsche was a ground-breaking thinker, who is still a force in the world today, despite a period in which he was discounted as the favourite theorist of the Nazis. He has been hailed as an anticipator of Freud, and he is often quoted by supporters of post-structuralism, as someone who saw systematization and pretensions to intellectual authority as veiled moves in a power game. His supporters dismiss his alleged validation of Nazism as a misunderstanding, largely fostered by his antisemitic sister Elizabeth, who edited his writings and inserted forged passages. Certainly, some of his theories can be regarded as providing support to Fascism and Nazism and antisemitism; yet he himself despised the antisemitic proto-fascist movements of his own day. He was actually a great admirer of certain aspects of Jewish culture and religion. His thought was so complex (or some might say contradictory) that it is very difficult to generalize about him. Some of his writings were actually detested by the Nazis, who were very selective in their quotations from him. Nietzsche was born of pious Protestant parents, who hoped that he would enter the Church. But while at university, under the influence of the writings of Schopenhauer, he abandoned religious belief. He was a brilliant student, and became a professor of classics when only 24 years old. His deep knowledge of the Greek classics, particularly the pre-Socratic philosophers, was the foundation of his later thought. For Nietzsche, the rot started with Socrates, whom he saw as the sceptical pettifogging moralistic eroder of the élan with which early Greek philosophy flung theories at the universe. He began to see Greek religion as a conflict between Apollo, the god of reason and moderation, and Dionysus, the god of inspiration and uncalculating enthusiasm, and Nietzsche decided that he was on the side of Dionysus – though he never denied the need for Apollo too. He did not cultivate madness, as some critics have said; his eventual insanity was caused not by his philosophy but by syphilis. In all his thought, Nietzsche, in assessing religions and philosophies, made his criterion whether they were lifeaffirming or life-denying, whether they increased the possibilities of life or restricted them. 73


Nietzsche’s approach to classical studies did not endear him to his colleagues (especially the ultra-respectable Ulrich von Wilamowitz) at the University of Basel. Nietzsche’s first book The Birth of Tragedy (1870), published when he was 26 years old, was condemned by contemporary scholars. However, his work in classical studies later became influential. Classical scholars like Sir James Frazer, F.M. Cornford, Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray followed him in stressing the ecstatic, more primitive elements in Greek religion and drama. Nietzsche, isolated in the academic world, found solace in his friendship with Richard Wagner, whose talent and ambition he admired at first. The two men agreed in their scorn of the establishment and their love of the untamed spirit of the ancient world. Wagnerian ideas are evident in Nietzsche’s early writings, including antisemitic prejudice. At this stage of his life, for example, Nietzsche condemned the writings of Heinrich Heine as meretricious and unGerman, the works of a Jew who was merely aping Germanic style. Here Nietzsche was echoing the antisemitic approach of Wagner, who in his book Das Judentum in der Musik (1850) attacked the work of German–Jewish composers Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, as well as the literary work of Heine and other Jewish authors. Wagner’s hatred of Jews went far beyond the cultural field; he regarded them as a corrosive influence on all modern society, and he subscribed to the racist doctrines of Wilhelm Marr, who actually coined the term ‘antisemitism’. Wagner had a great influence on the history of antisemitism, making it intellectually respectable in German society. Among his many devoted disciples was Adolf Hitler. But Nietzsche soon rebelled against Wagner. He became disillusioned with Wagner’s antisemitism, which he regarded as vulgar and crazy. He even broke with his own sister Elizabeth when she married the antisemitic leader Bernhard Förster. As for Heine, Nietzsche’s attitude changed totally. He became a great admirer of Heine as the finest German poet of his generation, and as an example of the outstanding genius of the Jewish people. Yet Nietzsche’s views on the Jews and Judaism remained contradictory. At times he extolled the Jews as the most vital and talented people on earth. At other times, he attributed all the woes of Western civilization to the Jews. The contradiction, however, is only apparent, and I hope to show that Nietzsche had a consistent view about the Jews – a view that somehow managed to reconcile philosemitism with a profound kind of antisemitism. In Nietzsche’s thought, the medieval demonization of the Jews, especially the picture of the Jews as subtly manipulating the innocent and naive Gentile world, survives in a peculiarly ambivalent form. It is an intellectual construction that shows a person of the highest intellect struggling, ultimately without success, to escape from the anti-Jewish myth that pervades his society. It has often been pointed out that Nietzsche divides Jewish history into three periods. The first is the early Biblical period, comprising the story of the Judges and the Kings, a period which Nietzsche regards as heroic. 74

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The second is the period beginning with the fall of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile, when the defeated Jews turned to the leadership of priests and prophets. This is the period which, according to Nietzsche, produced not only post-exilic Judaism but also Christianity, two religions which he regards as one, that is, Judaeo-Christianity, which he detests. The third period is that of modern times, in which the Jews emerged as leaders of a vibrant modern culture, which Nietzsche greatly admires. In the first heroic period, Nietzsche argues, the Jews, or Israelites, were a sovereign people with a proud fighting record and an ability to produce leaders of high spirit and ruthless courage. Nietzsche revelled in the Old Testament stories of Moses, Joshua, Samson, Samuel, David, Solomon, seeing these figures as analogous to the Greek heroes Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon and others. To Nietzsche, the most important thing in life was the will to survive, not morality, and so he saw in these stories a record of the unquenchable will. Here Nietzsche differed very widely from Voltaire, who saw in the Old Testament only primitive and barbarous cruelties, which he cited to denigrate Christianity. It was the shame of Christianity, Voltaire argued, that it based its claims on the belief that these savage records were inspired prophecies of the coming of Jesus Christ. Voltaire denounced the ancient Israelites as primitives who did not make the slightest effort to conform to the polished ideals of the Enlightenment: while Nietzsche adored them for the very same reason. Nietzsche, on the other hand, saw the New Testament as a sad decline from the primitive energy of the Old Testament. He wrote that it was a disgrace to print the New Testament alongside the Old in the same volume. This was because the New Testament embodied a slave morality, as opposed to the aristocratic ideal of the Old. Whereas the Old Testament contained an ideal of humanity at its best, the New Testament was written in the interest of humanity at its feeblest. It represented the revenge of the weak against the strong. Whereas Christianity represented itself as a religion of love, in which it is the duty of the strong to help the weak, Nietzsche saw in this only a drag on the progress of the human spirit, which needed to develop to the utmost its strongest and most ambitious aspects, until it brought into existence a new and higher form of life, the Superman. So far from preserving the sick and the enfeebled, it ought to be the aim of society to weed out its less promising elements and to use its healthiest and strongest elements in a programme of breeding that would result in a more perfect race. The Old Testament, wrote Nietzsche, arose from a life-affirming, yea-saying outlook; the New Testament from one that was life-denying and nay-saying, and its chief emotions were envy, resentment and desire for revenge, camouflaged as love and pity. But this applied only to part of the Old Testament, that is the narrative part that concerned wars and martial leaders. The part that concerned the reaction of priests and prophets to the destruction of the Jewish state by 75


the Babylonian conquerors is not supported by Nietzsche, but on the contrary condemned as the foundation of the hated religion of the weak, JudaeoChristianity. In fact, Nietzsche argues, it was the Jews who foisted on the world the slave-religion that represented the revenge of the weak on the strong. They reacted to their defeat by developing a religion of defeat. Nietzsche recognises no break or conflict between Judaism and Christianity; both are equally motivated by envy and revenge, and both have sapped the strength of Western culture, the positive aspects of which stem wholly from the legacy of Greece and Rome. Indeed, what is wrong with Christianity is precisely its continuity with Judaism. This amounts in fact to a condemnation of the whole of priestly and rabbinic Judaism, that is of the religion that sustained the Jews throughout the centuries of their exile, together with their religious classics, the Mishnah, Talmud and Midrashim, and the literature based on them. Nietzsche, by the way, was one of the many opponents of Judaism who never attempted to read the Talmud except in biased compilations such as that of Eisenmenger or August Rohling. Yet Nietzsche vigorously asserted that the Jews of modern times were an admirable people whom he wished to include in his breeding scheme for producing the Superman, because their hereditary qualities were essential for the make-up of improved humanity. He expresses this view, though in the somewhat equivocal fashion that is inseparable from his style, in the following words: The Jews are beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest and purest race now living in Europe: they know how to prevail even under the worst conditions, even better than under favourable conditions, by means of virtues that today one would like to mark as vices – thanks above all to a resolute faith that need not be ashamed before ‘modern ideas’.49 Nietzsche even had the idea that the great qualities of the modern Jews were in a way the result of Christian oppression. The constant suffering of the Jews at the hands of their Christian oppressors had the same effect as a programme of eugenics: it weeded out the weak and left only the strong. Nietzsche was a convinced Darwinian, and saw the Jews as an illustration of Darwin’s doctrine of the survival of the fittest. Nietzsche’s idea of eugenics – the breeding of a master race – was actually very different from that of the Nazis. Nietzsche regarded the master race as existing in the distant future, not in the present. He disagreed with the idea of contemporary racists such as Eugen Dühring that the Aryans were a pure race of superior qualities; on the contrary he thought that purity was something to be aimed at through a mixture of races, each of which might contribute its own best qualities, thus producing a race that was ‘pure’ in the sense of having discarded or purged the less desirable qualities of its 76

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constituent ingredients. He thought that the ancient Greeks were a mixed race of this kind. This meant that Nietzsche, instead of decrying German–Jewish marriages on grounds of ‘pollution’ of Aryan blood, actually welcomed them, though he did say that there was a limit to the extent to which Jewish blood could be absorbed. He regarded Jewish blood as a kind of powerful medicine which could produce excellent results in small quantities. The problem, however, arises of how Nietzsche conceived that the excellent qualities he observed in the Jews had survived their long immersion in the Judeo-Christian religion of slave morality which he so despised. His division of Jewish history into three stages leaves it difficult to understand how present-day Jews could be anything but despicable. In the time scheme he proposed, the Jews were excellent in ancient days when they enjoyed liberty and sovereignty, but after they lost their liberty, they developed a religion of resentment and dreams of revenge. This religion lasted for over 2000 years (from the destruction of the first Temple in 586 BCE to the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century CE), so how was it that the energy and vitality of modern Jews was so admirable, in contrast with the pervasive slave mentality of Christians, built up over the centuries, which Nietzsche constantly denounced? This question brings us to the core of Nietzsche’s peculiar conception of the nature of the Jews. He expressed it in the following passage: Psychologically considered, the Jewish people are a people endowed with the toughest vital energy, who, placed in impossible circumstances, voluntarily out of the profound prudence of self-preservation, take sides with all the instincts of decadence – not as mastered by them, but because they divined a power in these instincts with which one could prevail against the world. The Jews are the antithesis of all decadents: they have had to represent decadents to the point of illusion; with a non plus ultra of historic genius they have known how to place themselves at the head of all movements of decadence (such as the Christianity of Paul), in order to create something out of them which is stronger than any yea-saying part of life.50 Nietzsche is saying here something very surprising. He is saying that the Jews are the originators of Christianity, but themselves do not believe in it. They created Christianity, and also other creeds of decadence, such as modern liberalism, as weapons in their own fight for survival. They put forward doctrines which they knew would weaken and sap the strength of their conquerors, but they themselves were far from being taken in by such doctrines. They retained the will to power and the primitive self-confidence which are so necessary for survival, but they insidiously spread a philosophy that was calculated to destroy the will and confidence of their conquerors. 77


This charge against the Jews might be considered the ultimate in antisemitism, since it accuses them not merely of originating a pernicious view of life, but of spreading it like poison-gas in such a way as to harm their opponents but not themselves. If this were true, the Jews would be the arch-hypocrites of history, compared with whom masters of disinformation such as Goebbels would be complete amateurs. How did Nietzsche arrive at this extraordinary fantasy? I think that the answer lies in a mixture of theory and personal experience. Nietzsche was strongly opposed to Christianity, which he regarded as anti-life, because of its emphasis on humility, its denigration of this world, its other-worldly orientation and its dismissal of physical vigour and beauty as unimportant. But Nietzsche was the heir of the Voltairean tradition that blamed all the defects of Christianity on Judaism, and which delighted in dismaying Christians by stressing their affinity to the Jews whom they had oppressed and despised; thus saddling Christians with what was to them the greatest insult. Nietzsche in many of his writings follows this Voltairean line, attacking Christianity because it is so Jewish; though he differed from Voltaire in his selection of allegedly obnoxious material from the Old Testament with which to beat Christianity. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s personal experience made it impossible for him to maintain this line. He found that he liked the Jews whom he came across, while he hated the antisemites. He found the Jews to be yea-sayers and life-affirmers, while the antisemites were nay-sayers and life-deniers, seeking consolation for their own inferiority feelings in Jew-hatred. He began to see the members of the antisemitic movements, including his own sister Elizabeth, as the true followers of the negative aspects of Christianity, actuated by resentment of others’ success and desire for revenge for their own inadequacies. The Jews, on the other hand, such as the talented and irrepressible Heine, he saw as bursting with vitality and hope for the future. Nietzsche even began to see virtues in the Eastern Jews who at this time were migrating in great numbers from the Russian Empire, where they suffered violent oppression. These Eastern Jews were despised even by their co-religionists in Germany, who regarded themselves as cultured Germans, and were embarrassed by the influx of unregenerate Orthodox Jews with long beards and peyot, obtruding their difference without shame. Nietzsche, however (though he had joined in the distaste for Eastern Jews in earlier days) began to admire their independence and refusal to kowtow to Western norms. Nietzsche’s solution, then, was to absolve the Jews of the taint of actual belief in the despised religion of Judaeo-Christianity. If they really believed in this religion of life-denial, they could never have retained such vitality through the centuries or displayed such unconquerable will to survive. They must be playing a deep game, infecting their opponents with the virus of life-denial so that eventually they, the Jews, would come out on top. Already this game was succeeding, for the Jews, as represented by the Rothschilds and 78

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other Jewish capitalists, were in the process of taking over power in the modern world. It never seems to have occurred to Nietzsche that Judaism is actually a religion that has its own character that is very different from that of Christianity; that Judaism and Christianity are two different religions; and that this is the explanation of the difference he observed between Jews and Christians. He did not take sufficiently into account that the history of Jewish–Christian relations is one of religious conflict. As for Christian antisemitism (which he was able to observe in his own sister whose antisemitism was of an overt Christian kind, regarding the Jews as accursed Christ-killers), this did not seem to Nietzsche to need further enquiry; it simply confirmed for him the hypocrisy of Christians who charged against the Jews the defects of which they were themselves guilty. It seems that we must interpret in a similar way certain positive comments made by Nietzsche about the Jewish cultural tradition: that it was the Jews who preserved cultural values throughout the Dark Ages and Middle Ages when Christians were sunk in superstitious ignorance. He means that the Jews had their private tradition of humanistic culture which had nothing to do with their outward adherence to the JudaeoChristian slave-religion of resentment. Thus a thinker who, in a way, was most appreciative of Jewish characteristics, evolved a theory that can claim to be the most antisemitic of all. The Jews, in this theory, conform to the stereotype of ancient Hellenistic antisemitism, as ‘the enemies of mankind’. The Jews are plotting a terrible revenge on the Gentile world, but not out of a mere spirit of spiteful revenge and resentment, but as a long-term far-seeing strategy of survival and victory. For this, Nietzsche, the despiser of ordinary bourgeois morality, has the greatest admiration. This is the truest model of the will to power which he sees as the apex of human virtue. Nietzsche foreshadows here the temper of Japanese antisemitism, which has arisen in recent years fuelled by Japanese defeat, combined with the influence of Japan’s Nazi alliance during the Second World War. Some Japanese writers have built up the myth of Jewish dominance as responsible for the Japanese defeat, but this picture of a world wide Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world is tinged with admiration – the Jews have succeeded in doing what Japan failed to do.51 If Nietzsche had taken the trouble to examine Judaism as a religion different from Christianity, he might even have found qualities that had some affinity to his Nietzschean philosophy. An example is the biblical watchword, ‘Be strong and of good courage’. The respect for mental strength or will which Nietzsche found in the narrative parts of the Old Testament he might have found throughout the biblical and rabbinic tradition; but combined, in a way that Nietzsche did not understand, with a concern for the weak, who not only had to be protected from the strong by the operation of law, but also were to be the beneficiaries of the exercise of strength by those with strength to spare. On the other hand, the Christian precept ‘Resist not evil’, which 79


Nietzsche despised, is no part of Jewish teaching, and Nietzsche’s polemic against mercy, while certainly not part of Jewish teaching in general, does echo the Jewish injunction, in relation to the eradication of evil, ‘thine eye shall not have mercy’. Chiefly, however, the Jewish this-worldly tradition of humanism, proclaiming the dignity of humanity, ought to have produced a response in a thinker whose chief polemic was against other-worldly doctrines that reduced the status of humanity by requiring an abject posture of guilt and self-accusation. If Nietzsche did not respond to Judaism, many Jews responded to Nietzsche. In fact, it was mainly Jewish intellectuals who proclaimed the Nietzschean message and built up his reputation after a period of obscurity. The first book on Nietzsche was written in 1890 by Georg Brandes, the Danish Jewish critic, whose original name was Morris Cohen. This book, published in Germany, was the beginning of Nietzsche’s worldwide fame. One of the Jewish enthusiasts for Nietzsche was Martin Buber, who derived from him the concept that the aim of philosophy should be to describe and overcome the human dilemma rather than to develop categories elucidating the nature of the outside universe. Many of the Jews who embraced Nietzschean ideas were marginal Jews (Grenzjuden) who were seeking an identity and sense of authenticity after the loss of religious faith and severance from the Jewish community; but it can be argued that these Jews were enthusiastic about Nietzsche precisely because they found in him, in an atheistic form, qualities and values that were recognisable as consistent with the Jewish spirit. Among such Jews were Stefan Zweig (who was particularly attracted by Nietzsche’s conception of European identity), Jakob Wasserman, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Karl Kraus, Sigmund Freud, even Gershom Scholem, all of whom were strongly influenced by Nietzsche, though some of them later struggled to free themselves from his influence. It has even been argued by Jacob Golomb52 that Nietzsche was responsible for the explosion of Jewish talent in Vienna and Berlin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, since it was Nietzsche who gave the marginal Jews their ability to turn their neurosis of marginality into a positive force. He provided them with a method of self-analysis for their mental torture that anticipated in many ways that of Freud, though Nietzsche’s method (found particularly in his book The Genealogy of Morals (1887)) was appropriate to the exceptional rather than the ordinary individual. This is true; but it is also true that such help would have been unavailing without the vast store of mental and cultural resources bequeathed to these marginal Jews by their Jewish background. Zionism, mainly through Buber, was strongly influenced by Nietzsche. Buber called upon modern Jews to liberate themselves from ‘fettered spirituality’ and regain a harmonious sense of living.53 Many young Zionists responded to his Nietzschean demand for ‘a transvaluation (Umwertung) of all aspects of the life of the people to its depths and very foundations . . . . We must unlock 80

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the vital powers of the nation and let loose its fettered instincts’.54 Ahad Ha’am, however, saw dangers in this Nietzschean approach and tried to combat the influence of Nietzsche on cultural Zionism. He agreed that a regeneration of the Jewish spirit was needed, not merely a political solution, but though an atheist and secularist, Ahad Ha’am wanted this regeneration to take place through study of the Jewish sources, rather than through nonJewish romanticism and ecstatic philosophy. Gershom Scholem, on the other hand, provided a way of reconciling Buber with Ahad Ha’am. By reviving the Jewish tradition of mysticism, he aimed to ‘let loose the fettered instincts’ of the Jewish people while anchoring them in their own tradition. Buber himself, in his later life, followed this path too, by his researches into Hasidism, and his poetic reconstructions of its teachings. Both Buber and Scholem, it might be said, were seeking to revive and foster the Dionysian aspect of Judaism. In tracing the influence of Nietzsche on Jewish individuals and movements, however, it is possible to lose sight of the fact that Nietzsche was also an influence on the surge of antisemitism that led up to Hitler. One of Nietzsche’s theses was that the Jews were engaged in a plot against humanity by spreading ideas which they themselves did not believe, in order to debilitate others, while themselves remaining strong. This thesis is echoed in later antisemitic theory, but without the admiring tone with which Nietzsche invested it. For example, it has often been pointed out that there is a contradiction between the antisemitic charge that the Jews have fostered communism and the contrary antisemitic charge that the Jews are quintessential capitalists. This contradiction, however, provides no problem to the true antisemite, who simply explains that the Jews are responsible for both capitalism and communism, since their aim is to disrupt the Gentile world in whatever way they can, by spreading disintegrative ideas which they themselves do not believe. What is particularly remarkable about this kind of theory is the power and centrality that it allots to the Jewish people. The antisemite believes that the Jews are a unified entity that coordinates its plans on a global scale. All the evidence that the Jews are actually a people, divided into innumerable factions and having no unified strategy except possibly (as in the Warsaw Ghetto) in times of great danger and emergency, is discounted as mere camouflage, an example of typical Jewish cunning. Nothing will disturb the antisemite’s conviction that the Jews are a unified and powerful force at all times. Nietzsche’s ideas about the Jews partake of this paranoid concept of the Jews as a world power. The Jews occupy a place in his thoughts that far transcends the actual influence of the Jews in the world of his day. He accepts that there is such a thing as the ‘Jewish problem’, which is fateful for the future of Germany and Europe. The so-called ‘Jewish Problem’ gave rise to a huge literature. Nietzsche struggled to see the Jews as they really were, and to some extent he succeeded. He was impressed by the talent and spirit of the modern Jew. 81


But he was still dominated by the Christian myth in that he saw the Jews as a world power who might take over the world altogether, a denouement which he half welcomed but also feared. This man who was the scourge of Christianity, who fought all his life against what he regarded as the negativity and life-denying quality of Christian doctrine, was himself still partly an unconscious believer in the Christian myth, who handed down concepts that were utilized by the antisemites whom he despised.

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Part III THE JEWS IN MYTH AND IMAGINATION

7 THE DELECTABLE DAUGHTER

A story which frequently appears, from the Middle Ages to modern times, concerns a Jew and his daughter. The Jew is old, ugly and mean; but his daughter is young, beautiful and good-hearted. The third character in the story is a young man, a Christian, who loves the daughter and is loved by her. With her active aid, he steals the Jew’s treasure, and runs off with it, together with the Delectable Daughter herself. These are the bare bones of the story; but there are many details which vary from century to century. To study how the story changes and develops is to follow the history of the changing attitudes of Christians towards the Jews – almost to follow the development of Western culture itself. Clearly, one could strip the story down to even barer essentials: hostile Old Father, Young Daughter and Young Lover – without bringing Jews or Christians into the matter at all. In this basic form, the story is very old indeed, and goes back to a time long before the Jews came into existence. It is in fact an archetypal tale of patriarchal society, expressing the antagonism between the young males of the tribe and the Old Man who monopolizes the females. We can see the pattern in some of the Greek myths. Jason and Theseus are young men who have to outwit a tricky Old Father in order to win the beautiful daughter. We can even find the pattern in the Old Testament, in the story of Laban, Rachel and Jacob. It is amusing to note how many of the characteristics later ascribed to the Old Jew are already to be found in the character of Laban while Jacob, the progenitor of Israel, has the character of the young Lover who outwits the Old Man. Those who see Jacob as the wily Jew, rather than as an analogue of Theseus and Jason, are reading much later associations in to the story. In ancient Greece, the story found its way from the hero-tales of mythology to the realistic Middle Comedy of Menander; thence, into the Latin comedy of Terence and Plautus, and finally to the European comedy of Molière. In comedy, the Old Man is a miser with a hoard of gold as well as a beautiful Daughter; but this is really almost a basic ingredient of the story even in its heroic form. After all, Jason ran off with the Golden Fleece as well as with Medea. Jacob too left Haran with a good part of Laban’s wealth. We may note also four further ingredients of the 85

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story; they do not always appear, yet they seem to have an organic connection with the basic theme. First, the Lover is often forced to act as apprentice or servant to the Old Man for a time (Hercules, Jacob). Second, the Old Man is often not merely tricky but a sorcerer (Aeetes, and Laban, in the Talmudic version). Third, the Daughter, despite her goodness and innocence, may have some of her father’s magical power, and use this knowledge to help her lover (Medea). Fourth, there is the ‘exogamous’ element; the Lover is usually a wandering Stranger, not a member of the Father’s tribe. We thus have a folk-tale of great psychological and anthropological interest. We may now turn to the history of the story from the time when it became an element in the Christian conflict, the Father being identified as a Jew and the Lover as a Christian. It is not at all surprising that this should have happened, for, as Norman Cohn and others have pointed out, a great deal of the hatred felt by Christians towards Jews was of an Oedipal nature. The Jew was felt by Christians to be the Bad Father; and as I suggest in Chapter 7, ‘The Figure of Shylock’, the Jew was even identified with the angry Christian Father-God who cruelly condemns all mankind to eternal torture. The story in its anti-Jewish Christian form first appears in certain medieval stories called ‘exempla’ (i.e. moral tales) which were collected in written form by monks, and were used to enliven sermons. In a typical example, a spendthrift young Christian becomes the apprentice of an old Jew, hoping to learn his secrets. The Jew has a beautiful young daughter, whom the young man seduces and gets with child, while the Jew is away. The daughter tells the young man that her father will take revenge on his return, and advises him to steal the Jew’s treasure and run away. This the young man does, but meeting a holy man in the forest, he confesses the whole matter to him. The holy man enjoins the young man to restore the treasure to the Jew. Meanwhile, the Jew, discovering his loss and his daughter’s pregnancy, conjures up several devils, and asks them for the whereabouts of the Lover. The devils, however, cannot answer him, and one of them explains that they are powerless to help because the young man has confessed. Struck by the power of confession, the Jew converts to Christianity. This story has a certain innocence (in view of later developments) in that it is still regarded as a crime, not an act of virtue, to rob a Jew. Yet the story takes for granted that the Jews are dangerous sorcerers and allied to the powers of darkness. The Jews (in reality helpless) were regarded as dangerous, powerful, Bad Father-figures, whose strong magic could be held at bay only by the counter-magic of the Christian sacraments. The line from this kind of story to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is clear. The Jew is the Man in Possession, who possesses both the Treasure and the Daughter. The Christians, whose power over the Jews was actually limitless, never lost the feeling that they were the dispossessed. They identified themselves with the Young Man, who comes as a landless wandering stranger into the stronghold of the rich Father and carries off his material and sexual 86

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treasure. The Jew, on the other hand, in the midst of all his sufferings, always felt that he was the Man in Possession, temporarily dispossessed, like David from his throne by Absalom, but sure to return, and retaining the dignity of the Father. These strange paradoxical attitudes are simply the outcome of the difference in spirit between the two religions: Christianity the religion of the Son, whose image Christians internalize, and Judaism the religion of the Father, whom Jews take as their ego-ideal and model. The apparently conscienceless malice with which Christians pursued the Jews can be explained by the fact that the Christians felt that they were being brave in attacking the Jews. All appearances to the contrary, the Christians felt themselves as the boy David attacking the giant Goliath. As the story outlined earlier shows, the Jew was identified with all the powerful, magical King-Fathers of myth and legend – with Minos and Aeetes and even the Father-God of the Bible. Even this does not exhaust the theological implications of our story. The position held in the medieval Christian mind by the Virgin Mary is relevant too. Clearly, the story, whether in its Medieval or Classical form, represents an uneasy adjustment to the patriarchal system, in which a situation of fear, hate and distrust exists between father and son, and in which the Mother too hates and distrusts the Father, is waiting for an opportunity to outwit and betray him, and takes the side of the son against the father. (The story represents the mother as the Father’s daughter, but this only means that she is in a state of subservience to the father, and also that the beauty, youth and desirability of the Mother are being contrasted with the senile ugliness of the Father. It is noteworthy that the actual literal mother never appears in the story at all.) Judaism was the only patriarchal system of the ancient world which was based on love of the Father. (Malachi, in the last sentence of the Prophetic books, states the ideal of Judaism when he speaks of the Messianic age when, ‘He will reconcile fathers to sons and sons to fathers.’) Christianity, while ostensibly carrying on the Jewish ideal of love of the Father, actually turns the Father into a cruel demon, who can be placated only by the blood of the Son, that is reconciliation of Father and Son can be achieved only by utter submission and surrender on the part of the Son, not, as in Judaism, by the assumption of independent responsibility by the Son in a Covenant with the Father. In Christianity, the Mother-figure is the Virgin Mary; in Judaism, the Mother-figure is the Land. The full significance of the Virgin Mary took many centuries to develop, and it was not until the twelfth century, just before the story under discussion appeared, that the Virgin blossomed into a cult figure of importance. So important did she then become, however, that she has been described by Henry Adams as the greatest deity of all time.55 The Virgin’s function as a goddess was precisely to protect the Christian against the wrath of the Father (and by this time even Jesus was a Father-figure, just as frightening in his aspect of Judge at the Last Day as the original 87


Father-God himself). If God the Father is the terrible Jew, then Mary is his daughter-wife. The relationship between her and her devotees was lover-like – the whole vocabulary of courtly love was made over to her. Even her sexlessness, or rather her sexual unapproachability, was not inconsistent with the code of courtly love, by which lovers were prepared to ‘serve’ a lifetime without sexual gratification. In return for this devotion, she sided with the sinner against God. She was the secret helper within God’s camp, the mother conspiring with the child to save him from her husband’s anger. In fact she is the analogue of Ariadne in the myth, helping Theseus to outwit her father Minos, or Medea helping Jason against Aeetes, or the Jew’s Daughter helping the Christian Lover against her Father the sorcerer. All these stories express and reinforce the kind of society which may be named Uneasy Patriarchalism, a society in which fear of the Father is too great to allow the Son to grow up and become a responsible adult, taking his father’s place, and in which, consequently, the tendency of religion is to set up a secret matriarchy within the patriarchal system as a form of shelter against responsibility. Another name for this secret attachment to matriarchy, in a patriarchal context, is Romanticism: the conspiracy of the Mother with the Son against the Father, the sweet, secret and doomed rebellion the Son.56 The Mother-Goddess has not always been a kindly figure, and it is to be expected that her reappearance in the patriarchal system would eventually lead to the reappearance of the less gentle side of her character, the side which produced cults of human sacrifice in the Mother-Goddess religions of the pre-Classical world. Medea, for example, has something fearsome about her, despite her kindly behaviour towards Jason; she has magic powers of which the hero must beware, if he should cross her. Even the Virgin Mary had her sterner side. She could be infinitely kind to those who depended on her utterly; but those who held back some part of their allegiance could feel her fierce anger, as many legends testify. In some medieval stories, of which the most celebrated is the ballad of St Hugh, we find a malevolent Jew’s Daughter, who inveigles the Christian child to his death, having lured the child’s father before him. She is the Eternal Feminine, the cruel Goddess herself, Lilith, Cybele, Astarte or Kali. In this strange ballad, the Father-Jew has faded into insignificance and his cruelty has been taken over by his Daughter. Matriarchy is no longer a surreptitious defence against the rigors of patriarchy, but has blossomed forth into independent cruel power – always a danger when the power of the Mother is brought in to redress the power of the Father. However, let us leave this rather horrifying variation. In the evolution of stories, as in dreams, all figures, even the most attractive, are liable to turn into their opposites. Returning to the story of the Old Jew, the Delectable Daughter and the Christian Lover, we find some interesting developments as the Middle Ages give way to the Renaissance. In Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the story achieves the status of high literature. The Jew of Malta, the villainous old Jew Barabas, a fabulously 88


wealthy merchant, has a beautiful, good-hearted daughter, Abigail, who is wooed not by one Christian lover, but by two, Mathias and Lodowick. Though the part of the Lover is doubled, his function is halved, for the robbing of the Jew’s treasure is performed not by Lovers but by other Christians. The Jew achieves a terrible revenge on both Lovers and Robbers, but is betrayed by his daughter. The Jewish sorcerer of the medieval story has turned into a Renaissance Machiavellian villain, the kind of person with whom Marlowe was secretly in sympathy. Like Tamburlaine, Barabas glories in his unbridled individualism and freedom from legal and moral inhibition. Shakespeare’s Shylock is a much more sober character. Is there anything of the sorcerer left in him? Perhaps his skill in usury, by which he makes dead money breed as if it were alive, gives him something of the sorcerer’s. Barabas and Shylock really represent two different epochs in Jewish history – the era of the Jewish merchant adventurer and the subsequent era of the Jewish banker or usurer. In each of these eras, the Jews were the pioneers of a new form of economic system; in each case they were regarded as the instruments of the Devil, wielding new economic powers capable of transforming society. The Jews represented new energies, and Energy and the Devil were, in the Christian mind, the same thing, as Blake later realized. Once the new powers had been unleashed, Christians gradually summoned up the courage to take them over; but the Jew was always there as a convenient lightning-rod to absorb God’s wrath at man’s temerity. At the time when The Merchant of Venice was written, the energies of the whole Christian world were directed towards the birth of capitalism; yet the ‘sin’ of usury, basic to capitalistic development, is foisted on the Jew, in the shape of Shylock. Thus even Shylock has some sorcery about him: the sorcery of capitalism. The original medieval figure of the Jewish sorcerer, however, has probably influenced directly another of Shakespeare’s creations, Prospero in The Tempest. Here we have the Sorcerer, de-Judaized but complete with Daughter and apprentice-Lover, against whom he practices his magic. Though the magic is now beneficent, some of the harshness of the old Father-figure remains, to make the character of Prospero a little enigmatic. Though it can be argued that Shakespeare is drawing on classical legend itself, the medieval Jew’s Daughter Story is a likely proximate source. In The Merchant of Venice, our story is only a sub-plot subsidiary to the main Pound of Flesh theme. Some (e.g. Heine) have argued that the Jessica theme is of central importance in the play – that Shylock’s desire for vengeance against Antonio was not serious to the point of demanding death until Jessica was stolen away. In my view, Shylock’s implacable hatred of Antonio is independent of the loss of Jessica. Yet I do not think that the Jessica sub-plot is merely peripheral. The central theme, the conflict between Christianity and Judaism, is not independent of the Oedipal conflict. Jessica and Lorenzo are the representatives on the plane of sexual fantasy of the theological conflict between Mercy and Justice worked out in the main plot. 89


The joys of Heaven, according to Christian theology, cannot be deserved; but they can be gained undeservedly (i.e. stolen) through the intervention of Mercy. Jessica, like the Virgin Mary, is a figure of Mercy, helping to outwit the stern claims of strict Justice asserted by the Father. Another figure in the play who reinforces this theme is Portia. Her intervention in the Bond-story is strongly reminiscent of medieval stories of the miraculous intervention of the Virgin. There are even stories of the Virgin taking part in legal actions, and Nevill Coghill has pointed out the relevance of the medieval Processus Belial, in which, in the form of a legal action, the Devil claims the souls of mankind on grounds of Justice, and the Virgin, as Counsel for the defence, advocates and obtains Mercy. When Portia delivers her famous speech on Mercy, ‘the quality is not strained’, she is the embodiment of Mercy, a theophany of the Virgin. True, Portia does not remain a virgin, but her marriage to Bassanio (who stands for sinful mankind) takes place in the faery region of Belmont after mystical initiation rites, and has overtones of the reception of Man into Heaven, of which Mary was the Queen. Both The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice are Jew-baiting works; the ‘Romantic’ idea of Shylock as a sympathetic picture of racial oppression has been rightly abandoned by most critics. From this time on, however, though the influence of the figure of Shylock on writers was great, the unselfconscious virulence of Shakespeare’s treatment became no longer possible for any writer of real stature. In the eighteenth century, the Christian conscience towards the Jews awoke, and for the first time writers of eminence began to portray the Jew in a more favourable light. The pioneer of this approach was Lessing, whose generous spirit, and friendship with Moses Mendelssohn, enabled him to realize how the Jews had been maligned. Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise (1779) is the first work since the time when the Jew’s Daughter Story first began in which that story is given a pro-Jewish twist. In Nathan the Wise we can note many of the devices by which the growing Christian, or rather Enlightenment, conscience strove to transform the Jew’s Daughter Story into an instrument for good. The saintly old Jew, Nathan has a father-like relation to a girl, Recha, whom he has adopted, and who is generally taken to be his daughter. The Christian Lover is a Knight-Templar, Leon of Filnek, who saves the life of Recha, but treats Nathan with Christian contempt. Gradually, however, through his love for Recha, the Templar learns to love and respect Nathan too. The moral of the story is the need for religious toleration. Note how much of the old story still remains. The Jew is still an old man and a widower, like Shylock; there is still the theme of hostility between Christian lover and father Jew. However, the story dissolves into a tract on religious toleration. The Christian Lover and the Jew’s Daughter (revealed to be of Christian birth) turn out to be brother and sister, with an ex-Mohammedan father. One cannot admire enough Lessing’s courage in this pro-Jewish work; but 90


one must acknowledge that the aesthetic defects of the later attempts to clean-up the Jew’s Daughter Story are already present. The Story has been not so much transformed, as defused. The second such attempt was Maria Edgworth’s novel Harrington (1817). This novel was written in a spirit of conscious expiation; for Maria Edgworth had filled her previous novels with villainous, sinister Jews. Was Maria Edgworth influenced by Nathan the Wise or did she arrive at her solution to the problem of providing a civilized version of the Jew’s Daughter Story independently? Nathan the Wise was translated into English before 1800, and an interest in German literature was widespread at the time. At any rate, Maria Edgworth also makes the Father Jew (Montenero) into a good, wise merchant like Nathan. She too invests with mystery the parentage of the Daughter (Berenice), and in the end reveals her to be an English Protestant, so that the marriage between her and the Lover (Harrington) can take place with the blessing of the Father. As before, this device operates as something of a let-down. The inner meaning and mythical status of the story evaporate together with the religious tension. Harrington is a very minor work, but it has an honorable place in the history of the Jew’s Daughter Story, and was undoubtedly an influence on Scott’s Ivanhoe, published only two years later. In Ivanhoe, the process of cleaning up the Jew’s Daughter Story takes a step backward; for Isaac the Jew, the Father, is a much less sympathetic figure than either Nathan or Montenero. Israel Abrahams even argued that the chief influence on Ivanhoe is The Jew of Malta. Despite Abrahams’ arguments, I think that The Merchant of Venice is the chief influence. Indeed, the clue to Ivanhoe (considered as a treatment of the Jew’s Daughter Story) is that it is the embodiment of the ‘Romantic’ misconception of Shylock. Everything that Romantic critics say about Shylock is true about Isaac. Scott does portray Isaac as a person of stunted, avaricious character, whose defects, however, spring from the indefensible Christian persecution to which the medieval Jews were subjected; he does portray Isaac as having the saving grace of loving his daughter Rebecca even more than his moneybags. In The Merchant of Venice Shylock’s defects do not spring from Christian persecution, which is nowhere condemned; and Shylock does not love his daughter Jessica more than his money-bags, but puts daughter and moneybags on the same footing, as his property. The ‘Romantic’ version of Shylock had already begun, before Scott wrote Ivanhoe, in the actor Macready’s good-hearted, though artistically misguided, portrayal. So we can regard Ivanhoe as Scott’s translation into artistic reality of a current critical misinterpretation of The Merchant of Venice. Despite the great difference between the ignoble Isaac and the noble Nathan, it seems possible that Scott was influenced by Lessing too. The medieval setting of the story is much closer to Lessing than to Shakespeare. The figure of a Knight Templar appears in both Lessing and Scott and plays a somewhat similar role. Scott may well have felt that the portrayals of noble 91


Jews by Lessing and Maria Edgworth (and in the play The Jew by Richard Cumberland, 1794) were unrealistic, and that the cause of toleration was not served by such lack of realism. The persecution of the Jews, Scott felt, must have produced deep degeneration in the Jewish character, which however should be blamed on Christian persecution. Scott did not have the advantage of personal acquaintance with someone like Moses Mendelssohn, who combined the best and noblest qualities of the medieval Jews with the accomplishments of the Gentile Enlightenment. Scott had no awareness of the extent to which the Jews of the Middle Ages avoided demoralization by their pride in learning. Isaac’s character contains nothing of this – which shows how unrealistic realism often is. However, Scott compensates for the ignobility of Isaac by his extraordinary emphasis on the goodness of the character of the Daughter, Rebecca. In a sense, this is nothing new; for the contrast between the beauty and goodness of the Daughter and the ignobility and ugliness of the Father is one of the oldest ingredients of the Jew’s Daughter Story. What is new, however, is that Rebecca’s goodness is no longer associated with Christianity, but is derived from her Jewishness. She even eloquently rebukes Ivanhoe, from a Jewish standpoint, for the inadequacy of the Christian concept of Chivalry, with its glorification of violence. This element of Scott’s story is a real advance; a genuinely original artistic development of the story in a spirit of enlightenment. How Rebecca could have preserved the purity of her Judaism in an environment so corrupt as is represented by the character of her father is an unresolved mystery. But at least Scott does not adopt the device of revealing at the end that Rebecca was Christian all the time; a device which is only a more refined version of that medieval aspect of the story by which the Jew’s Daughter is an anima naturaliter Christiana (a naturally Christian soul) and finally escapes thankfully into Christianity. The role of the Lover in Ivanhoe, is divided between the Templar, Bois Guilbert, and the Saxon, Wilfred of Ivanhoe. Two aspects of the Lover are split between two characters; the Templar steals the Daughter, and the Saxon is loved by her. There is no condonation of the theft of the Daughter by the bad Christian; but the daughter’s love for the good Christian is unrequited and is regarded by herself as hopeless. Like Abigail in The Jew of Malta, whom she so much resembles, Rebecca remains unmarried; Abigail, a convert to Christianity, becomes a nun, and Rebecca, faithful to Judaism, adopts a corresponding Jewish life. This aspect of Scott’s story, by which the Jew’s Daughter loves in vain, is to have a strong influence on later unexpected developments in the story. The final and greatest development of the Jew’s Daughter Story from a pro-Jewish point of view is to be found in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). In this work, the outlines of the original story can be clearly discerned. There is the rascally old Jewish Father, Lapidoth, and the beautiful, virtuous Daughter, Mirah. There is the Christian Lover, Hans, and also 92


Deronda (before he is revealed to be a Jew). But the story is thoroughly transformed. The rascally Jewish Father is a renegade from Judaism; the true Father-figure in the story is Mordecai, Mirah’s elder brother, who is good and wise, like Nathan. Of the two Lovers, Hans, the Christian, is rejected by Mirah, and the other, Deronda, whom Mirah loves, in reversal of the denouement of Lessing and Maria Edgworth, turns out to be a Jew. This story, written by someone who knew more about Jews and Judaism than any previous handler of the theme, even Lessing, makes true amends for the injustice, hatred and insolence of the original Jew’s Daughter Story. It also resolves the conflict in that story between patriarchal and matriarchal tendencies, and ‘reconciles fathers to sons and sons to fathers’. For the Father in this story (Mordecai) longs for the Son (Deronda) to appear, recognizes him when he does appear, and refuses to believe that he is an alien. The Daughter, Mirah, is in no unholy alliance with the Son against the Father; all three are united in love. Just as Mirah has a false Father, Lapidoth, so Deronda has a false Mother, who is a rebellious Daughter against her own Father. Deronda’s mother (a singer like Mirah) is the representative in the story of the original renegade Daughter; but she (or rather what she stands for) is rejected by the Son, who refuses the proffered alliance against the Father, and on the contrary seeks to ally and identify himself with him yet without sacrificing his own individuality in the manner symbolized by the Crucifixion myth. (Deronda’s mother is a great singer, while Mirah’s talent is ‘not for great tasks’. Here George Eliot’s Romanticism re-asserts itself.) The whole book, in many subtle ways, pursues the themes of antagonism and reconciliation between parents and children, and arrives at a Jewish solution. It is a kind of psychoanalysis of the medieval Jew’s Daughter Story, by which its raw conflicts are resolved. It is no longer fashionable to dismiss the Jewish aspect of Daniel Deronda as a failure.57 One must acknowledge, however, that the Jewish part of the book is greater in intention than in execution. Is it inevitable that something written with such consciously good intentions should lack spontaneity? My own diagnosis would be different. I would say that Daniel Deronda suffers from the concept of toleration. This theme, inherited from Lessing, has a deadening effect, since it ignores the real differences that exist between the Christian and Jewish religious attitudes. The original story, with all its moral defects, is truer to the vitality of the conflict between the two religions. This is why the character of Mordecai lacks bite, though the deep understanding of Jewish aspirations shown in it will always make it a moving portrayal for Jewish readers. At any rate, Daniel Deronda is the culmination of what may be called the Enlightenment phase of the Jew’s Daughter Story; the phase in which the attempt was made to exorcise the anti-Jewish content of the story, in the name of toleration, decency and reason. However, George Eliot, in so far as she was an Enlightenment figure, was an anachronism in the age of Romanticism. The effort to rationalize the Story began in the eighteenth century; but the Romantic reaction against this 93


process of rationalization was under way before the nineteenth century had run much of its course. Scott’s reversion to the picture of the ignoble, ugly old Jew was perhaps consciously an expression of ‘realism’; but unconsciously it was the Romantic novelist’s recognition of the fact that the ugly old Jew was a figure of much greater archetypal force than Lessing’s high-minded Nathan. In the figure of Isaac the Jew, we can sense the ambiguities by which the Romantic movement was able to give birth both to modern liberalism and to the reactionary movements culminating in Fascism. Dickens’ Fagin was a creation of the Romantic imagination at its most intense; and it is, in many ways, a reversion to the nightmare Jew-bogey of the Middle Ages. (Even Fagin’s red beard comes from the portrayal of Judas and of the Devil in the Middle Ages, and this feature is itself derived from the red hair of such pagan ancestors of the Christian Devil as the evil god Set, the adversary of Osiris.) Edgar Rosenberg has pointed out that the Jew’s Daughter Story has a modicum of influence even in Oliver Twist, for the golden-hearted prostitute Nancy is in a kind of daughter-relation to Fagin, and she betrays him in the end. Even Trollope is influenced by the Romantic–Realistic reaction, and his version of the Jew’s Daughter Story, The Way We Live Now, has a rascally Father-Jew, though both the Daughter and the Christian Lover are rascally too. In the twentieth-century novel (before the era of the gas chambers), the fascination of the Evil Jew has on the whole triumphed over the demands of Enlightenment, rationalism and conscience. Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Wyndham Lewis all added to the gallery of villainous Jews, though they did not contribute to the Jew’s Daughter Story. The disappearance of the Daughter is interesting: Dickens had made the Jew too despicable to retain (openly, at any rate) his Father role. The medieval sorcerer-Jew has an evil dignity which makes the theft of his daughter emotionally worthwhile. The only real contribution to the Jew’s Daughter Story made by the late Romantic movement was Du Maurier’s Trilby (1896), a book which is important, despite its negligible literary value, because of its popular appeal. Svengali is a Jew, and Trilby is in a daughter-relationship to him. (Trilby is not Jewish, but her utter subservience to Svengali when under his hypnotic influence provides a parallel to the dual role of the medieval Jew’s Daughter, with her Jewish birth but Christian soul.) The book is a Romantic hotch-potch which steals elements from everywhere. Trilby’s singing career is derived from Mirah’s in Daniel Deronda. Svengali himself, with his hypnotic powers, is a reversion to the original medieval legend of the Jewish sorcerer, but the immediate source is the Wandering Jew legend, in its current elaborations. Combined with the more awesome side of Svengali’s character (in which even the influence of George Eliot’s Klesmer can be detected), are features derived from Shylock and Fagin. In its curious combination of fear, admiration and contempt, Du Maurier’s picture of Svengali is significant, and even prophetic of the tone of twentieth-century antisemitism. It is also significant that in 94


another novel, The Martian, Du Maurier betrays, together with his antisemitism, an erotic fixation on Jewish women. Du Maurier was half French and this fixation was largely a Continental phenomenon. In English literature, as we have seen, the Father lost his Daughter; but on the Continent, the Daughter lost her Father. She attained an independent existence as ‘la belle juive’ in a mass of literature ranging from such writers as Balzac, Huysmans, Maupassant, Zola and even Proust, down to the cheapest pornography. Sartre comments (Anti-Semite and Jew): “There is in the words ‘a beautiful Jewess’ a very special sexual signification. Special works which are given over to accounts of flagellation reserve a place of honor for the Jewess.” Sartre goes on to refer to literature in which the subservient Jewess loves an off-hand Christian who eventually deserts her. What is the significance of this change, by which the Delectable Daughter loses her virtue, and becomes a goodhearted whore, a loving but badly-treated mistress, or even a choice victim of sexual sadism? Actually, even this was an ingredient of the original Classical myth. Theseus, saved by the good-hearted Ariadne from the Minotaur in the Labyrinth of her Father, Minos, deserts her on the way home to Athens and leaves her on the island of Naxos. Medea, sorceress Daughter of the sorcerer Father, Aeetes, saves Jason, who escapes with her, but is later unfaithful to her. Since the theft of the Daughter is, in essence, an expression of hostility against the Father, there can be no true love between Daughter and Lover. The greatest possible revenge on the Father is to steal his Daughter, his most prized possession, and then treat her with contempt. Every humiliation which the Daughter is made to suffer is another blow against the absent Father. The fact that she is trusting and loving only makes the sadism sweeter. Of course, the archetypal figure of the Prostitute has more than one meaning. The fact that the Daughter has been unfaithful to the Father means that she is not to be trusted even by the Son. As long as fathers and sons are unreconciled, marriages are not likely to be happy. An even deeper significance of the Jewish Prostitute can be seen in Maupassant’s story ‘The Unknown’, where she has become the Eternal Feminine, frightening and fascinating, distributing her favours without regard for man-made laws in fact, the original Matriarch, or Great Goddess. There is an affinity between the Jewish woman of this story and the Jew’s Daughter of the medieval ballad of St Hugh. In some of Maupassant’s stories, the Jewish prostitute has another significance. She has become a kind of Christ-figure, taking upon herself the sins of mankind. But the chief significance of the Jewish prostitute is undoubtedly that she symbolizes the defeat of the Jewish Father. After the great campaigns of humiliation of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, it seemed that the Jew had been beaten into the ground. We see the degradation of the Father in Marlowe’s Barabas, who does not dare to show open hostility to the Christian Lovers of his daughter, but destroys them by stealthy plotting, after appearing to encourage them. 95


It can at least be said in Shakespeare’s favour that he gets rid of this innovation; Shylock with all his faults has recovered the dignity of the Evil Father, openly opposing his daughter’s Lover. Scott, despite all the nobility with which he invests the Daughter, contributes towards her ultimate degradation by making her subservient to the Lover, in her unrequited and hopeless love. Dickens’ Fagin divests the Father-Jew of every shred of dignity. Fagin is a capering, fawning wretch, lisping with effeminate, cowardly malice, striking always by stealth; he is the castrated Father. In the final stage, the Father has disappeared; the prostitute Daughter appears without him. Yet the ghost of the dead Father remains, to give an edge to the satisfaction of the Lover who treats the Daughter with contempt. The humiliation of the women of a hostile tribe is, of course, a very common phenomenon. Margaret Mead describes the Melanesian tribe, the Manus58 who sadistically maltreat and humiliate sexually women captured and stolen from a neighboring hostile tribe. The exogamous element in the Jew’s Daughter Story is important, and derives from the original Classical myth. Theseus and Jason are both Strangers. A similar bullying of the stolen Daughter can be seen in such plays as John Osborne’s Look back in Anger, where the theme is hypergamy rather than exogamy, and the working-class ‘hero’ takes his revenge on the upper class through his wife. But the exogamous aspect is really only another facet of the Oedipal situation. It is the estrangement between Father and Son which makes the Son an alien. The landless stranger, such as Jason or Theseus, is simply the Son, in his weakness and deprivation, pitting his puny strength against the privileged Father. It will be seen from the foregoing account of the Jew’s Daughter Story that its development has been very far from being a case of continual moral progress. The Enlightenment attempt to civilize the story broke down because of the typical Enlightenment ignorance of the springs of human nature. The Romantic reaction tapped deeper layers of the mind; but also released devils from the unconscious. The story of the Jew’s Delectable Daughter is now quiescent. Yet the conflicts and anxieties which it embodies remain unresolved.

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8 SHAKESPEARE AND SHYLOCK

We are told that Shakespeare ‘had little Latin and less Greek’, but this does not prevent him from being one of the great Renaissance figures. The Renaissance was about humanism, and the revival of Greek and Latin learning was part of this. But the spirit of humanism did not belong only to those who were learned in the Greek and Latin classics in their original tongues. Shakespeare read Plutarch in the English translation by North, but his imagination was fired by the stories of human achievement and suffering he found there in order to produce his masterpieces about ancient times, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus; and about modern times, the cycle of English history plays; and the tragedies that rivalled and surpassed the great achievements of the Athenian drama; and the comedies that sprang from the domestic drama of Menander. But part of the background of Shakespeare was also the literature of the Christian Middle Ages, and included in that literature were the Passion Plays and Morality Plays which were immensely popular and often had antisemitic themes. Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice took the Jew-baiting theme of the medieval plays and elevated it to high art in the spirit of the Renaissance. This did not prevent the theme from being deeply harmful to the Jews. Indeed the artistry of Shakespeare’s presentation made the theme even more dangerous than it had been before. Shakespeare must be reckoned among those who transmitted antisemitism to the modern world in a form that transcended, and yet did not ultimately depart from, the origins of antisemitism in the religious rivalry between Christianity and Judaism. Many writers have tried to argue that Shakespeare’s play about Shylock is not antisemitic at all. For the two hundred years that followed its first production, The Merchant of Venice was produced, acted and enjoyed by the public as a Jew-baiting play. In terms of frequency of production it has always been the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays. The romantic version of Shylock (portraying him as a sympathetic character) was first introduced in the early nineteenth century by the actor Macready and was voiced in literature by Heine, Hazlitt and others. This sympathetic portrayal was based chiefly on one short passage, ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ The passage is generally 97


delivered by modern actors in a moving manner, full of agony and pathos. But it is doubtful whether Shakespeare intended it to be delivered in this way. The main emotions of the speech, taken as a whole, are anger and desire for revenge, though it rebukes Christians, incidentally, for being guilty so often of that allegedly typical Jewish fault, desire for vengeance. The passage does, of course, concede that Shylock is a member of the human race. The gratitude of Jews to Shakespeare for his reassurance on this point has a certain pathos, but the fact is that Shylock had to be a reasonably credible character even to draw the audience’s hate. By making Shylock a living, breathing villain rather than a comic bogey-man (like Judas and Herod in the Passion Plays), Shakespeare increases the anti-Jewish temperature rather than diminishes it. Shakespeare takes pains to preserve the humanity of all his villains, even Iago and Richard III. In fact, Shylock was played as a comic bogey-man for many years.59It was the celebrated actor Charles Macklin (1690–1797) who first played the character seriously as the personification of evil. He used an unprecedented realism in the accent, clothing and general appearance of the character as Jewish, and at the same time stressed the ‘malevolence, the villainy and the diabolical atrocity of the character’ as one contemporary account put it. This portrayal was received with extraordinary enthusiasm, and Pope (allegedly) said of it, ‘This is the Jew that Shakespeare drew’. On the other hand, one of the pioneers (after Macready) of the portrayal of Shylock as a sympathetic character was Sir Henry Irving, who stressed the dignity of Shylock in his influential production of 1879. From then on, there were many productions which not only showed Shylock as a dignified, basically noble character, but attempted to show that his aggressive, revengeful characteristics were the fault of the Christian characters in the play, who baited and insulted him. On this reading, Shakespeare was not an antisemite, but was far ahead of his time in deploring antisemitism. Yet this well-meaning trend ignores some of the most important aspects of the play. Shylock is after all a most unpleasant character. It might be said that he is not nearly so villainous as the Jew Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, which was produced (probably) in 1589, about four years before The Merchant of Venice. Barabas is a murderer, swindler and fornicator, while Shylock is guilty of no legal crime; even his demand for his pound of flesh is within the law. Yet from the Jew-baiting point of view, Shylock is the more damaging caricature. We can recognize in him the anti-Jewish stereotype which the Nazis employed. Barabas has breadth, gusto and generosity in his villainy. His crimes are on a vast scale, like his business ventures; while Shylock’s villainy, like his business of usury, involves no risks. As a businessman, Barabas is more like Antonio than Shylock; his argosies visit the far corners of the earth. Marlowe even shows appreciation of the fact that Jews were interested in learning as well as business, for one of Marlowe’s characters borrows a rare work of scholarship from Barabas. 98

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Shylock, however, is portrayed as one whose entire horizon is bounded by money. The only hint of scholarly interests is in the wretchedly weak arguments in favour of usury which Shakespeare puts into Shylock’s mouth. Shakespeare clearly knew nothing of the treatment of interest-payment in the Talmud and its commentaries. A Jewish moneylender would have something far more interesting to say on the subject than Shylock’s childish quibble about Jacob’s striped sheep. The difference between Marlowe’s Barabas and Shakespeare’s Shylock is of some historical interest. Until the thirteenth century, Jews were more like Barabas (or Antonio) than like Shylock in their style of business. They were great travellers and risk-takers. The growth of the merchant guilds in the thirteenth century excluded the Jews from raw materials by excluding them from the guilds. They were forced to use their accumulated capital by becoming bankers, that is, in Church terminology, usurers. Eventually, in the fifteenth century, the Church relaxed its own rules against usury, and the Christian Lombard bankers ousted the Jews from the big-time moneylending. The Jews then sank into the position of pedlars, petty pawnbrokers and second-hand clothes dealers. They were barred from the professions and were even forbidden to deal in new clothes. Shakespeare’s image of the Jew as the usurer Shylock rather than the big-time merchant Barabas reflects the thirteenth century change in the professional life of the Jews (though, even so, it is out of date, because large-scale Jewish moneylending in Shakespeare’s day was already a thing of the past). Shylock is a law-abiding usurer, not a piratical poisoner like Barabas, but he is a creature without dignity or largeness of spirit even in villainy. Shakespeare is hardly improving the image of the Jew, but contributing to the continuous process of economic degradation of the Jews, a process which damaged Jewish morale, but not to the extent intended, for the Jews had moral and cultural resources which were able to survive and transcend the process. Shylock is portrayed as mean-minded, heartless and self-righteous. He hates Antonio, the generous Christian hero of the play, and relishes the prospect of bringing about his death by legal means. Where did Shakespeare get the details of Shylock’s character from? Shakespeare did not know any practising Jews, though he may have known some converted Jews. Since the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, no Jews had been allowed to live in England. One of the converted Jews who lived in England in Shakespeare’s time was Dr Roderigo Lopez, the Queen’s physician, who was hanged in 1594 for alleged complicity in a plot by the Earl of Essex against the Queen. Historians are agreed that he was innocent, but there was great public outcry against him at the time of his execution, and it is thought that Shakespeare took advantage of the atmosphere of antisemitism to bring out his play about Shylock in 1596. It has been pointed out that Shakespeare’s play is based on the plot of an Italian story in which the roles are reversed: the victim is a Jew, and the person who insists on his pound of flesh is a Christian. If this 99


derivation is correct, Shakespeare deliberately altered the original story in order to made the villain a Jew, so cashing in on the public hatred of Lopez. As he did not know any practising Jews, from what sources did Shakespeare construct Shylock? I suggest he had two sources: one was the Puritan movement of his own day, and the other was the New Testament portrayal of the Pharisees. Let us take the Puritans first. The Puritans were, of course, Christians, but Shakespeare never has a good word to say for them. Popular prejudice equated them with the Jews; their ministers were nicknamed ‘rabbis’. This was because of their interest in the Old Testament, which they took seriously on its own terms as a source of moral teaching, rather than just as symbolizing New Testament ideas. This attitude to the Old Testament, as I pointed out in Chapter 1, derived from Calvin, whom the Puritans revered as their founder. Shakespeare regarded the Puritans as spoilsports, haters of music and fun. The prime figure of this kind in Shakespeare is Malvolio, in Twelfth Night. Shylock, in some ways, is very like Malvolio. Both Shylock and Malvolio hate music, and this for Shakespeare is the equivalent of hating life. Shylock says to Jessica What, are there masques? Hear you me, Jessica – Lock up the doors, and when you hear the drum And the vile squealing of the wry-necked fife, Clamber not you up to the casements then . . . (Act II, scene V) Malvolio too hated music and fun. Sir Toby and his friends are a worthless lot, but they know how to enjoy life. Malvolio takes himself too seriously; he thinks he is worth something, that he deserves something. But this is the cardinal error for Shakespeare; what releases us for fun and music is the knowledge that we are all equally worthless. In The Merchant of Venice too, the Christians who oppose their fun and jollity to Shylock’s sober gloom are a worthless lot, as critics have pointed out. Antonio’s friends make no effort to help him, Lorenzo and Jessica are perfidious, thieving wastrels, Bassanio is a selfish, canting fortune-hunter who thinks nothing of putting his friend’s wealth at risk. But in their worthlessness, they throw themselves entirely on the generosity of God; they deserve nothing, so everything is bounty. When the Jew (or Puritan), with his tiresome claim for justice, has been disposed of, the black cloud of responsibility is removed, and they can all play like children. Shylock is like a taskmaster who oppresses everyone with his demand that people should get what they deserve, and consequently that they must make the effort to deserve something. The fifth act of the play has an extraordinary air of holiday from moral restraint; the bawdy talk brings with it a feeling of innocent sexual licence. It is the atmosphere of childhood. Shylock is the only adult in the play, and 100


he has been got rid of. Only his shadow remains to make the childhood paradise of Belmont more delicious. In this childhood paradise lies, for Shakespeare, the appeal of Christianity. Some critics, rightly pointing out the moral worthlessness of most of the Christian characters in the play, see this as indicating that Shakespeare is on Shylock’s side. Not at all; Shylock is in the wrong because he fails to understand his own worthlessness. A theological point is being made: the doctrine of original sin releases mankind from the hopeless quest for virtue. Of course, there is one great exception, Antonio, who is far from worthless: but he, as I shall argue, symbolizes Christ himself, who is the only one who is free from sin and who dies to save mankind from the consequences of sin. It will be seen that I do not regard The Merchant of Venice as merely a Jew-baiting play, even though I think it is antisemitic. I think the play is making a theological point; it is a great dramatic representation of the conflict between Christianity and Judaism, written, of course, from a Christian point of view. Shylock is not just an unpleasant Jew; he represents Judaism, and why, in the Christian view, it had to be superseded by Christianity. Puritanism, in so far as it comes into the play, is attacked as a reversion to Judaism, an accusation, indeed, that was often made by the opponents of Calvinism and Puritanism, though not entirely correctly. Certainly it is a mistake to accuse the Jews of being unmusical; there has seldom been a people for whom music was so important. When Shakespeare represents his Jew as hating music, it is very clear that Shakespeare was totally unfamiliar with Jews. Since Jews were banned in England in Shakespeare’s time, no interference from fact could mar the consistency of Shakespeare’s portrayal. His Jew is constructed from religious sources; from Puritanism and from the New Testament. The actual Jews are, in general, neither unmusical nor gloomy, though they are interested in morality and justice, and do not believe in original sin. From the New Testament, Shakespeare took the image of the Pharisee, and this was the most important influence of all on his picture of Shylock. The New Testament presents an unsympathetic picture of the Pharisees (with certain inconsistencies, such as the figure of Gamaliel). They are accused of hypocrisy, self-righteousness, a quibbling legalism, a joyless stiffness and a fundamental cruelty. All these qualities can be found in Shylock, and in a way that shows that Shakespeare had the New Testament Pharisees in mind. When Shylock first sees Antonio, he says: ‘How like a fawning publican he looks!’ (Act I, scene III). This is a direct reference to a New Testament passage about the Pharisee and the publican,60 and indeed the identification of Shylock as a Pharisee permeates the play. It is noteworthy that no legal crime is ascribed to Shylock at any point in his career. This is most unusual in a Jew-baiting play, and shows that Shakespeare deliberately intended to display Shylock as one who adhered to 101


the letter but not the spirit. For example, Shylock, quoting the example of Jacob, says This was a way to thrive, and he was blest: And thrift is blessing, if men steal it not. (Act I, scene III) Shylock would not in fact steal; he is not that kind of villain. Shylock in quoting from Scripture to defend his usury, shows his outward respectability. Antonio comments: An evil soul producing holy witness, Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple rotten at the heart. O what a goodly outside falsehood hath! (Ibid., 5) This is a reference to the New Testament denunciation of the Pharisees. ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.’61 Shylock is evidently intended to be an observant Jew. He does not eat pork, attends the synagogue and observes the Sabbath. He is one of those who ‘make broad their phylacteries and enlarge the borders of their garments’62 but are children of Hell. The most important instance of Shylock’s Pharisaic observance of the letter of the law is the central event of the play, the demand for the pound of flesh. Shylock’s insistence on the fulfilling of the bond is within the letter of the law and invokes the law. In the trial scene, the Pharisee’s conception of Law is supposed to come face to face with the higher Christian conception of the transcendence of Law by Mercy. Before I examine this central scene in detail, however, I shall mention a few more points at which Shylock’s identification with the Pharisee is driven home. Shylock’s use of Scripture to defend usury is intended to show not only Shylock’s respectability, but also his penchant for plausible legalistic quibbles. Shylock’s feeble argument might well be regarded as ingenious by an Elizabethan audience, and Antonio’s refutation as scholarly. Antonio regards this type of argument as rather beneath the notice of a Christian but condescends to beat the Jew at his own game. The ‘biter bit’ pattern reappears at a more crucial point in the play when it is by a legalistic quibble that Shylock is foiled of his revenge. It is part of the character of the New Testament Pharisee to be fond of arid legalistic argumentation, as when the Pharisees try to trap Jesus by subtle questions, but are foiled by an unexpected application of their own methods (e.g. Matt. 12). However, the ‘subtle’ questions of the New Testament Pharisees are just as childish by the intellectual standards of the real 102


Pharisees as the quibbling which Shakespeare put into the mouth of Shylock. It was easy enough to refute such cardboard Pharisees. In general, the character of Shylock shows a dryness and lack of warmth and spontaneity which was thought typical of the Pharisee. The tendency to legal quibbling is one aspect of this. Another is Shylock’s dry prosaic way of talking. Shylock uses very few figurative expressions, and when he does occasionally use one, it is immediately cancelled, as when he says, ‘waterthieves . . . , I mean pirates’ (Act I, scene III) or ‘my house’s, ears, I mean my casements’ (Act II, scene V). There is no poetry in him, just as there is no music. Shylock’s usury is really another aspect of this; for he is a creature who lives by calculation, not emotion. He does not venture or surrender himself in any way. The careless gambling and risk-taking of the Christians is contrasted with Shylock’s careful calculations in the moral as well as in the business sphere. The Pharisee has an account with God, in which he chalks up marks for credit and debit. The Christian ventures all on one moment of total surrender. ‘He that loseth his life the same shall save it.’ (Mark 8:85) Shylock’s dryness of emotional tone extends to his relation to his daughter. Heine tried to argue that he genuinely loved her, but a dispassionate reading shows that Shylock regards his daughter merely as his property, like his ducats. It is quite in character that Shylock should feel no real love for his daughter, for he is incapable of any kind of love. This part of the story is perhaps the most patently at variance with the facts of Jewish history. Even antisemites have attested the depth of Jewish family affection. Yet this family coldness was a logical deduction from the other qualities which Shakespeare felt compelled to give Shylock. A Pharisee, if he were really like the Christian idea of him, would be cold to his family. The best explanation of this is that the Jew is the repressive Father who is withholding the pleasure of sex from the younger generation. It is a delicious trick, therefore, to foil him by snatching away the luscious sexual object over which he stands guard like a dragon. The theme has been repeated in many modern novels, as I show in Chapter 7. The final characteristic which makes Shylock a Pharisee is his cruelty. Part of the picture of the Pharisees in the Christian mind was that they hounded Jesus to death. Though everything we know about the Pharisees from other sources contradicts this picture, and though the New Testament itself at more than one point gives a different picture (e.g. in Gamaliel’s treatment of Peter: see p. 17), the Pharisees in the Christian mind are not only cold, hypocritical and self-righteous, but also bloodthirsty and cruel. So when Shylock strops his knife against his shoe, drooling with pleasure at the thought of cutting into Antonio’s flesh, this is no mere Grand Guignol melodrama. It is a re-enactment of the Crucifixion. Antonio is a Christ-figure. His passivity and sexlessness are part of this identification. Like Jesus, he is paying with his flesh and his life for the debts of sinful mankind, who are represented by Bassanio, and the Jew is again the executioner. True, the execution is stayed, and the 103


Jew suffers instead. This too is part of the mechanism of the Christian myth. The protean part played unwillingly in that myth by the Jew, as executioner, scapegoat, Devil, Father-God and Christ-substitute is the mythic substratum of antisemitism. Shylock sharpening his knife reminds us not only of the Pharisees, but also of the Jew in the blood-libel ballads, who sharpens his knife to kill the Christian child, whose blood he allegedly drinks on the Passover. Yet the Pharisee and the fantasied child-killer are really one; for Jesus is the innocent child who was killed at Passover. The blood-libel, the disgrace of Christendom, arose directly out of the Christian myth. In the Court scene, the Pharisee code of justice comes face to face with the Christian doctrine of Mercy. Shylock says, ‘I stand for judgment’ (Act IV, scene I), and later, ‘I stand here for law’ (ibid.). The scene is a confrontation between the Old Law and the New. But the confrontation is framed in the usual Christian terms, by which the Jewish Law is misrepresented. For example, there is Portia’s famous speech on Mercy, ‘The quality of mercy is not strained . . .’, the classic statement in literature of what the Christian thinks to be the point of superiority of Christianity over Judaism: Though justice be thy plea, consider this, That in the course of justice none of us Should see salvation; we do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy. (Ibid.) It is true that it is a Christian idea, not a Jewish one, that ‘in the course of justice none of us/Should see salvation’. The whole idea of ‘salvation’ is un-Jewish; for the Jews, not believing that the whole of humanity was condemned to Hell by the Fall, saw no necessity for the rescue-operation which the Christians called ‘salvation’. The Jews believed that there was an ‘evil inclination’ in Man, but that he was capable of overcoming it by his own efforts. Moreover, the Jews did not believe in eternal damnation for anyone. The Pelagian heresy in Christianity was the nearest the Christians ever got to the Jewish point of view; but that genial heresy could not survive against St Augustine’s irrefutable expositions of Paul’s Epistles. In other words, the Jews were not as interested in the Mercy of God as the Christians were because the Jewish God was not so cruel and arbitrary in the first place. The Jews did not stand so much in need of a doctrine of Mercy, because they believed that God was merciful enough to give them a chance from the start. The traditional Christian believed that God had condemned him to eternal Hell before he was even born; and then by an incredible and unlooked-for act of Mercy (paid for by Jesus’ blood) reprieved him. However, this is not to say that the doctrine of God’s Mercy has no place in Judaism. Portia’s speech on Mercy, despite the evident belief of 104


Shakespeare (and of his editors) that it is pure Christianity, is full of ideas which are ultimately derived from the Judaism of the Pharisees. For example, when Portia says of Mercy, ‘It is an attribute to God himself’ (ibid.) she is referring to the doctrine of the Divine Attributes which came into Christianity through the Jewish writers Philo, Avicebron and Maimonides. The two main Attributes (middoth) of God, in the Jewish writings, were justice and mercy. Of course, I am not suggesting that Shakespeare was aware of the Pharisee origin of the doctrine of the Attributes, any more than he was aware of the Pharisee origin of the prohibition against usury. It is merely ironical that both Antonio and Portia preach Christianity to a Jew with doctrines unconsciously derived from Judaism. The Jewish doctrine that God’s justice is tempered by mercy has its repercussions in the sphere of human justice. Human justice, too, the Pharisees taught, must be tempered by mercy and must breathe the spirit of mercy. The Pharisees virtually abolished the death penalty. Portia says And earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice. (Ibid.) There could not be a more characteristically Jewish doctrine than this. But mercy ‘seasoning’ justice is a very different thing from mercy taking the place of justice. If the history of Jewish jurisprudence is compared with the history of Christian jurisprudence, it very soon appears which doctrine leads to more mercy in practice. What would the Pharisees have thought of trials by ordeal, confessions by torture, the mutilation and hanging of thieves? Moreover, if the mercy of God is available for anything that one does, there is very little motive to develop a code of merciful behaviour towards fellow human beings. Shakespeare brings out, more than Marlowe, not just the theological but the psychological pattern of the conflict between Christianity and Judaism. In particular, he portrays Shylock as the archetypal Father. Shylock is an old man, unlike Barabas who was in the prime of life. An old man is more clearly a father-figure. To the antisemitic caricaturist, there are no young male Jews. The old man is a miser, which means that he is arresting the flow of pleasure and locking it up into hard money-counters, which represent pleasures denied. When the Christian steals the daughter Jessica, he steals the ducats too, and the happy pair go on an orgy of spending, in which the pleasures locked up in the ducats are released. The old man himself is sexless; his passion goes into accumulating money, which means power; that is, the power to thwart the desires of the young. Instead of allowing the young to breed, he makes his money breed, and this only makes the young feel more frustrated. 105


In The Merchant of Venice, the battle-line is drawn between the old and the young. The mood is set by Gratiano’s speech at the start: Why should a man, whose blood is warm within, Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster? (Act I, scene I) Even the scene of Portia’s judgment contributes to this theme. The children dress up in grave grown-up clothes and play a trick on the grown-ups, beating them at their own game of serious solemn quibbling. Shylock is the main target; and he stands for Judaism; and Christians set themselves the ideal of becoming as little children. But Judaism is the religion of God the Father; and Jews set themselves the ideal of growing up. Shylock is a Pharisee, and the Pharisees too are father-figures. The infant Jesus stands surrounded by these grave, bearded figures, astonishing them with his precocity. They do not understand the wisdom of the Child. Later they become hostile figures, trying to trap the Child into damaging admissions of his subversive intentions. Finally, they become cruel, destroying greybeards, hounding the Child to his death. Jesus, in the Christian myth, like all romantic Heroes, like the Young Gods in the cults of Adonis, Attis, Tammuz and Dionysus, dies young; and because he dies young, he remains eternally young. Shylock, then, represents the Father; both because he is the old miser of the comic tradition and because he is a Pharisee. But simply as a Jew, he is a Father-figure. I would even suggest that the hatred directed against the Jew as Father-figure is a reflection of a deeply buried hatred of the Father-God himself, who in Christian theory (but not in Jewish theory) demands the eternal torture of all mankind, unless he is bought off with the blood of his Son. We should remember, also, that the Devil also is a father, being called the father of lies and ‘the ruler of this world’; and Shylock is constantly associated with the Devil, as when Antonio says, ‘the devil can quote scripture for his purpose’ (Act I, scene III). So Shakespeare’s play touches on the very deep Oedipal concerns which underlie the conflict between Christianity and Judaism. One is torn between admiration for Shakespeare’s ability to contact these levels, and pain and regret that he uses his insights to sharpen the conflict by taking sides against the Jew. The Renaissance, like the Reformation, broadened the perspective of mankind and deepened the feeling of tolerance towards other cultures and appreciation of their achievements. The extent to which this tolerance and appreciation could be extended even to the Jews, despite the legacy of contempt and hatred with which they were saddled, is shown in the work of some Renaissance figures such as Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin, Arias Montano and others.

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Shakespeare, however, used the new tools of the Renaissance to reinforce the old stereotype of the Jews as impeding the progress of mankind. He breathed new life into the medieval drama in which the Jews were vilified as inhuman legalists. His Shylock is a repetition of the New Testament misrepresentation of the Pharisees. Just because this is not vulgar antisemitism, but antisemitism on a profound theological level (together with the living, breathing power which only Shakespeare could infuse into his characters), this is a most dangerous episode in the history of antisemitic propaganda. It is also an example of the fact that great art and antisemitism can co-exist; we shall find further examples of this in the work of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Art is not the same thing as truth. Art arises from emotion; and the emotions arising from the great religious conflict between Christianity and Judaism are sufficient to give rise to the possibility of antisemitic art, which is all the more dangerous when it is the product of genius.

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9 THE ANTISEMITISM OF T.S. ELIOT

Eliot’s antisemitism has been a subject of much discussion.63 Hard-core devotees continue to deny that he was antisemitic at all. Others admit, and even exaggerate, his antisemitism, but regard it as of no significance, a mere pathological aberration of an otherwise great writer. The Times obituarist of Ezra Pound, for example, referred to Eliot’s ‘almost insane physical nausea’ about Jews, contrasting this unfavourably with Pound’s ‘anti-Jewishness’ which was ‘simplistic and ideological’.64 A close study of Eliot’s antisemitism, however, shows that it was even more ideological than Pound’s, being derived from the cultural and religious tradition of Christendom, as mediated, in particular, by the romantic medievalism of Henry Adams and Charles Maurras. We shall see, moreover, that antisemitism is a natural concomitant of the sacrificial view of life which was Eliot’s inspiration from the time of his earliest writings. The volume of Eliot’s antisemitic writing is very small, compared with Pound’s outpourings; and the theme disappears in Eliot’s work altogether after the early 1930s, when Eliot, no doubt, became dismayed by the direction antisemitism was taking in Germany. Nevertheless, it is impossible to ignore this thread in Eliot’s writing, both because of the virulence and emotional intensity of the antisemitic passages embedded at the core of some of Eliot’s best work, and because of the seriousness with which he himself regarded the matter (as is shown by his proposal in After Strange Gods to impose a quota on Jewish residents of the United States).65 Moreover, Eliot never disowned the passages in question, and continued to allow their re-publication, with very minor alterations of punctuation (e.g. ‘Jew’ for ‘jew’) which rendered them slightly less offensive. The exception was After Strange Gods, which he did not allow to he re-published; and though it seems probable that this was because of the antisemitic passage, he never offered this as the reason. He is reported to have told a friend, ‘I am not an antisemite and never have been. It is a terrible slander on a man.’66 However, he never offered any public defence; and it was hardly a matter in which he was entitled to stand on his dignity, once the facts of the Holocaust became known. 108

THE ANTISEMITISM OF T.S. ELIOT

It seems, then, that like many antisemites, he had some private definition of antisemitism by which he felt himself justified in disclaiming this label; what this definition may have been will be discussed shortly. It seems probable that his attitude toward the Jews did not change fundamentally, despite his decision to refrain from mentioning them in his later work. Heroic efforts have been made to deny that there is any antisemitism in the well-known passages in Eliot’s early work where Jews are portrayed. It has been argued for example, that the ‘jew’ (in ‘Gerontion’), and Bleistein (in ‘Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar’) are simply unpleasant people who happen to be Jews, and that no slur is intended on Jews as a whole. However, this does not begin to be an adequate description of Eliot’s attitude towards the Jewishness of his characters. The Jewishness is not something separate from the unpleasantness, but intimately connected with it. Take this passage, for example, from one of Eliot’s finest poems, ‘Gerontion’: My house is a decayed house, And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. (Eliot, 1969, p. 37) Is the ‘jew’, as has been suggested, merely a ‘historical type’, not intended to be representative of the Jews as a whole? One would have to be very innocent, and very ignorant of antisemitic literature and of the history of antisemitism to believe this. The passage is full of allusions to the stock accusations against the Jews, to be found in profusion at the time in productions ranging from popular fiction to ‘scientific’ works of antisemitic theory. The points continually hammered home in these productions were that the Jews were a disintegrative force in Western culture, that they had no loyalties or roots, that they were animal-like and menacing in their fertility, that they were without cultural ideals, that they sought power over Gentiles, that they congregated in cities and had no feeling for the land. All these points are to be found in the earlier passage. The ‘jew’ is associated with decay and dilapidation: he is a rootless, restless cosmopolitan, moving from city to city, born on the move in a lodginghouse; he is ‘spawned’ in frightening and disgusting proliferation like an insect, and ‘squats’ like an animal; he owns the house of the Gentile, but remains an unassimilated onlooker or voyeur outside it; he is a creature of the crowded city, not of the organic unity of the countryside. There is the typical antisemitic paradox of the Jew as an agent of disintegration and death, who yet manifests an evil, enviable energy and reproductive faculty; the energy of the bacillus, or of the ‘spider’ and ‘weevil’ mentioned later in the poem; an energy which contrasts with the lethargy and self-distrust of the forces making for life. The similarities in all this to the standard antisemitic charges preclude the possibility that Eliot is presenting a portrait of a single unrepresentative Jew or even an unrepresentative type of Jew. 109


However, there is a valid point to make here that leads into a more subtle kind of defence of Eliot against the charge of antisemitism. The ‘jew’ in ‘Gerontion’ is, after all, not really a dramatis persona; Eliot is not here portraying a ‘character’ such as one might find in a novel. The ‘jew’ is a symbol or metaphor, a kind of hieroglyph for the forces of disintegration in life, for the closing-in of ‘the world’ as Gerontion stiffens into old age and travels farther from his youthful Spring vision of the Christ-child (who is also ‘Christ the tiger’, a totemic sacrifice). This is a poem, not a factual treatise; in a poem, the poetical counters and devices should not be scrutinized with the literalness one gives to a sociological tract. If a poet uses, say, the image of a bat to convey a sense of the sinister, this is not because he detests bats in real life; he may know that they are in fact harmless and useful creatures whose sinister aura is the result of a series of fortuitous historical, literary and psychological circumstances; yet those circumstances may have made the bat the indispensable symbol at that point in his poem. Similarly, the function of the ‘jew’ in the poem is not to embody the poet’s views on the Jewish question, but (because of the associations of the word ‘jew’) to evoke the appropriate aura of seediness, menace and alienation, which belong to the situation of the only character with whom the poem is really concerned, Gerontion. This approach to the question seems very plausible, and is probably present in some form in the minds of most of those who feel impatient when the matter is raised. Here, for example is a typical formulation (from an article on ‘The Waste Land’): ‘. . . these remarks, like the tediously many of late which go on about Eliot’s alleged antisemitism, assume that this poem and others by him direct our attention on to the world that we experience in our daily encounters, in which every voice we hear is spoken by some person, that person socially conditioned and with some design upon us. But the voice . . . is a voice that sounds not in society, not even “in the poet’s head,” but specifically in a poem, and in a poem which is haughtily indifferent to any society at all . . .’67 Plausible as this argument sounds, it rests on a very simple fallacy. It assumes that a person’s responsibilities as a poet can be neatly cordoned off and separated from his responsibilities as a moral being. Actually, the argument defeats itself; for if taken seriously it makes Eliot into a far more immoral person than he would appear to be by the original charge of antisemitism. To be an antisemite is bad enough; but to be the kind of person who uses an antisemitic stereotype in which he himself does not believe merely to give impact to his verse is to be thoroughly despicable. It is far more creditable to Eliot to say that he was a sincere antisemite than that he used the word ‘jew’, as a conscious artist, in the awareness that its historical and literary overtones would so arouse atavistic fears and prejudices in his readers as to create a poetical atmosphere, mood or pattern at which he was aiming. This, if artistically successful, would indeed be what William James called the philosophy of George Santayana – ‘a perfection of rottenness’ (The Letters of William James). 110


Fortunately, there is no need to suppose that Eliot was quite so corrupt. If the passage in ‘Gerontion’ were all we had to go by, we might perhaps conclude that Eliot was on this one occasion tempted to utilize the emotive power of the antisemitic image, derived from popular literature and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in order to intensify Gerontion’s sense of plight. But the other passages, now to be considered, are numerous and weighty enough to rule out such an interpretation, unless we are to think of Eliot as a cynically wicked person, prepared to make repeated use of the misery of a slandered race as a poetical device. Eliot used antisemitism because he sincerely believed in it; and this is not to say that ‘Gerontion’ is a poem about antisemitism, in the same sense as Drumont’s La France juive devant l’opinion was a book about antisemitism. ‘Gerontion’ is a poem about Gerontion; or rather, it is a poem about growing old, about compromise with the world, about the dissatisfaction and lethargy which are the price of retaining the vision of youth and the hope of renewal. It is quite true that the ‘jew’ is not a character in the poem but a symbol. He symbolizes the forces of this world, which conspire to obliterate the vision of youth; but the reason why the ‘jew’ has his symbolic force is not simply that Eliot calculated that his readers would react to the word ‘jew’ in this way, but because he reacted in this way himself, because that is what the Jews meant to him. A poem is not propaganda for any particular views; but in its imagery and symbolism it draws on everything that the poet sincerely feels and believes about the world; and if there is no background of such sincerity, the imagery will be either lifeless or enlivened by mere malevolence. Other ways of defending Eliot from the charge of antisemitism have been tried, but before discussing these we had better have more of the evidence before us. Even more blatant than the passage in ‘Gerontion’ is the poem ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’, which contains the following stanzas: But this or such was Bleistein’s way: A saggy bending of the knees And elbows, with the palms turned out, Chicago Semite Viennese. A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot. Money in furs. The boatman smiles. Princess Volupine extends A meagre, blue-nailed phthisic hand 111


To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights, She entertains Sir Ferdinand Klein. Who dipped the lion’s wings And flea’d his rump and pared his claws? Thought Burbank, meditating on Time’s ruins, and the seven laws. (Eliot, 1969, pp. 40–1) Bleistein, like the ‘jew’ in ‘Gerontion’ is a rootless cosmopolitan, ‘Chicago Semite Viennese’ – echoing ‘Antwerp . . . Brussels . . . London’. The mention of Chicago is particularly revealing, as has been pointed out by Gabriel Pearson.68 Eliot came from St Louis, the importance of which as a cultural and industrial centre declined during his childhood because of the expansion of nearby Chicago, largely owing to the influx of European immigrants, many of them Jews fleeing from persecution in Europe. Eliot’s antisemitism, quite apart from its wider implications, had a specifically American origin in the distaste and dismay felt by patricians like Henry Adams and even Henry James at this influx. (Of course exactly similar feelings were experienced by patricians in the other countries affected, including England.) These immigrants seemed to people like Henry Adams to be barbarous alien hordes, devoid of all culture, but with a lust for money and success that was both loathsome and enviable. (Adams writes of himself: ‘Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow – not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs – but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he’.) Adams did not know, or wish to know that this ‘weird Yiddish’ was a language with a longer history than the English language. He did not know that the ‘furtive’ Jew, who (he wrote) ‘makes me creep’, brought with him from the ‘reeking’ Ghetto a cultural tradition in both Yiddish and Hebrew in comparison with which the acquisitions of the patrician Adams were parvenu. He did not in the least consider that these Jews were the victims of persecution, or that the Ghetto with which he taunted them was the location of their sufferings. And similarly Eliot (whose poems, particularly ‘Gerontion’, are much influenced, even to the extent of verbal quotation, by his reading of Adams) shows not the slightest human feeling or understanding of Bleistein, or rather of the people of whom Bleistein is a caricature. ‘Chicago Semite Viennese.’ We have seen some of the associations of ‘Chicago’, and it may be interesting to pursue the associations of the other two words. The word ‘Semite’ is evidently not intended to make Bleistein any more attractive. In the popular thrillers of the time, such as those of John Buchan, the villain was inevitably described as having a ‘Semitic’ look. This, strangely, did not mean that he was an Arab, for Arabs, in such fiction were generally rather dashing and noble. Antisemitism, from its inception to the time of Hitler (who was very friendly with that pure-blooded Semite, the 112


Mufti of Jerusalem) never really meant anything except Jew-phobia, and ‘Semite’ was a pseudo-scientific euphemism for ‘Jew’. This shifty procedure of hiding Jew-phobia behind an insincerely held ‘scientific’ theory of ‘race’ derives from the nineteenth century and it is disappointing to find Eliot subscribing to this procedure, for in general, his antisemitism belongs to the tradition of Christianity, a tradition in which racialism, or the pretence of it, plays no official part. The word ‘Viennese’ too repays some reflection. Bleistein is, in origin, a Viennese Jew, and this description evidently carries for Eliot connotations of grossness and lack of culture. Bleistein stares at the Canaletto with complete incomprehension. Such ‘protozoic’ Viennese Jews as Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Moritz Schlick, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler, Stefan Zweig and Max Reinhardt played no part in Eliot’s concept of a Viennese Jew, though Vienna was at this very time the centre of a great efflorescence of Jewish culture. It is ironic that one of the greatest experts on Italian Renaissance art in this century was Bernard Berenson, a Jew with a background very similar to that of Bleistein. Eliot’s selection of a Viennese Jew as the representative of modern philistinism is a gaffe comparable to that of Shakespeare when he made his Jewish prototype, Shylock, a hater of music. Yet to the true antisemite, this would be no argument; for to Henry Adams, for example, a cultured Jew was even more hateful than an uncultured one. The idea found in Maurras, Barrès and Adams that ‘Christian’ culture is debased by the participation of Jews and other aliens is included in Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’ in the figures of Mr Silvero and Hakagawa, ‘bowing among the Titians’. Yet in the line ‘Chicago Semite Viennese’, the gravamen of the charge against Bleistein does not lie in the words taken separately, but in their combination. The point is not so much that Bleistein is uncultured, as that he belongs to no particular culture; he is an unsavoury mixture. He represents the disintegration of Western culture, and the approach of barbarism. He represents, in fact, the new America, gawking uncomprehendingly at Europe. The other Jew in the poem, Sir Ferdinand Klein, represents the infiltrating Jew, who corrupts European culture by participating in it and by financing it, and who is welcomed by Princess Volupine, the representative of that culture in decline. (The separation of ‘Sir Ferdinand’ from ‘Klein’ by line and stanza heightens the irony of his infiltration; and ‘Klein’ at the beginning of a stanza echoes ‘Declines’ at the beginning of a previous stanza.) Burbank represents the older America, admiring and imitating European culture from afar, and, with Baedeker in hand, unable to save it from Sir Ferdinand, just as he is unable to preserve his native American cultural tradition from the philistinism of Bleistein. In the background (‘On the Rialto once’) lies the shadow of a third Jew, Shylock, who plotted to overthrow the ideal Christian, Antonio, by financial manipulation and usury. There is no reason to suppose that Eliot shared the well-meaning liberal-Romantic misconception of Shylock as a sympathetic character. 113


The whole poem thus contains a fairly complete antisemitic system, and can best be understood in the light of this system. This is not to say that the poem is about antisemitism; it is about the situation of a cultivated young American vis-à-vis European culture, and about his sense of helplessness in the face of the various threats to a civilization to which he feels himself deeply, though peripherally, attached, rather like the situation of, say, a Rome-educated British chieftain at the time of the barbarian invasions. But the symbol of the threat is the Jew, in his two manifestations of open philistinism and insidious infiltration. As a symbolist poet, Eliot required, as the ‘objective correlative’ of his sense of cultural decay, an image or symbol which would strike at the recesses of his own and his readers’ unconscious mind, and the archetypal image of the Jew was singularly fitted to do just this. It is an interesting reflection that the symbolist method, which is supposed to produce the ‘music’ of poetry, can in practice lead to surrender to atavistic social prejudices; for poetry does not distinguish between genuinely psychological archetypal images and those which have been socially induced by centuries-long indoctrination. To Eliot, the ‘jew’ image, at this time, must have seemed as right and inevitable as his other symbols, such as the rat, the geranium, the crab, the fog or the mermaids. It has taken Hitler’s Holocaust to shake the hold of this image on the European imagination. While antisemitism is not precisely the theme of the poem, it is an important element in the total theme and the poem cannot be understood at all if the antisemitism is regarded as incidental, or as a mere outburst of personal spleen. It is a systematic, or philosophical type of antisemitism of the American–Bostonian type exemplified by Henry Adams; deriving at one remove, from right-wing French religious anti-Judaism (Drumont, Maurras and the anti-Dreyfusards) and ultimately from the anti-Judaism of medieval Catholicism.69 This kind of antisemitism is in fact far more poisonous and dangerous to the Jews than the unthinking Jew-hatred of the people, which remains at the personal level, unless whipped up by agitators with a theory. At the same time, despite its theoretical, philosophical tone, it includes the populist Jew-hatred as an ingredient, and can be venomous enough in expression. In this poem the lines, ‘The rats are underneath the piles. / The jew is underneath the lot’ express such venom that even Eliot’s most dedicated white-washers prefer to ignore them altogether. Even more embarrassing has been the bringing to light of another poem about Bleistein in the first draft of ‘The Waste Land’. The poem is entitled ‘Dirge’: Full fathom five your Bleistein lies Under the flatfish and the squids. Graves’ Disease in a dead jew’s eyes! When the crabs have eat the lids. Lower than the wharf rats dive Though he suffer a sea-change Still expensive rich and strange 114


That is lace that was his nose See upon his back he lies (Bones peep through the ragged toes) With a stare of dull surprise Flood tide and ebb tide Roll him gently side to side See the lips unfold unfold From the teeth, gold in gold Lobsters hourly keep close watch Hark! now I hear them scratch, scratch, scratch. (Eliot, 1971, p. 119) This poem, written after Burbank, is of a much cruder type. The parody of Shakespeare’s The Tempest song is feeble, and the sneer at Bleistein’s nose is at a schoolboy level of antisemitism. The sheer aggression of this picture of Bleistein being eaten up by sea-creatures might lead us into thinking that the poem is an antisemitic lampoon of no more than pathological interest. This would be a mistake, for the poem, though artistically a failure, is serious in intention. We may note, first of all, parallels with ‘Burbank’ and other Eliot poems. Bleistein’s ‘protrusive eye’ now turns out to be the effect of ‘Graves’ Disease’. Instead of being under the rats, who are undermining the piles (i.e. a King Rat attacking the foundations of society), Bleistein is lying dead ‘lower than the wharf rats dive’. The lustreless stare at the Canaletto has become ‘a stare of dull surprise’ at his own death. His teeth, ‘gold in gold’ (i.e. yellow with gold fillings – the first version had ‘black yellow and gold’) are paralleled by the ‘golden grin’ of ‘the man with heavy eyes’ (again the protuberant eyes) who appears alone with ‘Rachel née Rabinovitch’ in ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’. ( John Harrison’s conjecture that the ‘man with heavy eyes’ is a Jew is thus confirmed; note too that he is ‘Outside the window, leaning in’, just as the ‘jew’ in ‘Gerontion’ ‘squats on the window sill’.) The poem thus registers the defeat and death of Bleistein, who, in Burbank, was triumphant. The protuberant eyes which stared through a window or the glass of an art-gallery at things which they ought not to see, are now staring in death. But the poem is not just a savage paean of victory over Bleistein. It is also a representation of the purgation of Bleistein. The poem shows many connections with the theme of purgation expressed throughout ‘The Waste Land’. The very form of the poem, as a parody of ‘Full fathom five’, connects with The Tempest associations which pervade ‘The Waste Land’ (e.g. ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’) and which evoke the theme of regeneration through ‘death by water’ or baptism. There are strong connections (despite a complete difference in mood) between ‘Dirge’ and Section IV of ‘The Waste Land’, entitled ‘Death by Water’. Phlebas the Phoenician is a muted and idealized version of Bleistein. Just as the crabs have eaten the lids of Bleistein’s eyes, so the bones of the drowned Phlebas 115


have been ‘picked’ by the current. Just as the tides roll Bleistein ‘gently side to side’, so the drowned Phlebas ‘rose and fell’. Even the fact that Phlebas is a Phoenician is a muted version of Bleistein’s Jewishness; for the Phoenicians were a trading, Hebrew-speaking nation, who had been treated in Flaubert’s Salambo as the ancient analogues of the modern Jewish bourgeoisie. (Carthage, it should be remembered, was a Phoenician colony.) It seems possible, then, that ‘Death by Water’ actually takes the place in ‘The Waste Land’ vacated by the rejected ‘Dirge’. Why should this substitution have taken place? It would be comforting to think that Eliot repented the savage antisemitism of ‘Dirge’, and for that reason substituted the sweetly elegiac ‘Death by Water’. However, there are considerations which make this hypothesis untenable. Eliot, from the first, had a dual method of approaching the theme of purgation: a ‘sweet’ method, and a ‘sordid’ method. This may he explained by the simple fact that while purgation implies cleanliness, it also implies dirtiness (as in The Water-Babies, when Tom in Ellie’s boudoir thinks she must be a very dirty girl to need so much washing-apparatus). Or, to put the matter more theologically, it is only when we realize how sinful we are that we are on the road to becoming virtuous. ‘Death by Water’ is derived from a poem, written in French by Eliot, called ‘Dans le Restaurant’ (Eliot, 1969, p. 51), in which the two methods are combined. A dirty waiter (who has told of a moment of sexual ecstasy in his boyhood) is given money by the poet to go and have a bath; the scene then suddenly changes to where the drowned body of ‘Phlébas, le Phénicien’ is being cleansed by an under-sea current (the French ‘l’emporta’ has the double meaning ‘cleansed’ and ‘carried’). Following ‘Dirge’ in the manuscript is a fragment, also rejected, which treats the theme in the ‘sweet’ manner: Those are pearls that were his eyes. See! And the crab clambers through his stomach, the eel grows big And the torn algae drift above him, And the sea colander. Still and quiet brother are you still and quiet. (Eliot, 1971, p. 123) Why were these attractive lines rejected? I suggest that Eliot wanted to combine the ‘sweet’ and ‘sordid’ modes, but having rightly rejected ‘Dirge’ on artistic grounds, decided to fall back on his original treatment in ‘Dans le Restaurant’, with some slight alterations in the direction of the sordid or grotesque (e.g. ‘picked his bones’). ‘Death by Water’ remains decidedly on the ‘sweet’ side, but the counterpoise is provided in ‘The Waste Land’ by the figure of Mr Eugenides, the seedy Levantine who is Phlebas’s modern version. The only remnant of Bleistein after this revision is the phrase ‘Gentile or Jew’ (not contained in ‘Dans le Restaurant’). This analysis suggests a defence of Eliot’s Jewish passages which his supporters have overlooked. It appears that even such a virulently antisemitic poem as ‘Dirge’ is not merely an instance of ‘physical antisemitism’ or of ‘an 116


insane physical nausea about Jews’. There is a theological point in the poem. Bleistein is undergoing a painful purgatory by water, just as Gerontion does, in imagination, in ‘the Gulf’, and just as Newman’s Gerontius does, in the poem from which Eliot derived the title and some of the ideas of ‘Gerontion’. Can it not be that Bleistein the Jew represents humanity itself, with its encrustation of sin and its need for purgation? This is the most plausible defence of Eliot so far, and it deserves serious consideration. We should remember the connection between water-purgatory and baptism, which involves death and rebirth. Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life . . . our old man is crucified with him.70 This connection between ‘death by water’ and baptism is reinforced by ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ (Eliot, 1969, pp. 54–5), where we find the same alternation of ‘sweet’ and ‘sordid’ as we have already noted in ‘Death by Water’, but this time related to baptism, in the contrast between the Baptism of Christ and Sweeney having his bath. It is surely part at least of the meaning of ‘Dirge’ that Bleistein is undergoing baptism. The cruel imagery of being eaten by sea-creatures arises from the relation between baptism and crucifixion. It is an image of sacrifice, of which baptism is one form or symbol; and the cruelty of the imagery is no more to be taken literally than the imagery of ‘Ash Wednesday’, in which the poet is eaten alive by leopards, and which relates to the sacrifice of bodily desires involved in membership of the Church. Moreover, the imagery of ‘being eaten’ is a basic religious symbol, derived, it is true, from prehistoric totem-feasts,71 but in Christianity related to self-surrender and incorporation in the Divine. Bleistein, seen in this light, is a sacrificial figure, his very grotesqueness and diseased fleshiness evoking the ‘old man’, or humanity, which needs to be purged away. The title of the poem ‘Dirge’ is not after all ironical, but a reference to the dirge sung for Adonis, who (in some versions of the rite) died by water. The fact that Bleistein, Phlebas, Mr Eugenides and Gerontion are all merchants, involved in ‘the profit and the loss’, means merely that they are all ordinary human beings, soiled by the calculations of everyday living, as opposed to the martyrs, who do not survive into old age, and do not count the profit and the loss. If Bleistein has been chosen as a symbol of soiled humanity, so have others who are not Jews: Sweeney, for example, and ‘Gerontion’ himself. Yet I am afraid that even this will not serve to defend Eliot against the charge of antisemitism; though I have a strong feeling that it is the defence that he himself would have raised, if he had ever deigned to defend himself. Christians often adopt a very similar argument nowadays to explain the 117


antisemitism of the Gospels. They say that the Jews are not represented as especially wicked in killing Christ; they are simply the representatives of humanity; they may even (in one variant) have a God-given role in this respect, a kind of martyrdom. ‘We are all guilty’ – but the Jews were chosen to bear the blame; to suffer damnation for mankind, just as Jesus suffered the physical doom that was due to humanity. On this view, the Jews become a kind of black Christ – the objectification of the doctrine by which Christ took upon himself the sins of humanity, and thus, in effect, became the archsinner himself. Or the matter may be put more metaphorically: humanity should look at the Jews in order to see the image of itself; they are like a nightmare image seen in a mirror. Here is a summary of a modern German defence of the Gospel according to John, the most anti-Jewish of the Gospels: ‘The “Jews” are not a historical people in the fourth gospel but “stylized types” exemplifying and embodying the world’s lack of faith. John’s intention was not to vilify real Jews – his polemics were “purely the result of theological reflection” ’. On this Joachim Kahl comments: ‘Has any form of antisemitism ever had anything essentially to do with the Jews as a historical people? Whether they are defamed as the children of the devil or whether they are branded as an inferior race of people is really beside the point. Both these attitudes are mythological and both are the result of the same need to have an enemy.’ If Eliot, as seems likely, conceived that he was treating his Jewish characters in some such mythological way, then he was guilty of an antisemitism of a very subtle and pernicious kind. To regard the Jew as a symbol of humanity is one thing; James Joyce did that in an unobjectionable way in Ulysses. But to take the Jew as a symbol of fallen, unregenerate humanity is an entirely different thing, and is to reinforce a myth which has caused such intense suffering. Whatever may be true about John’s Gospel, the last person for a modern author to take as such a symbol, after what has happened in Christendom, should be the Jew. For the historical effect of the Jew-myth has been the direct opposite of the effect claimed for it by modern apologists; it has not served to heighten people’s sense of responsibility but very much to lessen it: to make them shelve their guilt and load it on to the Jew. True, Eliot had other symbols for unregenerate humanity; but only one of them, Sweeney, is not an echo and disguise of Bleistein; and Sweeney is not so much an image of guilt as of unshapen, ignorant humanity, of the body as yet unredeemed by the soul (Caliban), rather than the traitor who consciously betrayed the highest. ‘Dirge’ is an artistic failure, probably because in this poem, Eliot allowed personal distaste to dominate over antisemitic symbolism. But ‘Burbank’ is not an artistic failure; in purely artistic terms, it is a triumph. In a poem of 32 lines, in a highly original idiom marked by wit, elegance and an astonishingly dexterous handling of literary allusion, Eliot has expressed a whole conspectus of the cultural plight of the modern world. It is not surprising that Eliot himself was very pleased with it. He called it ‘intensely serious’ and wrote that this poem and ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’ were ‘among the best that I have 118


ever done’.72 It should not be a matter for surprise that antisemitism can inspire literary excellence. It has done so many times before; Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice are obvious examples. For antisemitism is not a superficial thing; it has deep roots in mythology and in the history of religion. The Jew himself, as a symbol of evil, has been given this role by a culturally determined process; but the need for such a symbol is part of the human psyche. Pagan religion solved the problem of guilt by sacrifice, that is by the restitution of life to the dying god (dying because of the tribe’s guilt and pollution) through the death of their own best man. But there was always the dark figure of the Sacrificer, representing the guilt of the salvation-bringing Sacrifice itself. The Sacrificer (Cain, the Scapegoat, Typhon, Mot, Hother) has to be driven into the desert, where he bears the sign of murder, though he never quite loses his priest-like function. This is the role assigned to the Jew in Christianity, a role the Jews always refused to accept, though the legend of the Wandering Jew was a Christian wish-fulfilment by which the Jew was imagined to have accepted his role. To Maurras, Adams and Eliot, the Jew is no longer thought of as threatening the body of Christ by desecrating stolen wafers or crucifying Christian children, as in medieval times; but he is still threatening the Body of Christ (i.e. the Church) by denying the efficacy of the Sacrifice which sustains that Body in being. By inspiring humanistic movements (democracy, socialism, industrialism), by insisting on that ‘demand of the damned’, justice, by embracing this world instead of regarding it as a waiting-period for the next, by embracing adulthood and maturity (what Eliot calls ‘old age’) as positive values, and thus abandoning the beatific vision of childhood (here Eliot joins the tradition of Romanticism to that of Christianity), the Jew is the enemy of the whole sacrificial concept, substituting for it the concept of progress and the perfectibility of man. All this can be read in that superb poem ‘Gerontion’, which contains in embryo the whole of Eliot’s literary output. Whether Eliot and his French forerunners are right in giving this important historical role to the Jews is a matter for serious consideration. Certainly Judaism is the religion which, more than any other, gives the lie to the doctrine of sacrifice, by refusing to allow any place for the dying-andresurrected god. Unfortunately, however, Eliot is not engaged in a serious debate with Judaism. He shows no awareness that Judaism has anything to say in answer to the charges made against it. Like his forerunners in the history of modern antisemitism, he sees the Jews as the enemy, and Judaism not as an alternative or rival philosophy, but merely as the threatening miasma of materialism that stands over against Christian idealism. Eliot’s antisemitism is a unique concoction, blended from medieval Christianity, French fascism, fin-de-siècle romanticism, and Frazerian anthropology; but it is ultimately explicable in terms of the Jewish–Christian conflict and the Christian diabolization of the Jews.

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10 THE ANTISEMITISM OF EZRA POUND

If there is one word which provides the clue to the life-work of Ezra Pound, it is ‘productivity’. To him, man was essentially a productive animal, and if one thinks of Pound’s aestheticism in this light, it ceases to be an escape from life, a charge that could be put plausibly against previous Ivory Tower aestheticism. On the contrary, the life of the ordinary worker is subsumed under that of the artist. Even animals and insects are for Pound essentially artists: Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance. (Canto 81) Compare with this the evocation (in Canto 17) of man building out of marble as naturally as the insect builds its arbour of green: . . . and the white forest of marble, bent bough over bough, The pleached arbour of stone . . . . Everything that helped production was good; everything that hindered production was bad. That was Pound’s simple creed, and it informed all his work as an artist, as an economist and as an impresario of the arts. His aim was not merely production but productivity; a multifarious busy activity, continually branching out in an open-ended way. Not for him the finished product, with its air of completion and perfection. That would suggest that work can come to an end. His poems all capture the atmosphere of work in progress, of conceptions about to flower into performance; and as an entrepreneur of the arts he was continually helping to bring talent to parturition point, to see that good work was not stillborn, to goad and harry those who stood in the way of production. His whole interest in economics arose from his fury about 120

THE ANTISEMITISM OF EZRA POUND

the financial difficulties of artists such as Joyce and Eliot, whom he launched and kept afloat by ceaseless, selfless manipulation of patrons and the public. Unfortunately, Pound came to think of the Jews as the supreme anti-artists, the enemies of production. Pound’s antisemitism was at first an unthinking prejudice to which he gave deliberate indulgence; later it became a vicious obsession, fed by Nazi propaganda and proliferating into theoretical constructions of paranoid complexity. But the role which he gave to the Jews was always the same; they were those who hindered and corroded true production by concentrating on activities which battened on the forces of production without contributing to them. The principal manifestation of the Jewish spirit was ‘usury’; but behind this (as he later came to think) lay the Jewish religion of monotheism, with its anti-artistic ban on graven images and its abstract, unimageable God spinning in transcendental activity above the world like the money-market and its bodiless manipulations. Here, as always in the study of antisemitism, we come across semantic problems. When Pound attacked the ‘jews’ and referred to usury and high finance as ‘kikery’, what exactly was he attacking? He was not making a simple identification of ‘jews’ and ‘usurers’, for he admitted that there were usurers who were not Jews and Jews who were not usurers. At one point he even wrote, ‘Usurers have no race. How long the whole Jewish people is to be sacrificial goat for the usurer, I know not’.73 This sounds enlightened enough; yet note the ominous word ‘whole’. The whole Jewish people should not be indicted as usurers, but part of it should, and that part the most representative and significant. In his notorious broadcast from Rome (30 April 1942), Pound said, Don’t start a pogrom, that is not an old style killing of small Jews. That system is no good whatever. Of course, if some man had a stroke of genius, and could start a pogrom up at the top . . . there might be something to say for it. Here Pound is directly advocating the murder of rich Jews, but not of poor Jews. The Nazis at this time were gassing rich and poor Jews alike, so some defenders of Pound have been able to derive some comfort from the broadcast; quite illegitimately, however, since Pound deprecates the killing of ‘small Jews’ on grounds of expediency not morality. The ‘small Jews’ are just not important enough to kill. Sometimes Pound does seem to be expressing a ‘rich-Jew anti-semitism’, as when he refers to ‘poor yitts . . . paying for a few big jews’ vendetta on goyim’ (Canto 52). But a few lines further on he is referring to ‘jews, real jews, chazims, and neschek74 also super-neschek or the international racket’. This shows that in Pound’s view the ‘real jew’ is always associated with usury (‘neschek’) and that the ‘small jew’ is small only because he has not yet attained to the ‘super-neschek’ bracket. When the ‘big jew’ engages in his ‘vendetta’ against the Gentiles he is acting on behalf of the ‘small jew’ too.75 121


On another occasion Pound wrote, ‘International usury contains more Calvinism, Protestant sectarianism, than Judaism.’76 Yet Judaism, ‘kikery’, remains his generic name for the financial system which he attacks. (Moreover, he regards Calvinism as a kind of Judaism.) Even a non-Jew who engages in usury is thereby regarded as a kind of honorary Jew; for usury is part of the Jewish soul, while in non-Jews it is a virus which they have acquired by contagion. It has been argued that Pound uses the word ‘jew’ merely as a convenient metaphor or metonymy; a word that will conjure up the required associations in his reader’s mind without having to be taken literally. But such a metaphorical use must arise from the conviction that the Jews are the true source of the poison. A metaphor always implies certain known qualities in the object metaphorically adduced, qualities which throw light on the object described. So to call an activity ‘Jewish’, even, or especially, when this is not meant literally, is to assert the existence of essentially Jewish qualities. It is mere confusion of mind to suppose that such ‘metaphorical’ use of an antisemitic stereotype implies a lack of literalism in the antisemitism itself: it is as if calling one’s love a red, red rose implied some doubt about the redness of roses. It is interesting to compare Pound’s antisemitism with that of Eliot. The idea has been put forward that Pound’s view was more ‘simplistic and ideological’ than Eliot’s, and therefore in some way better. This seems to be a misreading of the facts. Eliot’s antisemitism is in some ways more ideological than Pound’s, since Eliot was influenced by Maurras to see the Jew as the archetypal enemy of Christendom, the rat gnawing at the body of Christ. Eliot thus sees the Jew as the representative of Satan, and therefore as an inevitable factor in life; there is here a medieval dualism, by which Satan, like Judas in the Gospel story, has his place in the scheme of things, and is damned for a cosmic purpose of God’s. Satan is the ‘Prince of this world’, and the Jew is his agent. This view, while it undoubtedly can lead to persecution of the Jews, can also result in their preservation in preparation of the final battle between the Light and the Dark, when the Jews (in the traditional Christian belief) will finally accept the Light. This kind of myth is foreign to Pound, who is not a dualist. Pound is essentially an optimist, a ‘fixer’, whose frame of reference is this world. There is nothing mystical to Pound about the Jews. They are simply another obstacle in the way of the good life, like phoney patrons, dishonest publishers or bad economists. Consequently, it was possible for Pound to attach himself to the Nazis, who regarded the Jews as a virus in the blood of humanity, to be eliminated by whatever disinfectant method might be available. A ‘Judenrein’ world was the aim; a world in which the Jews would be just a bad memory. To Eliot, such a view would be a vulgarism; a happy ending in a dimension where happy endings did not happen; the Jews were too important to be got rid of so easily. Another way of putting this is to say that to Eliot the Jew is symbolic of humanity itself; in criticizing the Jew, he was criticizing 122


himself: the part of himself that he most disliked. In ‘Gerontion’, the ‘jew’ is an aspect of the other old man, Gerontion. Even Bleistein, in Eliot’s most horrifically antisemitic poem, the unpublished ‘Dirge’, is symbolic of unpurged humanity. This does not make Eliot any less of an antisemite, but it does make Eliot a less immediately dangerous kind of antisemite than Pound, who never identified any part of himself with his hated Jew-image. Eliot put his finger on this when he said (commenting on Pound’s portrayal of Hell in the Cantos) ‘It is a Hell for the other people, the people we read about in the newspapers, not for oneself and one’s friends.’77 Eliot specifically criticized Pound’s lack of a doctrine of Original Sin, which meant the ‘disappearance of the idea of intense moral struggle’ and produced a picture of Hell ‘without dignity, without tragedy!’ The disappearance of the doctrine of Original Sin may seems a step forward in sanity and spiritual health. Nevertheless, in the short run, this disappearance was very dangerous for the Jews. The Christian doctrine of Original Sin set up the Jews as a target to be sniped at but never destroyed; then the collapse of the doctrine of Original Sin put the Jews into deadly danger, for the target remained though the safeguards had disappeared. The result was the Holocaust. Yet the doctrine of Original Sin was derived from the Jews themselves, being based on the Jewish myth of the fall of Adam. It is a little too glib to say that there is no doctrine of Original Sin in Judaism, as some Jewish theologians have argued. The idea that there is something wrong with the universe and with man exists in Judaism. But Judaism keeps moral evil to the psychological level, regards it as manageable (with the help of the Law), and therefore requires no cosmic drama of Divine Sacrifice, Devil and Executioner in order to cope with it. Judaism insists on the acceptance of responsibility by each individual. This demand for responsibility carried over into Christianity and combined with Hellenistic moral despair led to the need for a Saviour-Scapegoat ( Jesus) murdered by an Executioner-Scapegoat (the Jews). The Jewish sense of optimism about coping with evil returned into Christianity with the Renaissance; with the untoward result that the Jews, marked out during previous centuries as the embodiment of evil, faced eventual destruction. For optimism still did not progress to the point where evil could shrink to a dimension of the human soul that could be tackled directly. It still remained something out there, but something about which steps could now be taken. The Jews lost their symbolic force, their mystique. They were no longer an archetype, a myth, a metaphor for coping with moral evil. They were simply a nuisance, which could be destroyed. Eliot’s antisemitism, then, is profoundly philosophical, arising from an analysis of the human condition as a screen on which are thrown the shadows of a cosmic struggle between Good and Evil. Pound does not have Eliot’s selfdistrust; he has a hearty American self-confidence and optimism combined with a paranoia which is equally American. All would be well if only ‘they’ could be got rid of; corrupt East-coast politicians, bankers, usurers or Jews. 123


An explanation of the difference between these two American poets could be given in terms of their background. Pound’s father was born in Wisconsin. He was a mine-inspector in Idaho but later moved to Philadelphia (when Ezra was a small child) where he worked as an assayer at the mint. Homer L. Pound was an intelligent man, as the tone of Ezra’s letters to him shows, and he came from a family which was not without distinction in American history (his father Thaddeus Coleman Pound was a congressman and something of a theorist in monetary matters). But the background of Pound (unlike that of Eliot) was that of a genuinely indigenous middle America; of the frontier, forests and mines, not of the ministry and the Europeanized intelligentsia. It was not without justification that Pound adopted the persona (among many others, of course) of Old Ez, the repository of home-spun folk-wisdom. And this gave his antisemitism, too, a tinge of populism. He saw the Jew as the quintessential trader and banker, the camp-follower of the pioneering Gentile farmer, battening on the latter’s courage and creativeness. Eliot, on the other hand, derived his antisemitism partly from the urban situation of his birth place, St Louis, where a patrician culture (an outpost of New England) combined with genteel commerce was threatened by the growth of a brash new industrialism centered on Chicago and galvanized by hordes of Jewish immigrants. Eliot thus identified the Jews with the new ‘Americanism’ which seemed so tragically triumphant over European values, while Pound saw himself as the champion of specifically American virtues which would eventually throw off the encrustation of Jewish usury. Eliot and Pound were both emigrés, but Old Ez never sought to cut himself off from his American roots, as did Eliot, who retired to Europe like a Roman aristocrat retreating to the Italian homeland in the face of barbarian invasions of the provinces. The element of plain unthinking Mid-Western prejudice, a kind of populist stupidity that refused to take cognizance of the facts, always remained a large component of Pound’s antisemitism. He might have taken the trouble, for example, to find out something about the history of thought on the subject of usury. He would then have discovered that the first recorded prohibition against usury is in the Jewish Bible; and that the distinction between usury and partaggio (profit-sharing) which he attributes to the Middle Ages is in fact discussed with a subtlety which he would have found most enlightening in the Jewish Talmud. He might even have found out that the Talmud introduces a disapproval of Jews accepting interest even from Gentiles (except under extreme necessity), and that it was the Christian Church that forced the Jews back into usury because in Christian eyes in this case (as in the case of the Crucifixion) the sinful deed was a practical necessity for which God had thoughtfully provided a nation of lost souls. Pound’s sheer ignorance on the subject of Jews and Judaism is extraordinary. He seems to have made no effort to read about Jewish history, thought or language; yet he tries to create an impression of knowingness by using would-be Hebrew words such as ‘chazims’ (presumably intended for 124


chazanim, that is, cantors, though it is not clear why this particular class of Jews should be regarded as being addicted to usury). Like other gifted antisemites, such as Wagner, he attracted some Jews into his entourage (Louis Zukovsky, for example), but they seem to have done nothing to enlighten him on Jewish matters, possibly being without much Jewish education themselves. He picked up many scraps of misinformation from antisemitic literature. An interesting example is the story that Benjamin Franklin advised that Jews should be excluded from America. This piece of antisemitic mythology is incorporated in Canto 52: Remarked Ben: better keep out the jews or yr/ grand children will curse you. Pound’s carelessness and negligence in Jewish matters is, of course, part of his general strategy in the field of learning. In all the areas of study to which he contributed (Provençal poetry, Latin and Greek poetry, Chinese literature, economics, etc.), complaints have been made of his blunders, incompetence and charlatan bravado. Some of these complaints have been ill-founded, proceeding from the scholarly literal-mindedness which Pound detested and combated. Pound’s translations, for example, are not intended to be literal, and the ‘howlers’ (e.g. ‘votes’ for ‘votas’ in Propertius) arise from an original aesthetic of translation, not from ignorance. Yet his scorn of scholarly smallmindedness led him eventually into an insane self-confidence. He really came to think that he had only to know one or two facts about a civilization in order to intuit its whole essence. The ‘ideogrammic’ method became a means to instant polymathy. The ideograms of Chinese picture-writing seemed of great significance to Pound (following his reading of Ernest Fenollosa) because they pointed to a way of thinking that would never lose touch with concrete particulars; a method that proceeded from image to image in such a way that generalizations emerged incarnate and never degenerated into disembodied abstractions. The connections of this theory of thought with Pound’s affiliation to the poetic method of Imagism are obvious. His method of poetic composition, and even of prose composition, is the juxtaposition of significant details in such a way that the unconscious mind receives reverberations and forms generalizations subliminally, or alters its general conformations to see the world in a new light. The question is, ‘How does the poet know which details are significant?’ The answer is that he does so in the light of a discursive theory previously arrived at but never explicitly disclosed. This is an answer Pound did not want to accept. He wanted to be just as surprised by his images as the reader; to choose the images or details by blind intuition and join the reader hand in hand to see where they would lead. But this is to abdicate the responsibility of the writer and to hand himself over to the mercy of his own unconscious prejudices. When Pound really knows about a subject, the ideogrammic method is successful. When 125


he does not know about a subject, the ideogrammic method becomes not a way of thinking or expression but a substitute for them. This takes us back to the consideration of Pound’s aestheticism. We know incontrovertibly that the aesthetic stance adopted by Pound in the 1910s and 1920s led him eventually into the moral abyss. How did Imagism, The Little Review and London soirées lead to the espousal of Nazism? The question is particularly interesting in that Pound’s variety of aestheticism is one that appears to bridge the gap between art and morality, to turn towards the world instead of away from it and to concern itself with the health of the whole of society. Where did it go wrong? In Pound’s aesthetic vision, the artist stands over against the world, which he attacks and shapes to his requirements, or rather into the shape that he discerns hidden beneath the shapelessness of unformed reality. The artist is not a mere spinner of dreams, exuding art-stuff from his own innards, like a spider. His images are not borrowings from the external world, utilized to give body to his internal conceptions. The images are, or ought to be, out there, discoveries and acquisitions in man’s exploration of his environment. Donald Davie, in his study of Pound’s aesthetic, has made interesting use of a distinction between ‘plastic’ and ‘sculptural’ art (the distinction is derived from Adrian Stokes). Pound, as an Imagist, is ‘the poet as sculptor’; while in contrast, Eliot is a Symbolist, looking for an ‘objective correlative’ to act as ‘the formula of an emotion’, in other words, using pictures from the outside world as counters in an internal game.78 Whether this description does justice to Eliot may be doubted, but it is certainly very illuminating about Pound. It shows how Pound’s aggressiveness forms part of his aesthetic vision. The ruthlessness and dismissiveness which are essential to Pound’s personality can be seen as the qualities of the sculptor, who produces his work through ruthless rejection of irrelevant material, which stands in the way of the revelation of the form hidden in the stone. Yet at the same time, the sculptor loves the stone which is his medium. In all his rejections, he is bringing out the true quality of the stone, or wood, so that eventually he lays bare the spirit of the material itself, and his work seems like the shaping agency of natural forces such as wind and water, making the stone more stone-like than ever. And part of the artistic result is the sense of struggle between the artist and his material, a battle of equals, symbolized sometimes by the emergence of the worked sculpture from a base of unworked material, as in certain works of Michelangelo and Rodin. Now it is interesting that one of the accusations made by Pound against the Jews is that they are sentimental. and Tsievitz has explained to me the warmth of affections, the intramural, the almost intravaginal warmth of hebrew affections, in the family, and nearly everything else . . . . 126


It must be rather like some internal organ, some communal life of the pancreas . . . sensitivity without direction . . . . (Canto 35) This attack on Jewish schmaltz associates it with internalization, with the creation of a womb-like community in which the individual never has to face a hostile environment and thus never has to reject any part of it. This is the opposite of the sculptor facing his block of crude stone. (‘It is as simple as the sculptor’s direction: “Take a chisel and cut away all the stone you don’t want.” ’ – Pound in a letter to Iris Barry.) The accusation of sentimentality may seem hard to reconcile with the picture of the Jew as usurer and predator, but as a matter of fact they are two sides of the same coin. The point is that the Jew never has to make the hard decisions because he is essentially a parasite, who lives off society and exploits the people who do the real work. Usury is a form of parasitism, a way of sucking blood from the creative, earth-attacking Gentile peasants or artists. The Jew can afford to be sentimental because he never has to pay; the sacrifices and conflicts are faced by others: and venn hiss brudder diet widout any bapers he vept all ofer dh garpet so much he had to have his clothes aftervards pressed and he orderet a magnificent funeral and tden zent dh pill to dh vife. (Canto 35) This is a picture of a Jewish artist who is a schnorrer; that is, he pursues art in the Jewish way, and turns it into a parasitic activity. Emotions come easily to him because they cost nothing. True living involves ruthlessness, rejection; it is not ‘intravaginal’ but masculine, attacking, phallic.79 But the Jew is feminine, infantile, plastic. He manipulates the given, like an infant sucking at the breast; he does not hew at the given and transform it, like an adult man ploughing the earth or a woman, or like a sculptor forcing the stone to yield its inner structure. He waits for others to produce something, and then he manipulates it to his own advantage. Or if he does produce something himself, it is spun from his own innards, something without roots in outside reality and therefore giving rise to no image. The most malleable, plastic thing of all is money, the ultimate ‘symbol’, having no proper outline of its own but capable of assuming an infinite number of shapes or of meanings. Pound was not against money per se, but he was concerned that it should always stand for some concrete thing, whether goods or services, that it should not take off into a world of abstraction 127


and be ‘created out of nothing’. The Jew, he thought, was the artist of money, performing bewildering arabesques with it which bore no relation to the processes of agriculture or production and which actually hindered those processes. Such creativity was ‘cancerous’, having a life inimical to the social organism. It was also dirty and cloacal. Pound was aware of the thought expressed in Freud’s dictum, ‘Money equals faeces’, and in the scatological Cantos he shows the financiers as anally fixated children playing with their own dirt, unable to attain to the genital phase in which the reality principle is acknowledged, the omnipotence-fantasy is renounced, and activity becomes a tackling of a presented world instead of a plastic molding of a ‘creatio ex nihilo’. The presiding deity of Hell is ‘the great arse-hole’ (Canto 14), which is Pound’s version of the Demiurge, or the Jewish God, creating the universe from nothing. Pound’s aesthetic and moral attitude of anti-pity should certainly not be rejected out of hand as inhumane. It is in some respect a noble attitude, and one which can be given support from the moral tradition of Judaism itself. Pity can often be a patronizing emotion, sapping the self-respect of its recipient; which is why in Jewish law it is regarded as a far better act of charity to lend someone money than to give it to him. The word rachmanut means not pity but mercy, a very different thing, because it is an expression of respect for humanity, not of contempt for it. The pity which exacts no penalty for wrong-doing, because nothing better was expected, is little removed from contempt. The pity that forgives shoddy behaviour and shoddy workmanship is the enemy of all excellence in life. Like Nietszche, Pound saw something derogatory to mankind in the Christian concept of pity, and some of his finest poetry is devoted to denouncing this concept: All things are made foul in this season, This is the reason, none may seek purity Having for foulnesse pity And things growne awry; No more do my shaftes fly To slay. Nothing is now clean slayne But rotteth away. (Canto 30) This ‘compleynt’ is put in the mouth of the pagan goddess Artemis, as a direct protest against what Pound conceives to be the Judaeo-Christian concept of pity, which, like Nietszche, he saw as the revenge of the weak on the strong. Nietszche, however, admired the Old Testament, and excluded it from his condemnation. Nietzsche loathed the antisemites of his day and would never have mistaken the racialistic sadism of the Nazis for the true pursuit of ‘purity’. 128


How was it that Pound made this crude mistake? What taint was there in his doctrine of aestheticism that made him vulnerable to antisemitic propaganda of the vilest type, and led him to regard Mussolini and Hitler as the champions of culture in the Western world? From a doctrine emphasizing discrimination, there is no inevitable progression towards inhumanity. From a doctrine of the sculptural nature of art, or from an ideal of a society patterned and regulated by laws of courtesy and good management, how does one come to the conclusion that the people who made morality into an art should be obliterated? For undoubtedly, one of the most eerie aspects of Pound’s antisemitism is that the qualities he most admired in society, and for which he explored Renaissance Italy and ancient China, are in many ways similar to those he might have found in the Jewish culture which he misunderstood and despised. The stately patterning of the seasons of the year by rites and ceremonies, the close attention to nuances of gracious behaviour, the sober, rational regulation of commerce and lending, all these were closer to hand in the Mishnah than in remote Chinese texts. Pound’s conviction that the Jews have always been an anti-agricultural people was sustained by a steadfast ignorance of the Bible, the Talmud and even of the Jews around him. In fact, Judaism is, par excellence, the religion of agriculture; the religion that gave the processes of agriculture such religious sanctity that a Talmudic Rabbi could say that the operation of planting should not be interrupted even for the arrival of the Messiah. Instead of making some elementary enquiries into Jewish history and literature, Pound took his idea of the Jews from a populist stereotype (itself based on religious tradition); though it was possibly a vague awareness of the existence of Jewish agriculture that made him develop the later theory that the Jews were essentially cattle-farmers as opposed to tillers of the ground.80 The flaw in Pound’s Weltanschauung was that it was after all basically aesthetic rather than moral. It was a kind of aestheticism which took over the field of morality in high-handed fashion. Much as we may applaud Pound’s determination not to be an ivory-tower aesthete in the fin-de-siècle style, we may still find something anti-human in a morality which is subordinated to the claims of art. It was better, in a way, for the aesthete to feel that art and morality were opposed; even to dismiss the whole moral issue as beneath his attention. ‘As for living, our servants can do that for us’ (from Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axel). At least this attitude allowed a certain autonomy to morality, and, while loftily dismissing non-artists from the realm of Beauty, permitted them to have a role in the inferior realm of the Good. Pound refused to acknowledge such limits; the artist must legislate as artist over all human concerns, including politics, morals and economics. The inhumanity inseparable from aestheticism, so far from being softened by the concern for human problems, was applied on a far wider scale. Pound did not regard human beings as ends-in-themselves but as elements in a pattern. His concern was not for justice, but for productivity, which means the production of 129


pattern. Far more important than any human being was the goddess Forma, whom Pound invokes with religious ecstasy: that the body of light come forth from the body of fire And that your eyes come to the surface from the deep wherein they were sunken, Reina – for 300 years. and now sunken That your eyes come forth from their caves & light then as the holly-leaf qui laborat, orat Thus Undine came to the rock by Circeo and the stone eyes again looking seaward. This passage comes from Canto 91, in which some of the fundamental thoughts underlying the whole enterprise of the Cantos are given expression. The Canto forms part of the section ‘Rock Drill,’ first published in 1955. Even at this late date, after all the facts of the Holocaust had long become public knowledge, Pound was very far from abjuring his antisemitism. Further on in the same Canto, he writes Democracies electing their sewage till there is no clear thought about holiness a dung flow from 1913 and, in this, their kikery functioned, Marx, Freud and the american beaneries Filth under filth, Maritain, Hutchins, or as Benda remarked: ‘La trahison’. . . . The Jew is made responsible, in the blanket condemnation ‘kikery’, for the evils of democracy and modem degeneracy. The Jew is made responsible for anal fixation and for all the plastic dribblings and coagulations stigmatized in the scatological Cantos. The Jew is the enemy of ‘holiness’ and (in the context of the thematic content of the Canto) of forma, art and aesthetic health. And this at a time when even the most virulent and ingrained antisemites had been shamed into silence, and the idea that Hitler and Mussolini had ever stood for anything wholesome had become ludicrous. A kind of anti-moralistic aestheticism was a feature of the artistic circles in which Pound moved in England in his early career as a writer and promoter of the arts. This attitude took many forms, but nearly all these forms were liable to antisemitism. From the playful cultivation of irresponsibility, with its anti-Jew and anti-Black jokes aimed at shocking ‘liberal’ solemnity, to 130


broad philosophical schemes in which antisemitism was given a theoretical and historical basis, the championship of Art seemed to involve antagonism to the Jews.81 The relationship of aestheticism to the rise of Fascism and Nazism deserves detailed investigation, despite the paradox that modernism in the arts was persecuted by fascist regimes once they achieved power. Hitler as the Artist in Power, a grotesque caricature of Shelley’s ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’, is a figure worthy of study. Pound’s view of the artist is far removed from the Byronic or demonic; he sees the artist as the type of normality and health. And this makes his antisemitism all the more dangerous. Many aesthetes saw themselves as alienated figures, and the Jew as typical of the bourgeois world from which they were alienated; Pound, with his democratic, or rather populist vision, saw himself as the champion of the masses against the alien and alienated Jews. All forms of antisemitism have this at least to be said for them, that they take the Jews to have significance. The liberal error is to say, ‘There is no problem.’ Defending the Jews by declaring their insignificance is a way of annihilating them. We have to probe the various kinds of antisemitism, and discover beneath the secondary collaborations of lies, misrepresentations and stupidities, the core of truth; that is to say, the deep understanding and hostile reaction to something that the Jews do stand for. The accusation that the Jew is the essential anti-artist can be countered easily enough, on the level of ‘Jewish Defence’, by pointing out the huge contribution made by Jews to literature, music, painting and the other arts. But this is not enough, for it is necessary to acknowledge the sense in which it is quite true to say that the Jew is the essential anti-artist, to discover the real issue which underlies all the bogus formulations. Pound’s case against the Jews, if it were shorn of its more hysterical aspects and supported by a greater knowledge of the Jews than he actually possessed, might run as follows: The Jews are a people without a style. Since their God is unpicturable, they are unable to develop an art of their own. Since they are essentially nomads (who seized the inhabited land of Canaan but retained their attachment to the God of the desert), their relationship to the soil has remained parasitic. They develop no art of their own, but are clever at mimicking the art of others. Even their Temple was built in a borrowed style. Their synagogues have no architecture of their own, their cooking, their music and their poetry is an amalgam of all the cultures through which they have passed. Their religion is divorced from the processes of Nature: the god who dies and is reborn, the rhythms of reproduction and fertility, have no place in it; the female has no place in it. They create nothing, but they suck from the creativity of others; or they play endlessly with ideas spun from their own entrails, soft bodiless conceptions which 131


are squeezed and moulded, not hacked out by strength and courage from the hard stuff of reality. They envelop the world with the cobwebs of abstract conceptions, and especially with a web of money, deriving from no actual production, but somehow parasitic on production and eventually bringing it to a halt. They do not believe in work, which they call ‘the curse of Adam’, and their ideal is the inactivity of the Sabbath. But in truth, work is holy, and all work is prayer and art, when it is released from corrupting clogs and misdirections, put upon it by those who despise it. The Jews are the age-old enemies of work and art; they are lawyers, scientists, usurers, anything but artists. This is a heavy indictment, such as might have been made against the Israelites by the Canaanites whose gods and goddesses, groves, temples and altars the invading iconoclasts destroyed, or by the Greeks whose art-based civilization was Judaism’s most serious rival for the mastery of the ancient (and modern) world. A reply might be made on behalf of the Jews as follows: The Jews are indeed the enemies of art, in the sense that they stand for the primacy of morality. All the beauty of Egypt and of Canaan could not stand before them, because it was based on injustice and oppression. The Jew is the eternal parvenu, who will not accept the beauty and grace of any aristocratic order while there remains hidden in the slums a class of ugly, forgotten outcasts. The Jews desire beauty, but they desire even more that it should be equally distributed, and to that end they are willing to accept the burden of ugliness and suffering. The Jews are not so much the creators of beauty as its redistributors. They did not invent the beauty of the Temple, but they borrowed its beauty from priest-ridden, god-ridden, lord-ridden nations, so that it could become the possession of a nation of slaves who had become ‘a nation of priests’. They continually cut through the mystique of aristocratic tradition in order to appropriate education, culture, art, beauty for the despised. In particular, they appropriated leisure, the privilege of the upper classes, and gave it to the people: this is the meaning of the Sabbath. This is a reply that leaves without mention all the positive contribution of the Jews to art, from the ‘Song of Songs’ to Chagall and Schoenberg. All kinds of individual replies can be made to Pound’s individual charges; but the central point is that Pound was right in sensing that the Jew was the chief enemy of his doctrine of the primacy of art. Even if Pound had read Werner Sombart, and discovered that the Jews, wherever they have gone, have brought material prosperity to their host nations (rather than the economic ‘cancer’ which Pound attributed to their ‘usury’), he would still have hated the Jews (as did Sombart) for their conviction of the primacy of justice. If all the masterpieces of art ever created were put in the balance against the life of one child murdered in Hitler’s gas chambers, which should have been saved? There is no doubt about the Jewish answer to this question, but there might 132


be some doubt about Pound’s. It is because he put art first that he became involved in the guilt of the gas-chambers. This may lead us to consider briefly the much-mooted question of whether Pound should have been awarded public honours. Twice controversy raged; in 1949, when Pound was awarded the Bollingen Prize and in 1972, when he was awarded the Emerson–Thoreau medal of the Council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The discussion centered around the question, ‘Can artistic merit be rewarded in isolation from considerations of morality? Can we honor Pound the artist, while condemning Pound the man?’ This question is given a sharper edge when it is realized that this very conflict between art and morality is basic to Pound’s work and life, and that the answer he gave to it was largely responsible for his terrible guilt. We may leave it to time to sift the good from the evil in Pound’s work; but to give public honours to Pound in his lifetime was an insult to the millions of murdered and tortured Jews for whose fate he shared responsibility. ‘These issues’, argues Christine Brooke-Rose, are as dead as the religious wars; do we bother much now whether Agrippa d’Aubigne, the baroque religious poet, was on the Protestant or the Catholic side, except for points of exegesis? Yet people murdered each other for these issues.82 This judgment shows a moral imperception which hardly needs comment. Is the Holocaust such a trivial event in human history that it can be dismissed as an archaic aberration after forty or fifty years? Moreover, Pound himself would not have wanted to be judged as a moral incompetent who happened to have a knack for poetry. He did not want to be forgiven, like an ex-Nazi football player. Art and morality were for him indissolubly linked. If his moral conclusions were wrong, then there was something wrong with his theory of art (and there is evidence that this is the conclusion which he himself reached at the end of his life).83 This is not to say that his work, however morally and artistically flawed, cannot be given its due appreciation. But to heap public honours on the man was either to endorse his style of humanity or to treat it with indulgent contempt. There was more respect for Pound in moral condemnation and social ostracism than in easy forgiveness. But how necessary was antisemitism to Pound’s artistic vision? Would it not be possible to imagine a Poundian oeuvre without the antisemitism, yet with every essential aspect intact? He himself finally acknowledged that his antisemitism had been a ‘stupid, suburban prejudice’.84 His attack on the usurer as anti-artist was certainly fundamental; but surely his identification of the usurer with the Jew was not necessary to his thesis? It was a prejudice, derived from his upbringing, reinforced by playful irresponsibility and irascible love of fulmination. Did he not fight against this prejudice at times? 133


Have the antisemitic passages in the Cantos any artistic force or merit in themselves, or are they expendable and expungeable? It would be pleasant to give a pacific answer to these questions, but it would not be honest. Even if Pound’s antisemitism can be attributed to irresponsibility, this irresponsibility was part of the fabric of his life, and of his legacy from aestheticism. It was essential to his poetic method and to his style of scholarship to cultivate carelessness, to avoid humdrum enquiry into the facts; and if, as a consequence, he made a tragic mistake, this cannot be written off as unimportant. Pound’s antisemitism can be linked with all his basic attitudes as an artist and a thinker, and is an inevitable outcome of them. As for the artistic merit or otherwise of the antisemitic passages in the Cantos, this question is hardly applicable in the case of a poet who depends so little in his total design on the local beauties or intensities which undoubtedly exist in his work. If we excise the antisemitic passages on grounds of aesthetic nullity, where shall we stop? Shall we excise the long quotations from economic manuals or from Latin documents or from the Chinese syllabary? Who shall decide what, in the Cantos, is or is not relevant? Pound’s quarrel with the Jews was, in fact, far more than a stupid error or ‘suburban prejudice’, despite Pound’s own words. He picked out the Jews as his enemy because he sensed rightly (if obscurely) that they stood in the way of some of his most important objectives. They stood in the way of the ‘image’ or the ‘ideogram’; because the Jews are the chief exponents of discursive rational thinking by means of words and alphabet (the alphabet being the paradigm of the divorce of sign from referent). The Jews make a clear distinction between words and things, between theory and practice, between universals and particulars, between form and content, between God and Man, between ‘the seventh day and the six days of Creation’. And this, for Pound, was the cardinal sin. Theologically, the quarrel might be expressed by saying that Pound sees the divine as immanent, while the Jews see it as transcendent. Pound was quite right in thinking that he stood for paganism against Judaism.85 This might have been a noble and significant conflict, if it could have been worked out without recourse to demeaning stereotypes. It is the conflict between those who wish to subdue themselves to the rhythms of the goddess Earth and those who wish to conquer the Earth by the hard weapon or tool of the intellect. To Pound, man is essentially homo faber, while to the Jew, he is homo sapiens. Yet there is much common ground between these two views of man. Pound’s concern for the encouragement and conservation of talent reminds us of a perennial Jewish type, the fosterer of culture, such as Samuel ibn Nagrela. It is interesting to compare Pound with one Jewish thinker, Karl Marx, who also regarded man as primarily homo faber, and who also adopted a form of antisemitism. Marx’s concept of ‘alienation’ finds echoes in Pound’s thought, both in the notion of work (as opposed to drudgery) being the chief expression 134


of humanity, and in the unity posited between labour and art.86 And, like Pound, Marx selects the Jew/bourgeois as the enemy.87 But Marx’s antisemitism is limited compared with Pound’s. Marx’s final aim is, after all, a Jewish one; to transform the earth and raise man to a higher stage of consciousness. In this Messianism, the centre of the stage is occupied by Man, not by Art. It is not the aim, as in Pound, to conjure up, at unpredictable intervals, one more appearance of the goddess Forma. Marx saw the Jews as contingent villains in only one scene in the play; for Pound, they threatened the whole enterprise of Art, and the appearance of the goddess in the cyclic dénouement. To dismiss Pound’s antisemitism as a mere aberration is just as mistaken as in the case of Eliot. In both writers, antisemitism is an integral element in their art and philosophy. Unlike Eliot, Pound did not present his antisemitism as connected in any way with Christianity. Like Voltaire and his followers, Pound thought he was bypassing Christianity and linking with the antisemitism of ancient Hellenism. But to a large extent this was a delusion, as in the case of Voltaire. Pound’s picture of the Jews as essentially usurers was derived from medieval Christianity, not from the Greco-Roman world, which never accused the Jews of financial manipulation, but derided them as backward agriculturists with unfounded cultural pretensions. Pound started a quarrel with the Jews on somewhat original lines: that they were the enemies of Art (though even here he had precursors, notably Wagner). But the terms in which he posed the quarrel were thoroughly Christian: his strictures on the Jews as non-labourers, for example, often echo unconsciously the phraseology of Luther, which in turn derives from the patristic literature. His whole image of the money-centred Jew derives ultimately from the figure of Judas Iscariot, in the Gospels and in Christian art, with his thirty pieces of silver and his money-bag. Pound derived his antisemitic categories largely from populism; but these categories in turn were a legacy of the long Christian campaign of hate against the Jews.

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Part IV THE HOLOCAUST AND AFTER

11 HITLER AND NAZISM

In Christianity, Judaism has been regarded as an important and long-existent form of opposition to Christian faith. While this has given Judaism a position of importance in the Christian mind, the importance has been dreaded as a constant threat. Consequently, Christianity contains beliefs in the constant existence of Jewish threatening activities. This belief in the formidable extent of Jewish thought and activity survived belief in Christianity and took new forms in the post-Christian emergence of apparently secular beliefs. Thus the emergence of secular political systems has produced a new apparently secular form of antisemitism. Any participation of individual Jews in the new secular forms of society and any minor forms of power-assumption by individual Jews have assumed an air of power assumption by Jews as a whole. The welcome given by Jews to new areas of participation and freedom in general society has been interpreted as a dangerous plot to take over the non-Jewish world. Thus post-religious antisemitism, while arising from the previous religious antisemitism, has acquired new characteristics which are even more dangerous. Hitler was a person of mediocre abilities but ferocious ambition who was the heir to many trends of modernity, all conducing to his fixation on the Final Solution. From Darwin, or rather the theorists of Social Darwinism, such as Marr and Dühring, he derived the idea that human history is a struggle between quasi-species called races. From Nietzsche, he derived the idea that history was tending towards the appearance of the Superman, who would console mankind for the loss and death of God; this concept he fused with the idea of a Super-race, though not in a way that Nietzsche would have approved. From Wagner, he derived the idea of the Jews as a corrosive influence on the arts. From Luther, he derived the idea that the Jews were essentially parasites, who lived by exploitation of the Goyim and avoided all real work. Hitler was a magpie who picked up scraps of ideas from many sources, all tending to the grand solution of all problems, the annihilation of the Jews. Hitler’s moment of revelation is described by him in Mein Kampf. According to his own account, he was not antisemitic as a young man. One day, however, he saw in the streets of Vienna an Orthodox Polish Jew, 139

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complete with religious garb, which would have included streiml, long beard and peyot and tzitzit. It was suddenly borne in on Hitler that this figure was the epitome of evil. From that day, Hitler became a fervent antisemite, dedicating his whole life to the eradication of Jewish evil. This is a very interesting revelatory event, which deserves some analysis. On the face of it, this unreconstructed unassimilated Polish Jew would seem to be the last type of Jew to produce such a reaction of fear and hate. One would expect Hitler to be horrified rather at some assimilated Jew, infecting modern culture with debased values, or flaunting his wealth and power, perhaps even contaminating the Aryan bloodstream by seeking sexual union with a pure Germanic maiden – the type depicted later, in fact, in the cartoons of the Nazi press. Instead, Hitler received his apocalypse of evil from someone who was objectively very harmless and indeed pitiable: a refugee from Tsarist persecution, struggling to make a living as a pedlar. What was so horrifying about this pious pauper, clinging to the religious symbols that alone gave him hope and courage in a hostile world? One might have thought that such a figure might even be regarded as picturesque or even noble, like the members of the Amish movement in modern America, who preserve the dress and way of life of a bygone pietistic age. Yet this is the figure who was the negative inspiration of Hitler’s antisemitic career, culminating in the Holocaust. For Hitler, all the modernized versions of the Jew – the respectable doctors, professors, business men, bankers – were merely disguises assumed to divert attention from the quintessential Jew whom he saw with visionary perception that day. It was like a folk tale in which a suave polished civilized gentleman is revealed in his true nature as a devil with horns and forked tail. The true enemy of the antisemite is the religious medieval Jew, because the true origin of antisemitism lies not in modernity but in the medieval Christian–Jewish conflict. The student of antisemitism needs to perform a mental operation which, surprisingly enough, is similar to Hitler’s mystical experience of the quintessential Jew. Beneath the genetic theorist, or the aesthete concerned for European culture, or the romantic nationalist yearning for Nordic nobility, or any of the other antisemitic disguises of modernity, one needs to discern the underlying medieval hater for whom the Jew is the mythical figure, still simply the murderer of Christ, the acolyte of Satan whose aim is to poison wells and abduct Christian children for purposes of ritual sacrifice. Hitler himself testifies to the meaning of his vision of the Polish Jew as a discernment of the medieval Jew underlying the deceptive appearance of the average modern Jew. Hitler says that the Jews he saw when a child had ‘a human appearance’, so he did not recognize them in their true evil. Only when he saw the unreconstructed Polish Jew did he ask himself the question, ‘Is this a German?’, by which he really meant, ‘Is this creature human?’ Hitler goes on to say that this vision brought to his mind stories he had heard about the nameless horrors committed by the Jews in the Middle Ages. The 140

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sceptical modern, who doubted the truth of Christian theological dogmas, did not doubt the truth of the Christian horror-stories of the blood-libel. This is the essence of the mechanism of modern antisemitism; the continuance of the bogey-man image after the decay of the theology which created it. Even the figure of the Polish Jew in his medieval garb did not reveal the real Jew in his full horror as subhuman demon. It was left to the concentration camps created by Hitler in his maturity to perform this last act of revelation. One concentration camp operator was asked why it was necessary to reduce the Jews by starvation, humiliation and deprivation of hygiene before killing them. His answer was that it would have been difficult to carry out the killings on normal-looking individuals. The meaning of this is that the Jews had to be reduced to their basic appearance in the antisemitic imagination before they could be killed: they had to look like the vermin they were represented to be in racist theory, and this was achieved by depriving them of all human dignity. Just as the concentration camps were a depiction of the Christian hell, so the concentration camp victim, in all his desperation and filth, was a depiction of the demons and lost souls who inhabited it. I do not mean that Hitler was consciously aware of the religious motivation of his antisemitism. It is characteristic of modern antisemitism not to be aware of this motivation (except in the case of religious antisemites such as T.S. Eliot or Charles Maurras). Modernity goes along with a rationalistic pride in having jettisoned religious belief, and Hitler, as a proponent of modern currents of thought, disclaimed religious belief. Yet his instinctive horror at the archetypal figure of the religious Jew shows that the roots of his antisemitism were religious. He declares that before his vision, he was not antisemitic, but this is a simplistic version of events. An image of the Jew as hateful and frightening had been implanted in him by his religious education, and this image was ready to emerge and overwhelm him at some psychological crisis, even though his rationalistic conscience did not permit him to acknowledge even to himself the origin of his vision of metaphysical evil. But was Hitler indeed a rationalist? How does his mystical racism and nationalism, his demand for unconditional obedience to the infallible Führer, square with the Enlightenment belief in the primacy of reason? It is more accurate to place Hitler as a product of the post-Enlightenment movement known as Romanticism, though this too, even in its reaction against Enlightenment rationalism, is a manifestation of modernity. To what extent does the Romantic rebellion against the naive rationalism of the Enlightenment contain a potentiality of its own of murderous antisemitism? And how does Romanticism, a modern movement, link with the medieval religious roots of antisemitism? While it may seem surprising to call Hitler a rationalist, it may seem bizarre to call him a Romantic. This would put him in the company of Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley and many other loved writers and artists whom we do not associate with mass-murder or racism. Yet there are many connections 141


linking Hitler to the great aesthetic and political movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which we call Romanticism. Romanticism has many aspects, but its main characteristic feature is its rejection of rationality as the principal guide to human affairs. The germ of Romanticism can be found even in the heart of the Enlightenment in the protest of Rousseau against Voltaire, as we saw earlier. Voltaire’s enthronement of Reason meant that every human being, possessing reason, became an equal centre of power and authority. The role of the community was reduced to that of a mere assemblage of individuals, bargaining with each other for maximum individual freedom. Rousseau, however, saw the community as antecedent to the individual. He realized that the qualities of the individual are to a large extent created by the community and tradition in which he or she exists. This realization even led him to value the Jews as possessing a noble ancient moral and political tradition, an extraordinary perception that enabled him to bypass centuries of prejudice and vilification. Voltaire, however, the champion of reason, was a victim of a medieval stereotype in his unthinking attack on alleged Jewish superstition. Rousseau’s stance was an endorsement of national feeling and of community wisdom surpassing the limited individual reason. Such perception of the limits of individual reasoning was the germ of romanticism in its various forms. The kind of romanticism that expressed itself in the form of national or regional feeling may be seen, for example, in Sir Walter Scott’s glorification of the Scottish tradition, in Byron’s support for Greek independence, in Herder’s and Wagner’s work on the German past, in the regionalism of Wordsworth and Hardy, even in Zionism in its mystical Buberian form. But whereas in the thought of Rousseau (and to some extent that of Herder) this trend led to new sympathy with the Jews, it could also lead to a new and vicious kind of antisemitism. For those who identified themselves with their own tradition could see the Jews as alien intruders who interfered with the purity of the community and could never fit in with plans to renew the hallowed past. In this perception of the Jews as obstacles to a romantic programme of national renewal, all the medieval stereotypes of the Jews came flooding back, with additional elements of racial antagonism and the fear of resentment and betrayal. An allied element of romanticism was its opposition to the processes of modernity itself, as destructive of traditional structures. The glorification of the countryside, as in the English Romantics, Wordsworth and Coleridge, was a protest against industrialism. Liberalism and democracy were seen as destructive of ancient aristocratic values of chivalry and nobility, and as actuated by envy of people of special talents of leadership; the romantic cult of the Great Man was furthered by Nietzsche and Carlyle, and this scorn of democracy fed into the stream of Fascism. And, strangely enough, the Jews were blamed by certain types of antisemites as the chief promoters of modernity in all its forms. Typical of this type of antisemitism was Charles Maurras, the 142

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founder of the Action Française, who continued the anti-Dreyfusard movement in France, itself a movement that vilified the Jews as eroding the traditional pre-modern values that made France great. Maurice Barrès, Maurras’ friend and associate, declared that the Jews were responsible for the evils of the modern world, namely ‘liberalism, democracy, justice, equality, toleration’. This is a strange development, because not long before the Jews had been denounced (by Voltaire, for example) as so sunk in medieval degeneracy that they could never be expected to join the modern world. Now they were being blamed as the veritable authors of the modern world in their aim of destroying pre-modern values. As a matter of fact, there is something in this charge, for the humanistic values of the Renaissance and Enlightenment owe far more to the Jews and the influence of the Hebrew Bible than has generally been acknowledged. Certainly, as far as justice and equality are concerned, the Jews may plead guilty of having preserved these values in the face of many societies that glorified inequality. But to Maurras and Barrès, ‘justice’ was a dirty word, since it typified an equalitarian, non-noble society. Barrès even declared that even if Dreyfus was innocent, he should be declared guilty, because hierarchy was so much more important than justice. But the perception of the Jews as the creators of modernity derives not from any awareness of Judaism as a long-standing humanistic tradition, but from the prominence of marginal Jews in movements of reform and revolution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hitler himself regarded Communism as a totally Jewish movement, or rather as a weapon invented by the Jews to undermine the Gentile world. It is true that marginal Jews (i.e. Jews who had cast themselves adrift from the Jewish religious community) were very prominent in the early days of Communism, when it still had moderate and democratic aims; as the movement became more ruthless and tyrannical, it jettisoned its Jewish leaders, and in the end, under Stalin, became openly antisemitic. But Jews were also very prominent in democratic socialism, producing such leaders as Leon Blum, in France, whom Maurras and Barrès vilified as the modern embodiment of Judas Iscariot. It was the prominence of such Jews that led Eliot to make his famous pronouncement in After Strange Gods that a truly Christian state should limit severely the number of secular Jews allowed to dwell in it. Eliot, as his early poetry shows, certainly agreed with the view of Maurras and others that modernity was essentially Jewish, but he was prepared to tolerate religious, orthodox Jews, because he saw them as continuing the medieval role of the Jews as a subdued minority. Secular Jews, however, emboldened by emancipation, were threatening to take over and move into positions of leadership that compromised the nature of a Christian society. The secular Jews regarded themselves as emancipated from Judaism and as purely modern persons, but in fact their concern for social justice was a legacy of their Jewish religious background. Marx, despite his virulent antisemitism and contempt for Judaism, was the image of a Hebrew prophet. So Eliot’s 143


division of Jews into the harmless orthodox and harmful secular was not very accurate, since the secular Jew was the product of the religious Jew, and (as Rav Kook realized) pursued certain Jewish religious values more fervently than the orthodox. It may seem strange, however, that Eliot was prepared to tolerate the medieval-type Jew, while Hitler reacted with shock and panic to the medieval-type Jew who precipitated his antisemitic vision. The reason is that Eliot (with his knowledge of Christian theory at an academic level) saw the medieval Jews (at times, at least) in their official role as a tolerated religio licita, while Hitler, with a much more demotic background, saw the Jews through the eyes of the medieval peasants, whose minds (from the twelfth century on) were crazed (through the diatribes of the lower clergy) with paranoid folklore about Jews as vampires, and well-poisoners, having cloven hooves and a noxious ineradicable smell (the foetor judaicus, which could, however, be removed by baptism). Thus the perception of the Jews as the archetypal modernists is not without foundation. Jews, emancipated both from medieval restrictions and from adherence to Judaism, were elected into positions of leadership, especially in forwardlooking political parties. They also rapidly became leaders in the sciences, literature and the arts. Some writers, for example Albert S. Lindemann, blame the Jews for this pushful behaviour.88 The Jews should have been less prominent in the public eye, and must therefore accept some of the blame for antisemitism. Einstein, presumably, should have suppressed his theory of relativity, Proust his novels, and Kafka should have been content with his work as a Government clerk. The disgracefully high proportion of Jewish Nobel Prize winners should have been cut off at source, presumably by a decision of the Elders of Zion, though Lindemann does not say explicitly how the recommended policy of reduced Jewish achievement could have been implemented. The fact is that the Jews had always been a power-source that had been suppressed for centuries in the wider world (though fully exercised within its own cultural bounds), and when the restrictions were suddenly taken away, the resultant explosion of talent was irrepressible either by the Jews themselves or by their enemies. Talent and learning had been prized and fostered by the Jews by every educational and societal means over the centuries, and there was no way in which this light could be hidden under a bushel. But instead of welcoming the positive contribution the Jews were now able to make to the rapid development of modernism, their enemies saw with dismay a diabolic concerted effort to dominate the world, the revenge of Satan for the harrowing of Hell during the Ages of Faith, and the imposition of a new equalitarian way of life that was inimical to hiearchy and nobility. Thus the Romantic reaction against modernity became entwined with the hatred of the Jews that itself survived from the pre-modern period. The Jews had escaped from the fetters imposed upon them in the Age of Faith, and were, it appeared, remodelling the world in their own demonic image, sullying in the process all ideals of beauty and due order. 144

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Yet with all due allowance for the statistically improbable prominence of Jews in the leadership of cultural, economic and political activities in the modern world, the reaction of dismay was far beyond proportion. The Jews were, after all, not a cohesive force. Their only cohesion lay in their religion, and this had the least influence on the modern world. Where individual Jews had an influence, the Jews and Judaism as such were not involved, for few of these secular Jews were concerned to assert their own Jewishness. In the growth of the Soviet Union, for example, individual Jews were involved, but Jewishness had no part to play at all, except in the Yiddish-centred secular culture of the Bund, which was ejected from the centre of Communist power by the action of what have been called ‘non-Jewish Jews’ such as Trotsky and Martov, who could not bear to see Jewish influence exercised in its own name, even in a secular form. But when the enemies of the Jews saw individual Jews exercising cultural or economic or political influence they could not believe that these Jews were unorganised as Jews. They had to believe that these Jews were adherents of a world-wide, carefully organized Jewish conspiracy. The document of this conspiracy was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery that was believed in the highest circles worldwide (including Britain) until it was definitively exposed – though it is still widely believed even today. The astounding thing about modern antisemitism is the great importance assigned to the Jews during the years of their struggle for emancipation and normalization. Instead of being regarded as just another weak, ill-organized minority group trying to escape from oppression and ignominy, and having an unexpected degree of success in this quest, the Jews became the centre of concern, giving rise to thousands of anxious publications about the dangers of this (on the face of it) less than world-shattering development. The only possible explanation of this escalation of concern is that the Jews featured in an important way in the mind-set of Western civilization – a mind-set built on a myth which was still potent in many ways despite the growth of scepticism on the rational level. A perfect example of the fusion in the modern European mind of overt scepticism with unconscious belief is Adolf Hitler. He prided himself on his freedom from religious belief, and there is no doubt that he had a Nietzschean conviction in the death of God and the supremacy of man, even though this humanism was not incompatible with a kind of mystical belief in supernormal powers latent in the human psyche, especially his own. He manipulated the Churches with the utmost cynicism (as in his Concordat with Rome and his interference in the conduct of the Protestant churches), and realized that his aims could be furthered by citing the authority of Christian teaching, especially that of Luther. But this conscious appeal to the Christian record as authorizing his policies of antisemitism was not religious, merely historical. In relation to the Jews, Hitler’s plan of extermination shows great affinities to the tradition of Christian millenarianism.89 Even the phrase ‘the 145


thousand-year Reich’ is an echo of Christian millenarianism. While medieval Christianity did not, in general, envisage the extermination of the Jews, but rather tolerated them as a religio licita, there was one Christian scenario, centred on the Last Days, which did indeed evisage a total massacre of the Jews. This was the scenario of the Antichrist, based on certain New Testament passages. According to this, the Antichrist who would arise in the Last Days would be a Jew, who would persuade the Jews that he was the true Messiah, and he would indeed lead them back to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple there. But then Christ would return to earth, put himself at the head of a Christian army, and engage in battle with the Jews, who would be defeated and massacred to the last man, woman and child. This scenario was an alternative to the one in which the Jews would all be converted in the Last Days, but it had no less authority, and was the inspiration of the millenarian movements which flourished particularly in Germany. as in the movement of Thomas Münzer. Hitler, therefore, was not departing entirely from Christian thought when he proposed the annihilation of the Jews, especially as he had assumed for himself the messianic role as saviour of mankind from the menace of the Jews. His conception of the Nazi state as a unified organism with himself as directing cell or Führer was a blasphemous parody of the Christian conception of the Church as the Body of Christ. His secular, atheistic myth preserved the structure and outline of the Christian millenarian myth, and was a modern continuation of it, whether unconsciously or half-consciously. How do we assess what kind of cause deserves to be called the cause of the Holocaust? How do we distinguish between primary and secondary causes? This might be called the problem of the hierarchization of causes, and I shall be dealing with this in more detail in Chapter 12. The personality of Hitler has struck some observers as the main element in the causation of the Holocaust. Many and varied are the enquiries into Hitler’s psychology and early traumas. One theory is that Hitler suspected that he was himself of Jewish origin, his mother having had an affair with the son of a Jewish plutocrat; this would make Hitler a Jewish self-hater, like Karl Marx. Others trace his hatred of the Jews to the Jewish doctor who treated his mother for cancer, or the Jewish bureaucrats who allegedly frustrated his career as an artist. Ron Rosenbaum, in his book Explaining Hitler,90 surveys all such theories, but in the end dismisses them all, and all the more general theories too, on the ground that they tend to exonerate Hitler from blame for his wicked personal decision to exterminate the Jews. This however amounts to the abandonment of historical explanation and the denial of causation except in the sense of personal decision. Rosenbaum adopts the slogan, derived from Milton Himmelfarb, ‘No Hitler, no Holocaust’. This may very well be true. Someone as mad and wicked as Hitler was needed to carry into effect the extermination policy that had been adumbrated by many writers and politicians for nearly two centuries. Perhaps someone 146

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quite as mad and wicked as this might never have come along, and the Holocaust would not have happened. But we have to ask ourselves, ‘What was it in the European situation that made it so vulnerable to the fantasies of a madman?’ This is really the beginning of the search for the basic causes of the Holocaust, and this leads us into more and more general enquiries, laying bare the local maladies of Germany and other states and finally the malady of Western society itself. If someone leaves a heap of explosives with a fuse and a box of matches lying by, and some madman comes along, lights the match and the fuse and sets off the explosives, what was the cause of the catastrophe? Was it the madman, or the match, or the explosives, or was it the people who contrived the possibility of an explosion by setting up the dangerous situation in the first place? Much theorizing about the Holocaust amounts to blaming the madman or the match, and dismisses the view that the blame lies with the originators of the danger as too remote and generalized to be worth considering. A thinker like Hannah Arendt denies altogether that modern antisemitism has historical links with medieval antisemitism, arguing that racism and theological anti-Judaism are utterly distinct phenomena. My own view is that modern antisemitism is the legacy of the medieval myth of the Jew as Christ-killer, and also the legacy of the societal position of the Jews in the Middle Ages as a pariah people, condemned to perform the necessary but dirty work of society in the form of usury, and more and more burdened with a demonic image as child-murderers and well-poisoners. If Christianity had never attained power, but had remained a minority religion alongside Judaism as in the pagan Roman empire, its fantasies about the Jews would not have produced a Holocaust. But having attained limitless power, Christianity moulded its anti-Jewish fantasy into a concrete societal reality, the conversion of the Jews into a hated and despised under-class. The stigma arising from this status was so great that it survived the emancipation of the Jews and took new forms and rationales, based on modern forms of thinking. It was the determination of Christianity to preserve the Jews from annihilation, because of their importance in the Christian myth, that, in a way, prepared the Holocaust in a post-Christian society. For the Jews emerged into the modern world like a lamb prepared for the sacrifice: they were now without the safeguards that had protected them in the Age of Faith, yet with their stigma, and importance as a focus of fantasy, undiminished. The way forward now is not to dwell on local causations that rapidly become out of date, but to attend to the chief historical causation that is still working out its consequences in the context of changing circumstances. The Jews will continue to face antisemitism as long as the world continues to play out, without conscious, rational scrutiny, the fantasies that are the legacy of the Middle Ages.

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12 MUSLIM ANTISEMITISM

Christian antisemitism has had a characteristic that distinguishes it from the other great example of antisemitism, that of the Islamic world. This is the belief in the high extent of Jewish power. For most of history, the saving grace of Islamic antisemitism has been its large component of contempt, which has exempted the Muslims from the fantasy of a takeover of Islam by Jewish power. Again, one should avoid the error of misunderstanding the word ‘antisemitism’ by taking it too literally as a contempt for people of Semitic descent. If this mistake is made, antisemitism can be understood as including an opposition of Christians to Muslims, rather than as an opposition confined to Jews. As explained previously in this book, the term ‘antisemitism’ was invented late in history by Christians as a useful misnomer for their long historical opposition to Jews. This misleading term has never impeded the recruiting and enlisting of non-Jewish Muslims, that is, people of far purer Semitic descent than the Jews, as helpers in the fight or campaign of certain Christians against Jews. In quite recent times, however, the relationship between Jews and Muslims has taken an unprecedented turn: the long history of Muslim military superiority to the Jews has taken a reverse, shocking to Muslims, in the area of Palestine, where the Jews have defied and defeated Muslim military power for the first time in history. This was a tremendous shock to Muslims, who were unable to find any precedent for it and therefore had no vocabulary to account for it, except what they could find in Christian religious literature. That explains the otherwise surprising fact that much of the anti-Jewish vocabulary that has appeared in recent Muslim literature is actually derived not from Muslim but from Christian sources. The reason why anti-Jewish feeling has existed in all Christian culture for centuries before it appeared in a deep sense in Islamic culture is that the status of the Jews in Christian mythology has always been much deeper than it ever was in pre-modern Islam. It is part of the fundamental myth of Christianity that its divine founder, Jesus, was opposed as an enemy by the Jewish leadership, who actually brought about his death by their false representations of him to the Roman leadership as a danger to Rome. No parallel 148

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myth to this exists in Islam, which has never represented the Jews as dangerous, in any serious way, to their non-divine founder Mohammed, whose death has never been attributed to Jewish machinations. There is thus a mythic distinction of the highest importance to the role and rank of the Jews in Islam and Christianity. Indeed, the deep hatred of the Jews that has arisen in modern Islam has arisen not from Islamic mythology, but rather from the failure of the Jews to conform to their long-established status of unimportance in Islamic mythology: whereas, in Christianity, the role of the Jews in bringing about the death of Jesus has been regarded as one of deeply important and destined evil. On the other hand, there are certain pro-Jewish aspects of Christianity that are lacking in Islam. After all, Christians have never denied that Jesus himself was born of a Jewish mother and that his early disciples were all Jews. In Islam, on the other hand, the founder, Mohammed, was never claimed to have been of Jewish origin and his early disciples were not claimed to have been Jews. Thus the existence of similarities of doctrine between Judaism and Islam is attributed to the two religions having a similarity of background. Judaism was regarded as a derivative of an early religion which also produced Islam, whose version of the Abrahamic faith is the more reliable. Jews could be accepted as converts to Islam, but this step was not given the same deep significance that was attributed by Christians to the eventual conversion of the Jews to Christianity, which would be an acceptance by Jews of the true significance of the religion which had been defined by God as the true development of Judaism. This belief actually resulted in the survival of the Jews within the territories of Christianity, as a people permitted to practise their incomplete version of the Divine faith. It was Augustine who defined this concept of the permissibility of Jewish survival within Christian territory, but his doctrine had origins within the New Testament. The same doctrine of permissibility was not granted to Islam, or to versions of Christianity regarded as heretical. In Islam, on the other hand, the permission given to Judaism and Christianity to exist within Islamic territory had much less fundamental grounds, being fundamentally a doctrine of (limited) toleration of religions regarded as distinct from idolatry. Thus, opposition to Jews and Judaism at a deep level does not form an essential aspect of Islamic thought, but is a recent development in Islam arising from the shock of Judaism’s emergence from an apparently accepted and prolonged position of general inferiority. In Christianity, on the other hand, Judaism has always been regarded as an important and long-existent form of opposition to Christian faith. While this has given Judaism a position of importance in the Christian mind, the importance has been dreaded as a constant threat. Although, Islamic antisemitism has not, in the past, had the same intensity as that of Christianity, since the Jews do not play any deicidal role in the myth of Islam, the Jews do have a negative role in the basic story of Islam as 149


the early antagonists of the Prophet and as stubborn opponents of his claim to have fulfilled and superseded Judaism. Islam decided early not to force either Jews or Christians to adopt Islam, but to allow them tolerated but inferior status. There is thus a certain animus against the Jews, but of a fairly low-keyed kind, and the history of Muslim hostility to the Jews has been immeasurably milder, until very recent times, than that of Christianity. An important feature of the Jewish mythic status in Islam is that the Jews are an unsuccessful and defeated religious group. In Christianity, the Jews feature as imposing, cruel father-figures, inflicting death on the harmless victim, Jesus. In Islam, on the other hand, the Jews feature as ineffective in their opposition to Muhammad, and they thus excite contempt rather than hatred. This, however, implies that if the Jews were ever to step out of their destined role of defeat and ineffectiveness, they would be regarded by Muslims as guilty of an abominable act of insolence, and tolerant contempt would turn into bitter hostility. This is in fact what happened when the Jews defeated Muslims in battle and set up their own state on what was regarded as Muslim territory. This is to flout all the rules laid down for Jewish functioning in the Muslim religious scheme, and cannot be forgiven. This basic sense of religious affront lies behind the present Islamic–Jewish conflict and gives it particular gravity beyond all political considerations and calculations. Muslim toleration of Jews has turned into an antisemitism that is just as bitter, in its way, as Christian antisemitism at its worst, and has the same implications of possible genocide. On the surface, Arab nationalism and Zionism are on a par in that they are both movements of national independence taking their inspiration from European nationalism and aspiring to democratic functioning in a modern industrial state. Both, too, arose in an anti-imperialist setting, aiming to free sovereign peoples from foreign rule – an aspiration ostensibly approved by European colonialists who had accepted the principle of temporary trusteeship or mandates. In practice, the situation is more complicated. While Zionism has succeeded in setting up a modern, democratic state in Israel, every Arab country that has achieved freedom has almost immediately relapsed into autocratic rule of a tribal character. Moreover, no Arab country has achieved genuine industrialism, all being dependent on foreign expertise, even though the oil-wealth has given ample opportunities for development. It seems therefore that the rational solutions that might be expected from genuine nationalist development are still far away. Arab political behaviour is still dictated largely by religious and tribal motives. An extraordinary development has been the alliance of modern radical, anti-religious, left-wing anti-zionism with reactionary, religious groups of the Eastern world. It would not be relevant for me to devote a section of this book to such Muslim movements as those which support, with the deliberate sacrifice of their lives, the destruction of Jewish inhabitants of Israel, making 150

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no distinction between civilians and the military (for example, Al Qaida). Such movements make no contribution to concepts of modern libertarianism, but on the contrary look forward to a world to which such words as democracy and toleration are alien. One of the aims of this book, however, is to study the strange fusion that has taken place between antisemitism and advanced concepts of liberty. This fusion, however, has led to an alliance between advanced (or would-be advanced) movements of the West with some of the most reactionary movements of the Middle East. For example, in Western Europe in the 2004 elections to the European Parliament, common lists of Islamist and extreme left candidates were presented to the electorate. Marxist–Islamist alliances have been formed in Belgium and Germany. In France, a prominent member of the Workers’ Struggle has stated that the ‘struggle for Palestine’ is now part of the ‘global proletarian revolution’. In Britain, the Marxist–Islamist alliance has been formed as the successor to the Anti-War coalition of those opposing the second Iraq war. Candidates are supported by the British Socialists Workers Party, the Muslim Association of Great Britain, the British branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and some Palestinian groups financed by Yasser Arafat. This European Marxist–Islamist alliance has not yet put forward a detailed political programme; they are united in their hatred of the United States and in their aims of destroying Israel and bringing about the end of ‘global capitalism’. This development has been accompanied by the adoption by members of these Islamist groups of antisemitic motifs derived from Western sources, just at the time when the West itself has been abandoning such motifs as utterly prejudiced and inauthentic. In the Second World War, the Arabs were largely aligned with the Fascist powers against the West. The Mufti of Jerusalem, the arch-enemy of Zionism, was received with great honour by Hitler, to whom he gave strong approval of the policy of genocide of the Jews. Sadat of Egypt, together with other Egyptian officers, was a supporter of Germany. Iraq, too, was strongly pro-German. After the war, many Nazi officers found refuge and employment in Arab countries, especially Egypt, where they continued their war against the Jews, resulting in the continuation of Nazi antisemitic propaganda in Arab countries. Antisemitic libels previously typical of Christian antisemitism and staple propaganda of Nazism, such as the blood-libel, now form a regular feature of Arab propaganda.91 Thus, for example, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, invented by antisemites of the nineteenth century in Western society but now long recognized by the vast majority of Westerners as spurious, have now achieved a new lease of life in Muslim society, the enlightened past of which did not provide such material. It must be concluded that there has now been a confluence of Christian and Muslim antisemitism in the Middle East, for which the brokers were the Nazis. An interesting example is the speech made at the Organization of the Islamic Conference summit by Malaysian Prime Minister Mohammad 151


Mahathir, the conference host, which was enthusiastically applauded by the conference participators. The Islamic Conference (IOC) which was attended by leaders of 57 countries, opened on 16 October 2003, in Putrajaya, Malaysia. Prime Minister Mahathir said 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategize and then to counter-attack. We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them. We are up against a people who think. They survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power. Here we see the classic antisemitic motifs and the blurring of any distinction between anti-zionism and antisemitism. Yet this recrudescence of crude Western antisemitism in Eastern surroundings has not alienated Western modernists from adopting a stance of support for Muslim antisemitism. This is on the ground that Israel has been identified with Western capitalism and imperialism, seen as united in a conspiracy against the non-capitalist victims of the East. The use of fictional material (derived from the most crude past aspects of Western antisemitism) by the victims is condoned as pardonable in such pitiable circumstances. Even suicide bombing, regarded as reprehensible elsewhere, is praiseworthy when perpetrated against the civilian population of Israel.92 In what ways can Israel be regarded as the instrument of Western capitalism, acting on behalf of American exploitation of the undeveloped world? In historical fact, Israel had no help from America at the time of its original formation as a state. It was only after the state of Israel by her own efforts had achieved survival from the attempts of Arab states to annihilate her, and also after the Arab states had shown themselves as allies of the Soviet Union’s attempt to undermine the United States, that Israel emerged as the ally of the United States in the Middle East. As for the notion, held by many claimants to liberalism, that the Jews of the United States are dominant citizens there, and should be regarded as responsible for American power throughout the world, this is mere fantasy. But lying in the background of this fantasy is the old imagination, based on religious dogma, that the Jews are engaged in a plot to dominate the world. 152

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Actually, this spurious line of connection between the Jews and extreme reaction and militarism is not new. It was anticipated by left-wing revolutionaries of the past, including none other than Karl Marx. For someone of left-wing orientation, such as myself, this is a painful feature of left-wing history. Zionism has received much support from more tolerant, moderate and democratic forms of left-wing theory, but those forms that were associated with the worst forms of extremism (and led eventually to the horrors of Soviet Communism) had a history of antisemitism and anti-zionism. Zionism was never recognized by Communist theorists as a movement of national freedom, but stigmatized as a facet of international capitalism and imperialism. It is true that it was the vote of the Soviet Union in favour of partition in 1947 that brought about the establishment of Israel, but this was merely a tactical move against the West, and did not interrupt Soviet hostility to Zionism. Today it is a cardinal principle of left-wing antisemitism that Zionism is not a true national movement, but an instrument of Western capitalism, promoting American interests in the Middle East. In the interests of this view, the whole of Jewish history is negated, and Jewish historical connection with the Land of Israel is denied. The theory that Zionism is a creation of Western imperialism, and is aimed chiefly to prevent the development of Middle Eastern Arab states to full economic and political independence, has led to the pejorative use of ‘Zionism’ as equivalent to ‘imperialism’. This usage has now been extended to include many traditional antisemitic charges. Thus imperialism is easily extended to cover the traditional idea of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, and also to include ideas of Jewish financial power. In sum, the word ‘Zionist’ has become a code-word for ‘Jew’, and the entire antisemitic syndrome has attached itself to this word. These remarks, of course, do not apply to legitimate criticism of a particular Israeli government or its policies. Jews have often been associated with liberal movements, and have played a distinguished role in the development of socialism and in the emancipation of black people and other oppressed minorities. Zionism, a movement of liberation, now, in many circles, has the same satanic aura that has belonged to the Jews in Christian tradition. Many Jews have felt baffled by a turn of events in which their liberal aspirations have been stigmatized as the basest reaction against liberal progress. The creation of Israel, good though this has been in itself for the Jewish people, has thus not solved the problem of antisemitism but only re-created it in a peculiarly intractable form.

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13 CONCLUSION The causes of the Holocaust

When we consider the question of the causation of the Holocaust, we are bewildered by the multitude of overlapping causes, and find it hard to arrange them in order of importance. No single cause can be isolated as the cause of the Holocaust. Many different causes have been recognized, belonging to different areas of discourse, historical, economic, ideological and religious. If it is important to assign these causes to different levels of importance, that is, to construct a hierarchy of causes, what criteria of importance should be employed? A list of causes of the Holocaust may be constructed as follows: 1 The existence of the Jews as a distinct and unassimilable group in Western society, the perpetual ‘other’. 2 The religious background of Christian belief in which the Jews were mythicized as deicides who had been punished by exile and enslavement, and so were regarded with hatred and contempt. 3 The social structures arising from Christian power, in which the Jews were given a despised social status as pariahs, though protected from annihilation. Excluded from honourable professions, the Jews were channelled into the taboo profession of usury, and then hated all the more as allegedly congenital usurers. 4 The religious legacy of the Middle Ages by which the Jews were identified mythologically with betrayal and corruption; the social legacy of the Middle Ages, by which the Jews retained their stigma as the lowest and most abominated social caste. 5 The growth of popular folklore stigmatizing the Jews: blood-libel, desecration of Eucharist wafers, poisoning wells, causing the Black Death, having a bad smell (foetor judaicus) etc. 6 The survival into the Enlightenment age and the modern world of attitudes of contempt deriving both from the concept of deicide and from a long history of stigma and pariahship. 7 The transvaluation of morality arising from loss of religious faith and the rise of modernistic systems of thought, including neo-Darwinism, 154

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8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Eugenics and Fascism by which general moral principles were eroded and extreme eugenic measures, eliminating the unfit, became acceptable. The erosion of Christian dogmas specifically protecting the Jews: (a) the belief that the conversion of the Jews was necessary for the Second Coming, (b) the status of Judaism as religio licita, (c) the role of the Jews as ‘witnesses’ and as guardians of the Old Testament (‘the librarians of the Church’, Augustine). The influence of the Enlightenment, which weakened religious attachments and gave the Jews opportunities for normalization and advancement; the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, which strengthened tribalist and nationalist ties thus rendering the Jews even more alien than before. The development of racist theories, in which Jews figured as a totally undesirable racial strain. The rise of idealistic nationalism in Germany and elsewhere, in which the Jews seemed a threat to the national soul (Fichte, Wagner). The special genocidal turn taken by nationalism in Germany (Marr, Dühring). The perceived threat posited by the Jews to the survival of Christianity and Christian society. The rise of anti-capitalism and socialism, in which the Jews were represented as a threat because of their alleged inveterate commercialism. The threat of Communism, seen as a Jewish phenomenon. The political situation in Germany: defeat in the First World War, which was blamed on the Jews. The economic situation in Germany: the Great Depression and inflation. The quest for national identity affecting Germany and other European countries. The anxiety arising from increasing Jewish prominence in the arts, sciences and professions, especially banking. The psychopathic personality of Hitler. The nature of the German culture: unquestioning obedience to orders. The German people’s general acceptance of the concept of genocidal antisemitism (Goldhagen – as commonly understood). The nature of bureaucracy, which carries through an originally vague plan with escalating machine-like automatism; without animus, but without imagination – the banality of evil (Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman).93

Each of these explanations has had its special advocates who have regarded their choice as the root cause of the Holocaust. Others, however, have not elected a particular cause to a privileged position, but have been content to list all the known causes as contributing together to the outcome. On this view, the Holocaust was the result of accumulating factors, some historically remote, some more recent. Such a view, however, tends to dismiss the more 155


remote causes as mere historical antecedents which cannot be taken too seriously, compared with the more immediate causes of the Holocaust, such as the rise of the Nazi movement. A non-hierarchical listing of causes transmutes inevitably into a hierarchy of time, in which ‘more important’ means ‘more recent’. Such a hierarchy of time would give, for example, as the cause of the First World War, the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914. The drawback of this approach to the problem of causation is that it produces conclusions that are useless. What lessons for the future can be drawn from Archduke Ferdinand as a paradigm of causation? We need to know why a trivial event had such momentous consequences, and that means that we have to delve into the historical background of the event. Of course, this too raises problems: how far back should we go? Some medieval chroniclers attempted to explain contemporary events by going back to the Fall of Adam. We need to have a delicate sense of discrimination and diagnosis to find the events in the past that were crucial to the formation of the crisis we are trying to explain. We need to be sensitive to the gestalt of a whole section of human history of which the event under scrutiny is the outcome. There is also a pragmatic advantage of this approach. It is likely that the causes thus uncovered are still in operation. Archduke Ferdinand is not likely to be replicated in the future, but the constellation of factors producing his death are, or could be, part of the picture of politics in our own day. It is therefore a feature of the hierarchization of causes that it tends towards usefulness. The deeper the cause unearthed, the more likely it is that some lessons will be learned that may lead to the avoidance of similar destructive crises. Among the myriad events or tendencies that present themselves as the causes of any important event, we have to discriminate between ‘causes’ and ‘triggers’. A trigger is an event which releases the destructive power which is lying in wait to cause disaster, and it is this destructive potentiality that can rightly be called the ‘cause’. For example, a town is destroyed by a volcanic eruption, which is triggered by a slight shift in the distribution of underground strata. The cause, however, is the existence of the volcano itself, a constant threat of which the inhabitants of the town are aware. Of course, this distinction between trigger and cause could be described as merely semantic. If an avalanche is set off by careless loud noise, one might easily and naturally say that the noise is the cause, rather than the existence of a precarious configuration of snow. If someone is struck by lightning, is the cause of his death his carelessness in sheltering under a tree or the existence of a vast charge of electricity in the air? In certain contexts (e.g. an inquest), one may usefully describe the trigger as the cause, in others one seeks a more fundamental system of explanation. Even though ‘cause’ is a shifty and many-valued concept which has occupied philosophers for many centuries, it is still useful to distinguish between trigger and cause when the underlying threat is not a natural force (about which one can do nothing) but a societal structure which 156

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is susceptible to change and reform by those who understand it. In such a case, it is trivialization to occupy oneself with minor causes or triggers instead of addressing the main societal imbalance from which the minor or ephemeral formations take their origin. In the case of the Holocaust, the force that lies in its background is an overwhelming hatred and contempt for the Jews which existed (and still exists) in many countries, not just in Germany, where the Holocaust actually originated. This hatred and contempt is found in all Christian countries (i.e. countries with a Christian background, even if considerably secularized), and also, to a lesser extent, in countries with an Islamic background; but not in countries whose prevailing religion does not derive from Judaism, such as China and Hindu India. The religious rivalry between Judaism and its daughter religions gave rise to this hatred and contempt; for both Christianity and Islam claim to be improved versions of Judaism, and both therefore regard Judaism as an outdated and obsolete form of religion to which the Jews cling in obstinacy and malice instead of embracing the new improved version. In Christianity this resentment is much intensified by a religious myth of deicide, according to which the Jews not only rejected the improved version, but brought about the cruel death of its divine founder. If Islam had deified Muhammad and also introduced a myth blaming the Jews for his death, the same intensity of hatred of the Jews would have existed in Islamic countries. As it was, even the degree of religious rivalry that existed between Judaism and Islam was sufficient to make the position of Jews miserable enough in Islam as second-class citizens; and when the Jews sought to reclaim a land that was regarded as Islamic, the resentment reached boiling-point, and Jews became as demonic in Islam as they had been in Christendom. Just when Christendom, under Enlightenment influences, was beginning to entertain the possibility of Jewish enfranchisement (even though the mere adumbration of such a possibility was enough to set off a new and particularly vicious form of antisemitism), Islam, unaffected by Enlightenment thought (at least as regards liberal and critical reading of the Koran and other sacred writings) moved in the other direction, from relative tolerance to fundamentalist religio-political hate. But against the whole notion of a special hatred against Jews derived from a unique religio-historical formation there is the much-espoused theory of ‘the other’.94 This declares that antisemitism is simply a form of xenophobia. Jews, being different or ‘other’ incur animosity. This is true of all people who are different, not just of Jews. The details of the difference or ‘otherness’ are not important; Jews in Christian society are hated, but so are Christians in Jewish society (novels have been written to explore what would have happened to Christians if the Roman Empire had become converted to Judaism). Not only Jews were persecuted in medieval Christian Europe; so were gypsies and lepers. The doctrine of ‘the other’, in various linguistic forms, has been popular with Jews ever since the Enlightenment, since it seems to offer hope of an end 157


to antisemitism. If only Jews can assimilate sufficiently to be indistinguishable from non-Jews, the xenophobic reaction will not occur, and the problem will be solved. Thus German Jews who regarded themselves as patriotic Germans and as bearers of German culture distinguished themselves sharply from the Ostjuden whose strange attire and beards and customs were regarded as producing a justified xenophobia. The same distaste for unregenerate Jewry can be seen at the dawn of the Enlightenment, in the reply of Isaac de Pinto to the antisemitic strictures of Voltaire. De Pinto draws a strong distinction between Sephardic Jewry (good) and Ashkenazi Jewry (bad). If only all Jews could acquire the polish of the Sephardim, antisemitism would be at an end! Xenophobia is undoubtedly an ingredient in antisemitism, especially in certain eras when Jews constituted a recent immigrant influx, but Jewish history as a whole shows that the Jew as ‘other’ goes very little way towards explaining antisemitism and the Holocaust. Assimilated Jews have been hated just as much as unassimilated ones, and the German Jews who nurtured an ideal of symbiosis did not escape the gas-chambers. Indeed, it was the failure of assimilation, and thus of the theory of ‘the other’, that led to the solution of Zionism. It is true that gypsies as well as Jews suffered both in medieval Christendom and in Hitler’s Germany. But there was a huge difference between the image of the gypsy and that of the Jew in the Christian mind. Gypsies were simply not important to Christians in the way the Jews were. No theological tomes were written to explain the relationship between gypsydom and Christianity. To Christians, the Jews constituted a huge theological problem. Indeed, one could argue that the trouble for Jews was not that they were unfamiliar and strange to Christians, but on the contrary they were too intimately involved in the furniture of the Christian mind. The Jews, unlike the gypsies, were personae dramatis in the central Christian story. Every time Christians went to church they heard about the Jews. Christian art and the Passion Plays featured the Jews as the demonic enemies of Christ. There were no Christian myths about gypsies, who were despised for xenophobic reasons alone. This centrality of the Jews in the Christian mind caused both their preservation and their demonization. Only the Jews were given permission to practise a non-Christian religion within the bounds of Christendom. Islam, on the contrary, was classed as heresy, not religio licita, and no Islamic worship was permitted where Christians ruled. Judaism was acknowledged as the religion from which Christianity sprang, and therefore as a legitimate, if imperfect and incomplete, kind of Christianity. Eventually, Jews would be converted, and had to be preserved until that date, for their conversion was essential for the dénouement of the Christian story. This preservation, however, meant that the Jews were exposed over a long period to fantasies which became more and more horrific. By the end of the Middle Ages, the 158

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Jews, in the perception of the Christian masses, were hardly human. This was not distaste for ‘the other’; it was more like the shuddering horror felt nowadays for the vampire Dracula, but without the consciousness of the fictitiousness of the character. The Jews filled the role supplied by horror films today, but with far more sense of literalness. A recent book, The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians and the Pig, by Claudine Fabre-Vassas (1997),95 gives a compelling picture of the demonizing of the Jews by peasants of Southern France and Catalonia. The refusal of Jews to eat the flesh of the pig takes fantastic forms in the minds of these peasants, to whom the pig is a central domestic figure, half beast and half human. In their pig-rituals, especially concerned with blood and sacrifice, the Jew is interwoven, being cast in the role of both executioner and victim. In the peasant mind, the Jew is a frightening bogey-man, but also the sacrificer whose depravity is necessary for the salvation of Christians.96 The Jew can never be thought of as a normal human being, but only as a demon whose intervention is both feared and desired. Fabre-Vassas’s research, however, is not primarily about the Middle Ages but about peasants of the present day and the recent past, who retain much of the eerie folkloric image of the Jew and the sense of his cosmic importance as representative of evil. The terminology of the Jew as ‘the other’ is thus seriously misleading, since it assimilates antisemitism to mere xenophobia, omitting what is special to it, namely its unique mythological quality, emanating from the role of the Jews in the Christian myth. An interesting writer on this topic is Gavin Langmuir,97 who takes the view that antisemitism proper did not exist before the eleventh century. Before that time anti-Jewish sentiment would be more properly characterized as xenophobia. Langmuir is sure, however, that there is such a thing as antisemitism which must be distinguished from xenophobia by its special characteristics of hysterical irrationality, such as the belief in the blood-libel. Such special characteristics, he argues, require the assignment of a special name to this variety of hatred, to distinguish it from what might be called normal xenophobia operating by stereotypes. Langmuir’s analysis is valuable, but limited. He does not sufficiently appreciate the theological and mythological aspects of antisemitism and its roots in the origins of the Christian–Jewish conflict. He even contends that up to the eleventh century, Christian opposition to Jews was ‘rational’, since it was based on the charge that the Jews had brought about the death of Jesus, a charge which the Jews themselves admitted to be true, only differing about whether this judicial killing was justified. This, however, much overestimates the rationality of the role assigned to the Jews from the Gospels onwards. The Jews were charged not with killing Jesus, but with killing God. If Jesus, like Socrates, had been regarded as merely a human sage, the situation would have been very different. Langmuir, therefore, is wrong to assert that antisemitism did not exist before the eleventh century. It existed in full force 159


in the minds of the Christian clergy who produced the Adversus Judaeos literature and fulminated in their pulpits against the evil of the Jews (St John Chrysostom is a prominent example). What is true in Langmuir’s thesis is that before the eleventh century, antisemitism did not exist as an obsession at the popular level. It took many centuries for the preaching of the clergy to transform the Jews in the popular mind from human beings into monsters. Decrees of many Church councils are evidence of long-enduring friendliness of ordinary people towards the Jews: for example, the decrees forbidding attendance at Jewish weddings, and forbidding farmers to ask rabbis to bless their fields. It was not until the common people had become thoroughly Christianized that the phenomenon of popular antisemitism, so important for later developments including the Holocaust, appeared on the scene. Contributing also to this development was the gradual exclusion of the Jews from honourable occupations, and their employment by Christian rulers to perform tasks that were hateful to the common people, especially the collection of taxes, direct or indirect. The development of the Jews into a pariah caste, the target of popular contempt, fear and loathing, was a long process, not the creation of the eleventh century. Langmuir’s attempts to ground the appearance of popular antisemitism in the sociology of the eleventh century are thus beside the point. On the other hand, Langmuir is to be strongly commended for the seriousness with which he treats the phenomenon of Christian antisemitism, and for the severity of his strictures against other historians who have virtually ignored the whole matter. Other writers of recent years who have eschewed the misleading and superficial terminology of ‘the other’, and have stressed the theological and mythological aspects, have been Paul Lawrence Rose and Daniel Goldhagen, both of whom have been misunderstood as tracing the Holocaust to an exclusively German causation. It is extraordinary how the deeper, religion-linked aspects of the theses of these writers have been ignored in the responses, favourable or unfavourable, to their writings. Paul Lawrence Rose examined the development of German idealist nationalism.98 He showed how intimately antisemitism was bound up with the attempts of German intellectuals to cope with their loss of belief in Christianity and their substitution of a belief in the noble destiny of the German nation. But he also showed how this antisemitism was a legacy from Christianity itself, adopting the very same outlines and structural conformation as antisemitism had displayed in the Christian myth. Rose described his own argument as one of ‘morphology’, by which he meant that he was concerned with structural identity between Christian antisemitism and its purportedly atheist German successor. He might have expressed the matter more plainly by saying that the death of a dogma does not mean the death of its accompanying myth. People like Fichte or Bruno Bauer retained a fundamentally Christian scenario. Not a single charge against the Jews was dropped: they were regarded as guilty of cold legalism (Pharisaism), 160

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moneygrubbing (Judas Iscariot and this thirty pieces of silver), lack of patriotism (the Wandering Jew) and as being in every way an impediment to the new, noble Germany that would lead the world into a messianic era. In what was intended as a new, godless focus of idealism, the enemy was unchanged. Even more remarkable was the central, though negative, importance assigned to the Jews by these post-Christian thinkers. They were concerned, to the point of obsession, with the so-called ‘Jewish question’. Objectively speaking, the Jews were an unimportant minority struggling to achieve normality in a framework of developing democracy after centuries of degradation. In practice, every small success on the part of Jews was found terrifying: the Jews were taking over. This overestimation of the Jewish presence was itself an echo of Christian paranoia, in which the Jews were powerful allies of the Devil. In his reply to his critics (Afterword to the 1992 edition), Paul Lawrence Rose remarked that his important concept of ‘morphology’ had been totally ignored, and instead he had been taken to be allotting exclusive blame for the Holocaust to German intellectual trends, especially German revolutionary nationalism. Crucially placed passages such as the following had passed without comment: This powerful unifying function can be seen in various contexts. Above all, Ahasverus leaps across the gulf between the great movements of Christian and secular antisemitism. In both mentalities is found lurking his symbolic essence – namely, inherited collective Jewish guilt. But secularization brought new possibilities for anti-Jewish theorizing that were ultimately to be more perilous for the Jews than the old Christian framework. With the rise of a secular philosophy, Ahasverus mutated to become the symbol of an enlightened ‘noble-minded’ Jew-hatred, which preached human redemption as the greatest good of mankind. Ahasverus retained his status as the emblem of Jewish stubbornness, but now his symbolic qualities were translated into the enlightened modern terminology of human freedom and moral enslavement, egoism and lovelessness, reconciliation to nature and to history. (p. 55) It seems that the obvious relationship of modern antisemitism to its predecessor, Christian antisemitism, is a taboo topic. Any writer who discusses this topic is not exactly ignored; instead attention is concentrated on aspects of his work extraneous to the taboo. Thus Paul Lawrence Rose, whose real topic is how German antisemitism grew out of Christian antisemitism, is treated as if he has confined himself to German history, and is criticized as an obsessively anti-German theorist. An even more remarkable case of the operation of the taboo is Daniel Goldhagen, whose book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the 161


Holocaust (1996) has become one of the most celebrated, and criticized, works about the Holocaust.99 However, the second chapter, ‘The Evolution of Eliminationist Antisemitism in Modern Germany’ has been almost ignored. Here Goldhagen writes Regarding Jews, the medieval legacy to the modern world was, in Joshua Trachtenberg’s words, ‘a hatred so vast and abysmal, so intense, that it leaves one gasping for comprehension’. Nevertheless, the Jews were left alive because the Church, in recognition of Christianity’s and Judaism’s common heritage, accepted the Jews’ right to live and to practise their religion, though they were condemned to live in a degraded state, as punishment for their rejection of Jesus. (p. 53) Goldhagen goes on to say For hundreds of years, antisemitism had lent coherence and esteem to the self-image of the Christian world; as many of the old certitudes about the world eroded in nineteenth-century Germany, the centrality of antisemitism as a model of cultural coherence and eventually as a political ideology – and its balmic quality to a society losing its moorings – grew tremendously. (p. 54) Goldhagen does argue that antisemitism achieved a special virulence and murderous tendency in Germany, which outstripped in this regard even the antisemitism of France, Poland and other countries with the same heritage of Christian antisemitism. He attributes this special virulence to the circumstances of German history, especially the anxiety and uncertainty felt about the German self-image and identity as a nation. But he never attributes it to the ‘German character’ and he never suggests that Jew-hatred was unique to the German people. His thesis is that Jew-hatred everywhere in Europe was a legacy from medieval Christianity, but that circumstances made it particularly hysterical in Germany, where the alleged need to eliminate the Jews from German society by one means or another had become an intellectual truism, inculcated by every medium of expression and at every level of education, together with the widely held belief that the Jews had done Germany great harm and were its most poisonous enemy. Goldhagen’s thesis is not ‘simplistic’, as has been alleged. He does not think that the Holocaust was ‘inevitable’, but that a number of subsidiary causes were necessary to bring it about, including the German military defeat, the economic slump and the twisted personality of Hitler. In the absence of these causes, the Holocaust would not have happened. But all these causes would have been insufficient 162

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if there had not existed a reservoir of loathing, fear and contempt deriving from, and continuous with, the demonization of the Jews in the Christian Middle Ages. By far the most essential cause of the Holocaust was this ‘hatred so vast and abysmal, so intense that it leaves one gasping for comprehension’. The causes of this hatred are outlined in the items 2–5. in the list given earlier. Again, things might have happened differently. Despite the baleful role assigned to the Jews in the Christian myth as deicides and as obstinate rejectors of Christian teaching, the political triumph of Christianity was necessary before the myth could be translated into societal reality. The power of the Church and the subjection of the Jews meant that the Church could embark on a successful campaign of vilification which in the course of centuries gave the Jews a nightmare configuration in the popular Christian mind. Even more important, the power of the Church enabled an institutional process to take place by which the Jews were endowed with the stigma of a pariah class. This was not just a theological or even mythological campaign, but an active process of degradation, achieved by excluding Jews from all honourable professions and channelling them into taboo occupations, particularly usury. This process actually became more intensive as the Middle Ages wore on, so that when the age of Enlightenment dawned, the Jews were at their lowest ebb.100 It was not to be expected that this stigma would disappear at the waving of the wand of the Enlightenment. On the contrary, the Enlightenment itself brought special dangers to the Jews. The same process of endangerment through liberalization can be seen in the violence offered to the Untouchables of India as a result of their attempts to normalize their position, in response to enactments improving their legal status. The religious pariahdom of the Jews continued in other guises, supported by theories of race or economic class. The question may be asked why there is such reluctance on the part of investigators to assign as the chief cause of the Holocaust the reservoir of hatred built up by Christian indoctrination and its effects on both popular folklore and on post-Christian ideologies. As we have seen, the reluctance is so extreme that this part of the theses of Rose and Goldhagen was simply ignored, and both were accused of ‘blaming the Germans’. An obvious reason for reluctance is embarrassment, on the part of both Jews and Christians, about pointing to the culpability of a religion which claims to be the apex of spirituality. Indeed, the lofty claims of Christianity have been an important part of the trouble from the first. This stance, excluding any concession to pluralism, made the Jews appear very wicked and perverse in not accepting the obsolescence of their own religion. Moreover, even when Enlightenment intellectuals became Deists or atheists, they did not abandon the historical evolutionary scheme by which Judaism had been rendered obsolete by the advent of Christianity. In the historical philosophy of both Kant and Hegel, Judaism is cast for the role of an imperfect precursor to the 163


highest stage of religion, Christianity. Bruno Bauer, though an atheist, even proposed that Jews must convert to Christianity before becoming eligible for enfranchisement, since Christianity was higher on the evolutionary scale (leading to enlightened atheism) than Judaism. More important perhaps is the feeling that to pinpoint Christianity as the instigator of antisemitism and the Holocaust is to court despair. If Christianity is to blame, what can be done about it? Here we may revert to the analogy of the stroke of lightning. To identify the cause of a death by lightning as the presence of an electric charge in the air would be useless, because this is beyond human control. We therefore rightly prefer to identify some cause that is subject to control, such as the mistaken choice to stand under a tree. Some causes are too deep to be worth mentioning; for example, it would not be helpful to attribute the Holocaust to the human propensity for evil. On the other hand, some causes are too trivial to be worth mentioning, unless we are adopting a purely academic historical approach, and do not care whether our analysis leads to any practical suggestions for the future. Christianity, however, is not a force of nature but a human cultural product. The ‘hatred so vast and abysmal’ may seem at times to be endemic in the human soul, so that some have even said that antisemitism has existed wherever there have been Jews. This is not true; in China and India, the Jews met with no antisemitism for their ‘otherness’, but only respect for their adherence to their ancestral pattern. Antisemitism occurs in regions where the prevailing religion has arisen out of Judaism (i.e Christianity and Islam) and is therefore engaged in a struggle to supersede Judaism. Its solution is the development of the pluralistic approach. This has actually happened to a large extent in Western democracies, but even in them pockets of unregenerate Christian triumphalism remain. Where democracy and pluralism have not developed a secure tradition (e.g. in Eastern Europe and in Islamic countries) the potentialities for a Holocaust remain. The greatest lesson of the Holocaust, however, is the existence of virulent post-Christian antisemitism, retaining the worst structural features of traditional Christian antisemitism. This is an antisemitism that denies its religious origins, and is therefore very hard to treat. Its solution, however, lies in a kind of psychoanalysis, in which the unconscious roots in myth, folklore and art are laid bare and a rational understanding of the long history of hate is made possible.

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APPENDIX An interpretation of ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’

Polyphiloprogenitive The sapient sutlers of the Lord Drift across the window-panes. In the beginning was the Word.

Commentators (influenced by the superscription from The Jew of Malta) take the ‘sapient sutlers’ to be the clergy, on whom the whole poem is generally supposed to be a satiric comment. But why are the clergy ‘polyphiloprogenitive’? Grover Smith101 is reduced to saying that this is a reference to the lechery of the clergy in The Jew of Malta. But to be lecherous is a very different thing from desiring many children. It is difficult to understand, anyway, why the morals of some sixteenth century fictional friars, as reported by the villains of the play, should be made the basis of a satirical attack on the clergy generally. Also, why do the clergy ‘drift across the window-panes’? Is it simply that the poet is in church and the clergy are observed to cross the windows outside? What can be the point of this? The name given to the Deity in this verse is ‘the Lord’. In the next verse, it is ‘␶ó ε´ ␯’, and in the third verse, ‘the Baptized God’. ‘The Lord’ has an Old Testament ring. I suggest that the first verse refers to the Old Testament view of God, the second verse to that of the Greek philosophers, and the third to that of the New Testament, a compound or fusion of the previous two. The ‘sapient sutlers of the Lord’ are the Jews. ‘Sutlers’ means ‘petty traders in food and drink’. An anti-Jewish bias is to be expected of Eliot at this period of his career. He would regard the Jews as chiefly traders, and their religion as being very much concerned with food and drink, both because of the Jewish dietary laws and because of the temple sacrifices (cf. Rom. 14:17, ‘For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink’). The ‘of’ in ‘sutlers of the Lord’ is both possessive and objective. The Jews are the people of the Lord, to whom he gives commandments about food and drink; and also they provide the Lord with food and drink in the form of sacrifices and drink offerings. The Jews are called 165

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‘sapient’ because of their pride in the wisdom of the Law (1 Corinthians 1:20: ‘Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?’). The Jews are called ‘polyphiloprogenitive’ because of their high estimate of fruitfulness (‘Be fruitful and multiply’ is the first commandment in the Old Testament), because of their desire for their own increase (Genesis 22:17: ‘I will multiply thy seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore’); and also, perhaps, because of the characteristic Jewish family affection which Ezra Pound made a subject of attack in Canto 29 (‘philoprogenitive’ can mean ‘fond of one’s children’ as well as ‘desirous of offspring’). The stanza is saying that the Jews of the Old Testament had a materialistic religious attitude. They regarded themselves as ‘sutlers’ providing God with food and drink and expecting in return material benefits. They failed to appreciate the non-material, spiritual nature of God, as described by Greek philosophers and expressed in John’s statement. ‘In the beginning was the Word’. Accordingly, the Jews have failed to establish their religion in the world; they ‘drift across the window-panes’. This is like a line of ‘Gerontion’ (published in the same volume of poems): ‘And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner’. Eliot sees the Jew as outside the House (European civilization) peering in through the window, or drifting by it. He may own the House (a reference to his supposed financial power) but he can never be resident in it; nor can he detach himself from it. The next line in ‘Gerontion’ is: ‘Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp’. The word ‘spawned’ expresses, like ‘poly’ but more openly, Eliot’s dislike of the Jews’ fertility. Another instance of the connection in Eliot’s mind between Jews and windows is in ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’, where a man (identifiable as a Jew by his ‘heavy eyes’ and ‘golden grin’ i.e., gold teeth) ‘Leaves the room and reappears/ Outside the window, leaning in’.102 If the earlier interpretation of the first stanza is correct, the superscription from The Jew of Malta acquires a new significance. It is Ithamore the Turk who speaks the words, ‘Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars’ to his master the Jew Barabas. It is, partly at least, the incomprehension shown by the non-Christians of the function of Christian clergy to which Eliot wishes to draw attention by his superscription. If, indeed, Eliot were attacking the clergy in this poem, the villains of The Jew of Malta would be strange allies to call to his support. In the beginning was the Word, Superfetation of ␶ò ε´ ␯, And at the mensual turn of time Produced enervate Origen. The second verse deals with the opposite error to that of the Jews, namely the error of adopting a view of God that was too spiritual. This was the error of the pagan philosophers who developed the idea of God as an impersonal One, 166

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which produced the Word or Logos as an emanation. This view of the Logos came into conflict, in the Christian Church, with the doctrine of the Word made Flesh, and of the full Divinity of Christ. Origen, who was over-infected with Greek philosophy, came to despise the flesh, as his self-castration showed; and he held heretical views on the status of the Incarnate God. Thus the reason for the repetition of the line ‘In the beginning was the Word’ becomes clear. At the end of the first verse it appears as the statement of a truth, correcting the mistake of the Jews and explaining their failure. At the beginning of the second stanza it appears as a proposition which itself requires further consideration and qualification if it is to escape heresy. It may be objected that it was in fact a Jewish thinker, Philo, who first applied the Logos theory to Biblical theology. But this is just the kind of fact that is liable to be ignored or discounted by someone with an anti-Jewish axe to grind. Why is the Word a ‘superfetation’? What is the point of the word ‘mensual’? And what is meant by saying that the Word produced by the One, itself then produced Origen? Grover Smith introduces here some curious speculations about the sexuality of God the Father in begetting the Son; but these speculations are, in my opinion, beside the point, since the stanza is referring not to Christian doctrine, but to Greek philosophy. I suggest that the image elaborated in this stanza is that the Word is an egg. The One produced an egg, the Logos (probably to be identified with the Primal Egg of mythology) and this egg ‘at the mensual turn of time’ (that is, after the proper period of gestation) produced Origen. I would even suggest that there is here a sly pun on the Greek phrase ␶ò ε´ ␯. The Primal Egg was produced by the Primal Hen.103 Eliot may have been given the idea of this kind of learned joke by a passage in Ezra Pound’s Mauberley: 0 bright Apollo, τív 1´ νδρα, τíν 1 ´ηρωα, τíνα θÂν What god, man or hero Shall I place a tin wreath upon! That the Logos is a ‘superfetation’ of the One can be understood by realizing that the Logos, in Stoic speculation (and in Philo) was the creative principle which mediated between the One and the Many ( John 1:3: ‘All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made’). Thus the egg produced by the One is impregnated with the Many, and can thus give rise to the full variety of life. However, for Christian doctrine (Eliot is saying) this view, if unqualified, is too intellectual and impersonal, and gives insufficient cosmic importance to the Flesh. The consequence which was hatched in the Church, therefore, was the heresy of Origen. In the next two verses, Eliot proceeds to the Christian view of the Godhead, which (he is suggesting) is free of the errors of Judaism and of pagan philosophy, yet 167

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combines and synthesizes both. Eliot wants to present the Christian view not as a doctrine, but as a vision – an insight simple, pictorial and profound, like the Symbol of literary theory. Accordingly, Eliot turns not to the theologians but to the painters, and specifically to a painter of the Primitive School, untainted by Renaissance theory even concerning his own art. The language of these two verses is entirely different from that of the rest of the poem; the polysyllables have disappeared. The painter is a simple craftsman, apparently concerned only with the details of his craft (the ‘gesso ground’, for example – but even here he is not entirely competent, for the materials of ‘the wilderness’ have not stood the test of time and are ‘cracked and browned’), and with his commission to paint a Baptism of Christ, complete with ‘nimbus’. Yet it is in this painting that the essential Christian vision has been expressed; the Word made Flesh, in its true relation to God the Father and to the Holy Spirit. It is the Baptized God that the painter is depicting, not the Crucified God. The Flesh is presented at its moment of apotheosis, cleansed of the stain of sin (‘the unoffending feet’) and so able to embody the Word. It is now possible to understand why there is a pronounced pause or break in the poem at this point, marked by a line of dots. The poem up to this point has been a kind of Credo; an exposition of the Christian view of the Godhead, and an account of how this view was developed. The rest of the poem deals not with God, but with Man. In this second part we have an account of the nature and function of the Church, and the two parts together thus form a complete affirmation which is not inappropriately called a Sunday Morning Service. It will be objected immediately that this interpretation ignores the celebrated satirical tone which is said to mark the poems of this period in Eliot’s work. I hope to show later that this objection can be answered satisfactorily. The sable presbyters approach The avenue of penitence; The young are red and pustular Clutching piaculative pence. The polysyllables have returned. The simple pellucid vision of the last two stanzas, a vision of the Divine, gives way to the trivial ugly realities of everyday life in the Church.The repeated theme in this stanza and the next is ‘penitence’. Instead of the ‘unoffending feet’, the purified sinless Flesh, we have the ‘pustular’ flesh of humans, spotted with sin. Instead of the eternal moment of union between Flesh and Word, captured in stillness by the painter, we have the painful movement of Time, in which little sins have to be expiated continually, and a fresh start is continually being made. Instead of the eternally youthful beauty of the Baptized God (there are echoes of Adonis, Attis and Dionysus, for the Baptism is a rebirth), there is the division in the 168

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Church between the young and the old. The clergy are called ‘presbyters’ because this means ‘old men’; they are black, because the fire of life has died in them. But in the young, the fire of life produces an ugly redness and an outbreak of boils. In these humans the Flesh is corrupt in youth and impotent in age. Instead of the once-for-all Baptism, their irreversible rebirth on a supernatural plane, there are the little continual outbreaks of sin, each requiring its expiatory penny. (‘Piaculative’ instead of the correct ‘piacular’ has a diminutive effect.) Under the penitential gates Sustained by staring Seraphim Where the souls of the devout Burn invisible and dim. The syntax of this stanza is puzzling. Should there be a comma instead of a fullstop at the end of the previous stanza? If so, it is the young who are clutching pence under the penitential gates. But what penitential gates? Is this some reference to the internal architecture of a church? If so, the details are hard to recognize. And who are the devout whose souls ‘burn invisible and dim’? Are they the same people as the ‘young’ of the previous stanza? Or are they the ‘presbyters’? Or some other group? And if the souls are invisible, how can they also be dim? And why are they burning? The usual interpretation, which concentrates on the word ‘dim’, and takes the stanza to refer to the tepid prayers of the so-called devout, does not meet these questions. If, however, we take the full-stop at the end of the previous stanza seriously, we arrive at a different syntactical structure. The word ‘under’ becomes an adverb, not a preposition, and the verb ‘are’ is understood immediately after it. (A similar doubt between preposition and adverb occurs in the case of the word ‘above’ in stanza 4. I shall consider soon whether there is a reason for this inducement of hesitation.) The interpretation that now forces itself upon us is that the stanza refers to Purgatory. Underneath are the penitential gates of Purgatory, guarded by aweinspiring winged angels. Within the gates are burning the souls of those who are undergoing purgation, having gained God’s grace. Some of these souls are invisible, and some are dimly visible.104 The stanza carries forward the idea of the previous stanza, which deals with the Church as a community engaged in purgation of the flesh, and shows that this purgation must continue even after death. (Medieval doctrine insisted on the physical reality of the pains of purgatory and of its flames.) Purgatory is situated beneath the Church-worshippers (the ‘presbyters’ and the ‘young’) because Dante situated Purgatory in the Antipodes. The ‘penitential gates’ are called in the Purgatorio ‘Peter’s Gate’, the main entrance to 169

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Purgatory. (The plural ‘gates’ is generally used for a large double gate, except when a special name is being used.) ‘Peter’s Gate’ is ‘penitential’ not only because it is the entrance to the place of penitence, but because it is approached by the Three Steps of Penitence. The ‘staring Seraphim’ who sustain the gates are the two Angels of the Valley, who guard the part of Ante-Purgatory nearest to the Gate, and the Angel of the Gate himself. The faces of all three angels are described as awe-inspiring (Canto 8, 35 and 9, 8 I). That the souls in Purgatory are called ‘the devout’ is not surprising; for these souls all embrace their punishment willingly and are in God’s grace,105 Catholics call these souls ‘holy’, and it is even permitted to pray for their intercession. That some of the souls are invisible and some dimly visible is explained by Dante’s account of the fire of the Seventh Cornice, where the souls are only intermittently visible to the poet. Eliot quotes directly from the same passage in ‘The Waste Land’: ‘Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina’ (line 427). Arnaut, who had come out of the centre of the fire sufficiently far to become visible, went back and became invisible again. Even when fully visible, the shades (‘ombre’) of Purgatory have a ‘corpo fittizio’. A further degree of shadowiness occurs when the shade is in the process of appearing or disappearing, as when Guido (Canto 26, 135) ‘vanished through the flames, like a fish going through water to the bottom’ (‘come per l’acqua pesce andando al fondo’). It remains to be explained why Eliot, both in this stanza and stanza 4, has produced in the reader a hesitation between preposition and adverb. In both cases, it is the preposition which is understood more naturally at a first reading. In stanza 4, a first reading will inevitably produce the phrase ‘above the painter’, to be as inevitably corrected by the next line, which makes it quite clear that ‘above’ is intended as an adverb. Yet the phrase ‘above the painter’ still remains at the back of the mind, and the effect produced is that the painter has given such an impression of immediacy that he seems to be one of the witnessing crowd in the painting. In stanza 6, the word ‘under’ seems to follow on so naturally as a preposition from the previous stanza, that even when we read it as an adverb (as the preceding full-stop forces us to do) we still retain the impression that the people in church are somehow ‘under the penitential gates? And so they are, for earthly life is a kind of ante-room to Purgatory, and Peter’s Gate awaits them, looming above them at the end of their earthly journey. So Peter’s Gate is both below them and above them. Eliot’s subtle use of punctuation to produce ambiguity was noted by Empson in his remarks on a poem of this period, Whispers of Immortality. It should be noted that the only part of Dante’s Purgatory in which souls are purified by fire is the last or Seventh Cornice, where the sin of which they are purged is the sin of lust. This is important in view of the sexual theme in the next stanza. (In Aquinas’ Purgatory, on the other hand, fire was the standard instrument of punishment, and the Purgatory of the Stoics was

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called Â␮υ´␳ˆÛι˜) Along the garden-wall the bees With hairy bellies pass between The staminate and pistilate, Blest office of the epicene. In this stanza we have an example of Eliot’s surprise-technique, which amounts essentially to a continuation of the argument by pictorial means. The sudden switch to the pre-Renaissance painting in stanza 3 was a previous example of the same technique. The parable of the bees, I suggest, is intended to throw light on the function of the Church, and on the rather depressing contrast which has been drawn between humdrum life in the Church and the moment of Divine enlightenment. The point is that life in Church is for all its members, and particularly for the clergy, a life of sacrifice. The true Church member must deny the urgent claims of the flesh in order to purge his flesh of sin. Yet ultimately the Christian religion is not a denial of the flesh, but an affirmation of it, in the central doctrine of the Incarnation. By sacrificing the desires of the flesh, the individual members of the Church contribute to the apotheosis of the flesh, which is the Body of Christ – the Flesh of God – which is the Church. The substance of the Church is the Flesh (this is the point of the poem ‘The Hippopotamus’, in which the hippopotamus, symbolizing the flesh in all its bulky, quivering, fallible absurdity, rises superior to the Church, when the latter is wrongly conceived as above the shocks that flesh is heir to). So the day-to-day humdrum penitential existence of the individual Church-members contributes to the Baptismal experience of the Godhead and keeps that experience fresh. The worker-bees renounce their sexual nature, but having done so, they bring about the sexual renewal of Nature. The experience which they have sacrificed is not lost to the universe; it becomes centralized and stored, and results in a tremendous central sexual transmission, which is identical with the descent of the Holy Spirit on the flesh of the Baptized Christ. This conception of sacrifice can be traced throughout Eliot’s work. It derives ultimately from the passage in Frazer’s The Golden Bough which describes the savage sacrificial ritual by which primitive man renewed, as he believed, the powers of Nature (LII, I). The thought behind this ritual is that we must sacrifice not what is worthless (for that would be no sacrifice) but what is supremely valuable, and that by sacrificing it, we preserve it, not for ourselves but for the community and the Universe. This is true for every member of the Church, but particularly for the clergy. (In The Idea of a Christian Society Eliot called for a renewal of the monastic orders in the Church of England.) The self-denial of the ascetic is very different from the self-castration of Origen, which the word ‘epicene’ recalls from stanza 2. Origen did not renounce sex; he eradicated it, and so denied the

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value and divinity of the flesh. He wanted to be a pure spirit, with no need for purgation, and so blasphemed against the Incarnation. He made things too easy for himself by a once-for-all renunciation which made the continual effort of self-sacrifice unnecessary. The words ‘blest office’ make us think immediately of the clergy, and this brings us back to the superscription from The Jew of Malta. The infidels, Ithamore and Barabas, fail to understand the ‘blest office’ of the clergy, but Ithamore unconsciously hits on a fruitful analogy when he calls them ‘caterpillars’. He means, of course, ‘worthless parasites’, as when Bolingbroke calls Bushy and Bagot ‘the caterpillars of the common’ (Shakespeare’s Richard II, Act II, scene III); but the metaphor from the insect world suggests to Eliot a more appropriate image from the same sphere to symbolize the clergy. Sweeney shifts from ham to ham Stirring the water in his bath. The masters of the subtle schools Are controversial, polymath. Now we have another shock-transition, from the worker-bees to Sweeney in his bath. It is easy enough to see that in this last stanza we are again concerned with the Flesh and the Word. Sweeney represents the Flesh without the Word, and ‘the masters of the subtle schools’ represent the Word without the Flesh. I suggest that just as the opening stanzas of the poem are concerned with the pre-Christian era, the final stanza is concerned with what has been called the post-Christian era. In the paganism of the modern world (Eliot is saying) a split has taken place between the Flesh and the Word. On the one hand, we have the barbarian Sweeney, who is the Flesh personified – his body has to be described in terms of meat. On the other hand, there are the philosophers and scientists who have reached a new height of knowledge and sophistication, but whose efforts divide the world instead of uniting it. This is the same dichotomy that Eliot deplored in the literary field in his much-discussed phrase ‘the dissociation of sensibility’. There is irony in the fact that Sweeney is in his bath; he presents a picture to be put alongside that of Christ in the baptismal water – the ‘unoffending feet’ are juxtaposed to Sweeney’s hams, and the mysterious waters of purification to the unmysterious waters of a secularized world. Both Sweeney’s flesh and the water in his bath are without holiness. The ‘masters of the subtle schools’ are sometimes interpreted as the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages. I think that this is a mistake, but I would suggest that the word ‘schools’ is purposely chosen to relate the modern scientists to the Schoolmen and so to the first scholastic thinker, Origen. We thus have the thought, ‘Modern scientists have cut off the mind from the body, just as some medieval Schoolmen tended to do, and just as Origen did. Modern scientists are castrated intellects’. It should be noted that the last two lines of the poem are unobtrusively related to the first two lines of the poem by the words ‘subtle’ and ‘polymath’, 172

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which echo ‘sutlers’ and ‘polyphiloprogenitive’. I think that this means that the world has come full circle; the modern scientists are another race of Jews, because of their materialism, their over-subtlety and pride of intellect, and their adherence to the Many rather than to the One. (The Jews, it is implied, were individualists, rationalists and pluralists, who wanted to multiply their progeny rather than draw the Church together into one unitary Communion inside the Body of Christ. The Jews did not want to sink their individuality in union with God, but merely to be his privileged servants.) Thus the ‘Sunday Morning Service’ is complete. It contains an affirmation of faith in the Christian doctrines of both the Godhead and the Church, and a sermon against unChristian doctrines, both pre-Christian and post-Christian. I now come to the question, ‘What has happened to the satirical tone and style of the poem’? If the poem is a pious affirmation of faith, there seems little room for the satirical qualities that have been so much admired in these sardonic quatrains. To this objection I would answer that the poem is, in the main, not satirical, but that it is full of irony. The irony derives not from any cheap points scored against the Christian clergy, but from the conflict of the Word and the Flesh, which are always striving to meet in union, but are always failing to do so, with ridiculous and pathetic effect. The pride of the Flesh and the pride of the Word are always suffering an unexpected fall, and this is productive of irony; yet despite the ridiculousness of each in isolation, the holiness of both of them is revealed when they unite, either in the person of the Baptized God, or in the day-to-day purgations of the Church. And there is another source of irony which is at least equally important. This is the irony which Eliot directs against himself. He calls the poem ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’. Eliot is often praised for the dramatic gift that enabled him to create such characters as Prufrock and Sweeney. But it is not always realized that one of the most successful of his dramatic characterizations is that of ‘Mr. Eliot’ himself. The polysyllables of this poem convey the irony and pathos of the pedantic and learned Mr Eliot, whose philosophy is one of abandonment and ecstasy – an ecstasy which he can attain only in theory. I am sorry if I have destroyed the satirical attack on the clergy so beloved of people who prefer those of Eliot’s poems which were written before his ‘defection’ to religion. I am afraid that close inquiry would produce similar results in the case of the other ‘satirical’ poems of this period. The poem which now emerges is, in my view, a much greater poem than the one that is lost; despite the antisemitism which (if I am right) ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ has in common with much of Eliot’s work of the same period.

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1 ANTISEMITISM: AN HISTORICAL OVERVIEW 1 See Hyam Maccoby, ‘Holiness and Purity: The Holy People in Leviticus and Ezra-Nehemiah’ in Reading Leviticus: A Conversation with Mary Douglas, ed. John F.A. Sawyer, Sheffield, 1996. 2 See a similar use of the expression ‘strange wives’ in relation to Solomon, 1 Kings 11:1. 3 Nehemiah 13.23–27. 4 Esther 3:8. 5 Diodorus, Bibliotheca, 34:1. 6 See Hyam Maccoby, Revolution in Judaea, New York, 1980. 7 Galatians 1:11. 8 See Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker, London, 1986. 9 1 Thessalonians 2:14–16. 10 Romans 11:28. 11 See Hyam Maccoby, Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil, London, 1992. 12 2 Thessalonians 2. 13 See Hyam Maccoby, Paul and Hellenism, London, 1991. 14 Epiphanius, Panarion, 30:16.6–9. 15 Matthew 23:31–35, Acts 7:52–53. 16 Acts 5. 17 1 Thessalonians 2:15–16. 18 Matthew 27:25. 19 See Hyam Maccoby, Jesus the Pharisee, London, 2003. 20 Acts 22:12. 21 Acts 9:2. 22 For example, Eusebius, D.E., I, 6, 17; Aphrahat, Dem., 11, 1; 15.4; Chrysostom, Or. C. Jud., VI, 2; Tertullian, Adv. Jud., 1; Irenaeus, Haer., IV.14’ Justin, Dial. 34; Ephrem, Rhy. C. Jud., 15. 23 For example, Origen, C. Cel., II, 75; Isidore, C. Jud., I, 18; Augustine, Adv. Jud., 5 and 7. 24 James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue, London, 1934, pp. 121–51. 25 For example, Maximinus, C. Jud., I; Tertullian, Adv. Jud., 5; Augustine, C.D. XV, 7; Chrysostom, Or. C. J., I, 7. 26 Romans 9:13, Galatians 4:21–31. 27 See Pliny the Younger, Epistulae X, 97–98.

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28 By Wilhelm Marr in 1879. 29 The most influential works inspired by the German antisemitic movement are The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, London (1899) by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Wagner’s son-in-law) and Die Judenfrage als Frage des Rassencharakters (Leipzig, 1901) by Eugen Dühring. 30 It was later shown (in the London Times of 1921) that this alleged document was actually plagiarized from a satirical novel written in 1864.

31 32

33 34

2 PURE BLOOD: THE BEGINNINGS OF RACIAL ANTISEMITISM IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN Galatians 3:28, AV. See Poliakov, The History of Antisemitism, vol. 2, Philadelphia, PA, pp. 222–32. The research of Leon Poliakov remains the best guide to the stages by which the doctrine of limpieza de sangre took hold of the people of Spain and even had a profound effect on the social and economic life of the country. See Hyam Maccoby, Judaism on Trial, London 1982, 1993. See Saul Lieberman, Shki’in, Jerusalem, 1939.

3 THE REFORMATION: LUTHER (1483–1546) 35 These words come from Luther’s tract That Jesus Christ was a Born Jew, published in 1523. 36 See William Nicholls, Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate, Northvale, NJ, 1993, pp. 270–1, based on translation by Jacob R. Marcus, in The Jew in the Medieval World, New York, 1975, pp. 167–9. 37 Jews, however, were forbidden by the Bible to lend money on interest to fellowJews, on whom they were not even allowed to impose liability for non-interest loans except for a very limited period. This was not because of a moral objection to interest as such, but simply because of an obligation to help fellow-citizens in monetary difficulty. According to rabbinic development, however, the law of actual cancellation of debt after a given number of years was applied only to fellow-citizens in deep monetary distress, to whom a monetary ‘loan’ was, in essence, a mere form of assistance. Others could sign a document which allowed the loan to survive the seventh year, though still without interest. At one point, the rabbis even enacted a rule against the exaction of interest from loans to Gentiles, as an extension of biblical law. The purpose of this new prohibition was not moral disapproval of exaction of interest from Gentiles, but fear that such exaction might have various unwelcome effects on the Jewish population. Even here, however, an exception was made in the case of Jewish scholars who were unable to pay for their studies except through income derived from moneylending to Gentiles (see Gemara on Mishnah BM 5:6). This shows that charging interest to non-Jews was not regarded as immoral in itself, and that is why the rabbis of the Middle Ages, when deprived of other sources of income, finally settled on this as the available source of income for most. 4 THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND VOLTAIRE (1694–1778) 38 Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews, New York and London, 1968, ch. IX.

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39 d’Holbach, L’esprit du Judaïsme, ou examen raisonné de la loi de Moyse, et de son influence sur la religion chretienne, London, pp. 171–3. This work is sometimes attributed to Anthony Collins, the English Deist. In fact it is a composite in which the expressions of Holbach and possibly Diderot are discernible. 40 Ibid., p. 69. 41 Antoine Guénée, Lettres de quelque juifs portugais et allemands, 2nd edn, II, 44, N.1, Paris, 1769. 42 Jean-Jacques, Rousseau, ‘Des Juifs’, Oeuvres Complètes, III, Paris, p. 499. 5 KARL MARX (1818–83) 43 He resigned this post in 1843. 44 Karl Marx, Early Texts, trans. and ed. David Mcllellan, Oxford, 1971. 45 An expression coined by August Bebel, and very apposite to today’s left-wing antisemitism. 46 It is true that it was the vote of the Soviet Union in favour of partition in 1947 that brought about the establishment of Israel, but this was merely a tactical move against the West, and did not interrupt Soviet hostility to Zionism. 47 Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, dissociated herself entirely from her father’s antisemitism. She identified herself as Jewish and engaged strongly in Jewish working-class activities in the East End of London, even making efforts to learn Yiddish. 48 In his motivation, Heine was like that other Enlightenment Jew, Solomon Maimon, who in about 1780 applied to a Christian clergyman for conversion, saying he wanted to do this ‘on rational grounds’. Asked to explain, he said that as a Jew he was starving, and as a Christian he would eat, and therefore the move was very rational. The clergyman threw him out. (Solomon Maimon: An Autobiography) 6 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844–1900) 49 KSA, vol. 5, p. 193. 50 KSA, vol. 6, pp. 192–3 (cf. vol. 12, p. 532). 51 See for example David G. Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa, Jews in the Japanese Mind, New York, 1995. 52 See Jacob Golomb ed., ‘Nietzsche and the Marginal Jews’, Nietzsche and Jewish Culture, London and New York, 1997. 53 Jüdische Renaissance, Ost und West 1, 1901: 7–10. 54 ‘Zionistische Politik’ (1920), Jüdische Bewegung, first series, pp. 113 ff. 7 THE DELECTABLE DAUGHTER 55 The chapter ‘Les Miracles de Notre Dame’ in Adams’ Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Princeton, NJ, 1981) should be consulted. 56 See Denis de Rougemont, Passion and Society (trans. Belgion Montgomery, London, 1956) by for a full treatment of this theme. 57 See F.R. Leavis, ‘George Eliot’s Zionist Novel’, Commentary, October, 1960, and William Baker, ‘George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda’, The Jewish Quarterly, Spring, 1969. 58 Margaret Mead, Growing up in New Guinea, New York, 2001.

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8 SHAKESPEARE AND SHYLOCK 59 For the history of the stage portrayals of Shylock, see Frank Felsenstein’s Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, Baltimore, MD, 1999, ch. 7. 60 Luke 18:10–14. 61 Matthew 23:27. 62 Matthew 23:5. 9 THE ANTISEMITISM OF T.S. ELIOT 63 The most recent study of Eliot’s antisemitism is T.S. Eliot’s Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, by Anthony Julius (Cambridge, 1995). Previous full-length studies were by John Harrison (The Reactionaries, 1966), and Christopher Ricks (T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, London, 1988), while shorter studies were published by myself (1967, 1969, 1973, 1974). Some remarks in an article by George Steiner gave rise to a lengthy correspondence in The Listener, from May 1971, in which most of the possible attitudes to Eliot’s antisemitism were aired. 64 The Times, 2 November 1972. 65 Eliot, T.S., After Strange Gods, London, 1934, pp. 19–20. 66 W.T. Levy and V. Scherle, Affectionately, T.S. Eliot, London, 1969. 67 ‘T.S. Eliot and the “out there” ’, Times Literary Supplement, 10 December 1971. 68 Gabriel Pearson, ‘Eliot: An American use of Symbolism’, in Eliot in Perspective, ed. Graham Martin, London, 1970. 69 See John Harrison, The Reactionaries, London, 1966. See also M. Curtis, Three against the Third Republic, Princeton, NJ, 1959. 70 Romans 6:3–6. 71 Eliot was well aware of the links between Christianity and primitive sacrificial ritual, as he shows for example in his reference to ‘Christ the tiger’ in ‘Gerontion’, and in his anthropological notes to ‘The Waste Land’. 72 T.S. Eliot, 1971, p. xviii. 10 THE ANTISEMITISM OF EZRA POUND 73 New England Weekly, VIII, 6 (21 November 1935), p. 105. 74 A closer transliteration of the Hebrew word for ‘usury’ would be neshekh. 75 Guide to Kulchur, p. 315: ‘[Rothschild had, let us say, a purpose, a race [his own race] to “avenge” ’. 76 British Union Quarterly 120 (4 June 1938), p. 13. 77 T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods, London, 1934, p. 47. 78 Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: The Poet Sculptor, London, 1964. 79 See Canto 47 for the sexual aspect. 80 ‘[The Hebrew Scriptures] are the annals of a servile and nomadic tribe that had not evolved into agricultural order . . . . Jehovah is a semitic cuckoo’s egg laid in the European nest’ [‘Ethics of Mencius’]. The curious theory that the Jews avoided agriculture by breeding cattle (thus avoiding, also, dangerous encounters with wild animals) may reflect the cattleman / farmer feud in the American experience. Pound seems to have extended this theory to later Jewish history by the hypothesis that Jews regard Gentiles as cattle, for example: ‘the yidd is a stimulant, and the goyim are cattle / in gt proportion and go to saleable slaughter / with the maximum of docility’. (Canto 74) (That this was published in

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81 82 83 84 85 86 87

1948, when no one could plead unawareness of the transportation of the Jews in cattle-trucks to the death-camps, shows, at the least, remarkable insensitivity.) The Talmud is, in fact, so much on the side of the farmer that it forbids the breeding of small cattle in the Holy Land. The Hebrew Scriptures, of course, are permeated by agriculture. See John Harrison, The Reactionaries, London, 1966. Christine Brooke-Rose, A ZBC of Ezra Pound, London, 1971. Daniel Cory, ‘Ezra Pound: A Memoir’, Encounter, vol. 30, no. 5, 1968. Reported by Michael Reck, ‘A Conversation between Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg’, Evergreen Review, vol. 57, June 1968. See particularly the pamphlet ‘A Visiting Card’ (first published in Italian in 1942) for Pound’s praise of the pagan elements in Christianity and attack on the Judaic elements. Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie, Berlin, 1953, pp. 505–6. See Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge, 1968; p. 104 ff. ‘On the Jewish Question’, in KarI Marx, Early Texts, trans. and ed. David McLellan, Oxford, 1971.

11 HITLER AND NAZISM 88 Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, Cambridge, 1997. 89 Hyam Maccoby, The Sacred Executioner, London, 1982. See also Norman Cohn, 1970. 90 Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler, London, 1998. 12 MUSLIM ANTISEMITISM 91 See Robert Wistrich, Hitler’s Apocalypse, New York, 1985, ch. 9. 92 Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, in an interview on BBC Newsnight, broadcast on 7 July 2004, repeated his support for suicide bombers. He said that such acts were justified under Islam as a form of holy war. ‘This is not suicide, it is martyrdom in the name of God,’ the cleric said. Asked whether these views extended to the situation in Iraq, he said: ‘If the Iraqis can confront the enemy, there’s no need for these acts of martyrdom. If they don’t have the means, acts of martyrdom are allowed.’ On the killing of innocent women and children, he said: Israeli women are not like women in our society, because Israeli women are militarised. Secondly, I consider this type of martyrdom operation as an indication of the justice of Allah Almighty. Allah is just through his infinite wisdom. He has given the weak what the strong do not possess, and that is the ability to turn their bodies into bombs like the Palestinians do. 13 CONCLUSION: THE CAUSES OF THE HOLOCAUST 93 I have omitted post-Holocaust causes of antisemitism; for example, the New Left conception of Israel as a bastion of Western imperialism. Also, causes of

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Islamic antisemitism have been omitted as irrelevant to the causation of the Holocaust. 94 The term ‘the other’ was coined by Emmanuel Levinas, who meant by it something very different from its recent use to mean the unfamiliar stranger who rouses resentment and hatred by his unconformity to local norms of behaviour. Levinas meant by ‘the other’ simply one’s fellow human being, whether belonging to one’s own society or to another, to whom one owed duties. 95 This book complements earlier works on the medieval demonization of the Jews, especially The Devil and the Jews by Joshua Trachtenberg (1961). 96 For a more general treatment of the relevance of sacrifice to antisemitism, see Hyam Maccoby, The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt, London (1982). 97 Especially in his Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, Berkeley, CA (1990). 98 Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner, Princeton, NJ, 1990. 99 See ‘Motives, Causes and Alibis: A Reply to My Critics’, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, http://www.goldhagen.com/. See also Goldhagen’s article in New Republic, December 1996 and letter in New York Review of Books 44, 2 (6 February 1997). 100 See Hyam Maccoby, A Pariah People: The Anthropology of Antisemitism, London, 1996.

101 102 103 104

APPENDIX: AN INTERPRETATION OF ‘MR. ELIOT’S SUNDAY MORNING SERVICE’ T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, Chicago, IL, 1956, p. 43. See John Harrison, The Reactionaries, London, 1966, p. 149f. The Primal Egg appears in Phoenician, Egyptian, Hindu, Finnish and Orphic creation myths. In some versions, the Primal Egg is laid by a Primal Bird. Dante calls these souls “le devote ombre” (Purg. XIII, 82). See also Purg. XXIII, 21.

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Goodman, David G. and Miyazawa, Masanori, Jews in The Japanese Mind, New York, 1995. Graetz, Heinrich, History of the Jews, London, 1891. Guénée, Antoine, Lettres de quelque juifs portugais et allemands, 2nd edn, II, 44, n. 1, Paris, 1769. Harrison, John R., The Reactionaries, London, 1966. Hertzberg, Arthur, The French Enlightenment and the Jews, New York and London, 1968. Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, London, 1973. Holbach, Paul Thiry d’, L’esprit du Judaïsme, ou examen raisonné de la loi de Moyse, et de son influence sur la religion chretienne, London, 1770. James, William, The Letters of William James, ed. by his son Henry James, 2 vols, Boston, MA, 1920. Julius, Anthony, T.S. Eliot’s Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, Cambridge, 1995. Keppel, Giles, Jihad, London, 2002. Kershaw, Ian, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris, London, 1998. Langmuir, Gavin, Towards a Definition of Antisemitism, Berkeley, CA, 1990. Laqueur, Walter, The History of Zionism, London, 2003. Leavis, F.R., ‘George Eliot’s Zionist Novel’, Commentary, October, 1960. Levy, William Turner and Scherle, Victor, Affectionately, T.S. Eliot, London, 1969. Lewis, Bernard, The Middle East, London, 1995. —— Semites and Anti-Semites, London, 1997. —— What Went Wrong?, London, 2002. Lieberman, Saul, Shki’in, Jerusalem, 1939. Lindemann, Albert, S., Esau’s Tears, Cambridge, 1997. Maccoby, Hyam, Revolution in Judaea: Jesus and the Jewish Resistance, New York, 1980. —— The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt, London, 1982. —— The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, London, 1986. —— Paul and Hellenism, London, 1991. —— Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil, London, 1992. —— Judaism on Trial, London, 1982, 1993. —— ‘Holiness and Purity: The Holy People in Leviticus and Ezra-Nehemiah’, in Reading Leviticus: A Conversation with Mary Douglas, ed. John F.A. Sawyer, Sheffield, 1996. —— A Pariah People: The Anthropology of Antisemitism, London, 1996. —— Jesus the Pharisee, London, 2003. Maimon, Solomon, An Autobiography, ed. Moses Hadas, New York, 1967. Manuel, Frank E., The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian Eyes, Cambridge, MA, 1992. Marcus, Jacob R., The Jew in the Medieval World, New York, 1975. Martin, Graham, Eliot in Perspective, London, 1970. Marx, Karl, Early Texts, trans. and ed. McLellan, David, Oxford, 1971. Mead, Margaret, Growing up in New Guinea, New York, 2001. Nicholls, William, Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate, Northvale, NJ, 1993. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, New York, 1956. —— Kritische Studienausgabe, eds Colli, Giorgio and Montinari, Mazzino, Berlin, 1975–84.

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Novick, Peter, The Holocaust in Collective Memory, London, 1999. Parkes, James, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue, London, 1934. Pearson, Gabriel, ‘Eliot: An American use of Symbolism’ in Eliot in Perspective, ed. Martin, Graham, London, 1970. Poliakov, Leon, The History of Antisemitism, vol. 2, Philadelphia, PA, 2003. Pound, Ezra, Culture, New York, 1938, new edition published as Guide to Kulchur, New York, 1952. Pound, Ezra, Impact, Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization, edited with an introduction by Noel Stock, Chicago, IL, 1960. —— The Cantos of Ezra Pound, London, 1968. Pulzer, Peter, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, London, 1998. Ricks, Christopher, T.S.Eliot and Prejudice, London, 1988. Rose, Paul Lawrence, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner, Princeton, NJ, 1990. Rosenbaum, Ron, Explaining Hitler, London, 1998. Rougemont, Denis de, Passion and Society, trans. Montgomery, Belgion, London, 1956. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, ‘Des Juifs’, in Oeuvres Complètes, III, Paris, 1964. Ruether, Rosemary, Faith and Fratricide, New York, 1974. Said, Edward, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, London, 2003. Sartre, Jean Paul, Anti-Semite and Jew, New York, 1974. Smith Grover, T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, Chicago, IL, 1956. Trachtenberg, Joshua, The Devil and the Jews – Medieval Conceptions of the Jews and its Relation to Modern Antisemitism, New York, 1961. Voltaire, Francois-Marie Arouet de, Philosophical Dictionary, trans. and ed. Peter Gay, New York, 1962. Wagner, Richard, The Jews in Music and Other Essays, trans. Ellis, W.A., Lincoln, NE, 1995. Wistrich, Robert, Hitler’s Apocalypse, New York, 1985.

182

INDEX

Aaron 7 Abigail (The Jew of Malta) 89, 92 Abraham 45 Abrahams, Israel 91 Absalom 87 Achilles 75 Action Française 143 Acts of the Apostles 174 Adam, Apocalypse of 11 Adams, Henry 87, 108, 112–14, 119, 176 Adonis 106, 117, 168 Adversus Judaeos literature 160 Aeetes 86, 88, 95 Agag 55 Agamemnon 75 Agobard 21 Ahasverus 161 Al Qaida 151 Albigensians 2, 37, 38, 45 Alexandria 10–11, 57 Amalekite 55 Ambrosius 20 America 3, 7, 24, 27, 113, 123–5, 130, 133, 140, 152–3, 177 Amish movement 140 Amolo 21 Anabaptist 46 Ananias 17 Antichrist 2, 21; legend 46, 146 anti-Dreyfusard movement 114, 143 Antiochus Epiphanes 10 Antiochus Sidetes 10 Antipodes 169 Antisemitism, art 107, 131–5; Babylonian and Persian 9; biological theory of Jewish inferiority 26; blood-libel 22, 25, 27, 37–8, 41, 56, 154; Church Fathers 17, 18; cosmic 11; definition of 7–8;

deicide charge 21, 22; Eliot, T.S. Chapter 9 passim, Appendix passim; Enlightenment 24–8; exegetical 18; Gnostic 11; Gospels 11, 17; Hellenistic 10–11, 16; Hitler Chapter 11 passim; Holocaust Chapter 13 passim; host desecration 26; Japanese 79; Jewish self-hatred 63–4; Jews archetypal usurers as 121–2; Jews Christian myth in 28; Jews creators of modernity, as 143–4; Jews enemies of sacrificial concept as 119; Jews metaphor for evil as 66, 122; Jews parasites, as 44, 127; Jews poison wells 26; Jews sub-human 26; Jews symbolising fallen humanity 117–18; Judaism religion of money 65; Karl Marx Chapter 5 passim; left-wing 25; Luther Chapter 3 passim; medieval peasant view 144; menstruation of Jewish men 26; Muslim Chapter 12 passim; natural selection 26; Nietzsche Chapter 6 passim; philosphical 123; post-Christian 24, 28, 54, 139, 164; Pound, Ezra Chapter 10 passim; racial 23, 25, 26, 30, 162; right wing 25; Roman attitude 10, 20; Romanticism and 141–2; Russian 27–8; Shakespeare Chapter 8 passim; socialism of fools as 67, 176; Spanish Chapter 2 passim; unsociability 9; Voltaire Chapter 4 passim; xenophobia 157–8 Antonio (The Merchant of Venice) 89, 98–103, 105–6, 113 Antony (Antony and Cleopatra) 97 Antwerp 109, 112, 166 Aphrahat 174 Apion 10–11, 16, 57 Apocalypse of Adam 11 apocalypticism of Hitler 46

183

INDEX

Apollo 73, 167 Aquinas, Thomas 170 Arab nationalism 150 Arabs 8, 26, 36, 112, 150–3 Arafat, Yasser 151 Arendt, Hannah 30, 147, 155 Ariadne 88, 95 Arianism 20 Artemis 128 Aryan 26, 38, 76, 77, 140 Assyrians 7 Astarte 88 Athenian 95, 97 Attis 106, 168 Aubigne, Agrippa d’ 133 Augustine, St 18, 37, 45, 104, 149, 155, 174; Jews identified with Cain 18 Austria 27 auto de fe 37–8 Avicebron 105 Avineri, Shlomo 178 Babylonia 7, 9, 20, 71 Baker, William 176 Bakunin, Mikhail 67 Balder 11 ballad of St Hugh 95 Baltanas, Domingo 34 Balzac, Honore de 95 Barabas (The Jew of Malta) 88–9, 95, 98–9, 105, 166, 172 Barrès, Maurice 113, 143 Barruel, Abbé 25 Barry, Iris 127 Bassanio 90 Bauer, Bruno 64–5, 160, 164 Bauman, Zygmunt 155 Bebel, Auguste 176 Beilis, Mendel 28 Belial 90 Benda, Julien 130 Benjamin, Tribe of 7 Benjamin, Walter 80 Berenson, Bernard 113 Bergier, Abbé 60 Berlin 53, 58, 80, 178 Bernard of Clairvaux, St 45 Bismarck, Otto von 26 Black Death 22, 154 Black Hundreds 28 Blake, William 89 Blum, Leon 143

Bockholdt, Johann 46 Bodin, Jean 47 Bollingen Prize 133 Bolshevik Revolution 28, 68 Boulanger, Georges 27 Brandes, Georg 80 British Socialists Workers Party 151 Brooke-Rose, Christine 133, 178 Brussels 109, 112 Buber, Martin 80, 142 Buchan, John 1, 112 Bund Jewish 28, 68, 145 Burbank (‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’) 109, 111–13, 115, 118 Byron, Alfred Lord 131, 141–2 Caesar, Julius 10 Caesarea 18 Cain and Abel 18, 119 Caliban 118 Calvin, John 23, 48, 100, 101, 122 Canaan 55, 131–2 Canaletto 111, 113, 115 cannibalism 18, 56 capitalism 25, 67–8, 89, 151–3, 155 Carlyle, Thomas 142 Carroll, James 4 Carthage 116 Cathars 2 Chagall, Marc 132 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 175 Charlemagne 20–1 Chartres 176 Chaucer, Geoffrey 22, 119 chazanim 125 ‘chazims’ 121, 124 Chicago 111–13, 124 China 125, 129, 134, 157, 164 Chintila 21 Chivalry 92 Christian Hebraism 47 Christian millenarianism 145–6 Chronicles Book 2 16 Chrysostom, St John 18, 20, 56, 160, 174 Chuetas of Majorca 38 Church Councils 18 Church Fathers 56; antisemitism of 17–18 Churchill, Winston 28 Cicero 54 Circeo 130 City of God 45

184

INDEX

Dreyfus, Alfred 27–8, 143 Dreyfusards 27, 114, 143 Drumont, Edouard 27, 111 Du Maurier, G. 94–5 Dühring, Eugen 3, 76, 139, 155, 175 Duke William 20

Clemenceau, Georges 27 Cleopatra 97 Code of Justinian 20 Coghill, Nevill 90 Cohen, Morris see Brandes, Georg Cohn, Norman 86 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 142 Collins, Anthony 176 Communism 50, 67–9, 72, 143, 145, 152–3, 155 Concordat, (Vatican and Hitler) 145 Constantine 19 Constantinople 19 Constantius 19 Corinthians 166 Coriolanus 97 Cornford, F.M. 74 Cory, Daniel 178 crucifixion 17, 33, 93, 103, 117, 124 Crusades 21, 37 Cumberland, Richard 92 Curtis, M. 177 Cybele 88 Damascus 11 Daniel Deronda 92–4, 176 Dante 169–70 Darwin, Charles 26, 30, 76, 139, 154 David, King 75, 87 Davie, Donald 126, 177 de Loyola, Ignatius 34 de Pinto, Isaac 58, 158 deicide 1, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 41, 149, 154, 157, 163 Deism 23, 51, 163, 176 Demiurge 11, 16, 128 Denikin, Anton 28 Denmark 48 Devil 11, 51, 89–90, 94, 104, 106, 123, 161, 179 Dickens, Charles 94, 96 Dictionnaire Philosophique 55 Diderot, Denis 176 Diodorus 174 Dionysus 73, 106, 168 Disputations medieval 35, 63 Disraeli, Benjamin 70–1 Dohm, Christian Wilhelm 24 Dominicans 35 Dostoievsky, Fyodor 27 Douglas, Mary 174 Dracula 159

Early Church 17 Ecclesiastes 69 Eckardt, Roy 4 Edgworth, Maria 91–3 Edict of Milan 18 Egypt 8, 11, 17, 67, 71, 132, 151 Einstein, Albert 44, 144 Eisenmenger, J.A. 76 Elders of Zion 2, 144 Eliot, George 92–4 Eliot, T.S. Chapter 9 passim; Appendix passim 2, 107, 121–4, 126, 135, 141, 143–4 Eliot, Valerie 177 Elvira, Council of 18 Emancipation of Jews 23–5, 28, 31–2, 51, 58, 60–1, 64–5, 67, 69, 72, 143, 145, 147, 153 Emerson–Thoreau medal 133 Empson, William 170 Engels, Friedrich 67–8 Enlightenment 1, 3, 11, 26, 28, 32, 38, 41–2, 49, 51–4, 55, 57, 58–64, 69–70, 71, 75, 77, 90, 92–4, 96, 141–3, 154–5, 157–8, 163, 171, 175–6; contempt for Jews 24; Romantic reaction against 25, 70 Enoch 11 Ephrem 174 Epiphanius 174 Erasmus 47 Esau and Jacob 18 Esterhazy, F.W., Major 27 Esther 9–10, 174 Eternal Feminine 88 ‘Ethics of Mencius’ 177 Eugenics 76, 155 Eusebius 18, 174 Exodus from Egypt 8 Expulsion of Jews from Spain 31 Ezra, holy seed 9; intermarriage 9 Ezra, Ibn 47–8 Fabre-Vassas, Claudine 159 Fagin 94, 96

185

INDEX

Fascism 73, 94, 131, 119, 142, 151, 155 Felsenstein, Frank 177 Fenollosa, Ernest 125 Fichte, J.G. 155, 160 Final Solution 2, 44 First Crusade 21 Flaubert, Gustave 116 foetor judaicus 26, 38, 154 Förster, Bernhard 74 Förster, Elizabeth 74, 78–9 Franklin, Benjamin 125 Fourier, Charles 67 Frazer, Sir James 74, 119, 171 Frederick the Great 57 French Revolution 25, 28, 51, 58 Freud, Sigmund 80, 113, 128, 130 Gager, John 4 Galatians 174–5 Galatinus, Pietro 47 Galilee 17 Gamaliel 17, 101, 103 Genesis 11 Germany 21, 25, 28, 30, 36, 44, 46, 50, 52–3, 78, 80, 108, 146–7, 151, 155, 157–8, 161–2; eliminationist hate of Jews 2–3; mysticism 26; nationalism 26, 160 ‘Gerontion’ 109–13, 115, 117, 119, 123, 166, 177 Gerontius 117 ghetto 27, 38, 44, 112 Ginsberg, Allen 178 Gnosticism 11, 16 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de 26 Goebbels, Joseph 59, 78 Goethe, J von 62 Golden Age of Spain 36 Goldhagen, Daniel 155, 160–1, 179 Golomb, Jacob 52, 80, 176 Goodman, David G. 176 Graetz, Heinrich 68 Greene, Graham 94 Grégoire, Abbé Henri 58, 60 Gregory I, Pope 20 Grenzjuden 80 Guénée, Abbé Antoine 60, 176 Gypsies 43, 157–8 Hadrian 10 Halevi, Judah 36, 64 Hardy, Thomas 142

Harrison, Jane 74 Harrison, John 115, 177–8 Hay, Malcolm 4 Hazlitt, William 97 Hebraism, Christian 23, 47–8, 71 Hebrew Bible 16, 18, 47 Hebrew Poetry 36 Hebrew prophets 68, 71, 143 Hebrews ancient 56, 59 Heer, F. 4 Hegel, G.W.F 26, 28, 64–5, 67, 163 Heine, Heinrich 69, 74, 78, 89, 97, 103, 176 Hellenism 10–11, 16, 55, 57–8, 79, 123, 135, 174 Hercules 86 Herder, J.G. von 26, 28, 62, 70, 142 Herod 98 Herodians 17 Hertzberg, Arthur 38, 54, 175 Herzl, Theodore 28 Hess, Moses 66, 69–70 Himmelfarb, Milton 146 Hinduism 157 Hippolytus 21 Hitler Chapter 11 passim 2, 4, 8, 18, 27–8, 42, 46, 48–9, 52–4, 62, 72, 74, 112, 114, 129–32, 141, 146, 147, 151, 155, 158, 161–2, 178; Mein Kampf 139 Holbach, Paul Thiry Baron d’ 51, 59, 176 Holland 23 Holocaust 137, 140, 142, 144, 146, 150, 152, 156, 158, 160, 162, 164, 178 2, 4, 41, 49, 52, 62, 71, 108, 114, 123, 130, 133, 140, 146–7, 154–8, 160–4, 178–9; Christian diabolisation of Jews 28; hierarchization of causes 156 Homer 124 Hother 119 Hourwitz, Zalkind 58 Hugh of Lincoln 22 humanism 49, 80, 97, 145 Huysmans, J.H. 95 Iago 98 Idaho 124 Illiberis, Council of 21 Imagism 125–6 Incarnation 171–2 Inquisition 31, 36–8, 46, 59 Irenaeus 21

186

INDEX

Isidore, St 21, 174 Islam 21, 23, Chapter 12 passim 148–53; 157–8, 164, 178 Israel 1, 7–8, 45, 69, 91, 150–3, 176, 178 Israelites 7–8, 18, 56, 75, 132 Italy 20, 59, 129 Ithamore 166, 172 Ivanhoe 91–2 Jacob 86 Jahweh 9 James, Henry 112 Japanese 79, 176 Jason 88, 95–6 Jerusalem 8, 20–1, 113, 146, 151, 175 Jerusalem Church 11, 17 Jessica (The Merchant of Venice) 89–91, 100, 105 Jesuits 34 Jesus 3–4, 17–18, 20, 22, 30, 32–4, 41, 46, 57, 75, 87, 102–4, 106, 117–18, 123, 148–50, 159, 162 Jew of Malta, The 88, 90, 91, 92, 98, 165, 166, 172 Jews 1–4, 7–11, 16–18, 20–8, 30–8, 42, 43–8, 53–5, 57–61, 63–71, 68–72, 73–5, 74, 77–80, 78, 86–7, 86–106, 89–94, 92–5, 95, 98–100, 102–6, 108–9, 108–10, 108–12, 112–19, 113, 114–15, 116–19, 121–3, 121–4, 121–5, 126–8, 127–9, 130–5, 131–2, 134–5, 139–40, 139–41, 142–50, 144, 146–7, 153, 155, 157–61, 158–9, 161–2, 165–6, 165–7, 166, 172, 174–8, 175–6; Ashkenazi Jewry 158; chosen people 8–9, 24; deicides 1, 147; essential strangers 24–5; exponents of rational thought 134; Guilds exclusion 22; intermarriage 9; librarians of Church 37, 45; moneylenders 22; name derivation 7; pariah caste 1, 160; persecuting Christians myth 4; promoters of modernity 142–3; role in Christian Myth 2–4; scapegoats 25; self-hate 63; self-image 23; Sephardi 53, 158; stigma 147 John, Gospel of 118, 166–7 Jonah 9 Josephus 10, 57 Joshua 75 Joyce, James 118, 121 Judah, Kingdom of 7–8

Judaism 8–11, 18, 20, 24–5, 31, 35–8, 45–7, 51–2, 55, 58–60, 63–6, 68–72, 74–6, 78–80, 87, 89, 92–3, 97, 101, 104–7, 114, 119, 122–4, 128–9, 132, 134, 139, 143–5, 147, 149–50, 155, 157–8, 162–4, 167, 175; land as mother-figure 87 Judas Iscariot 31, 57, 94, 98, 122, 135, 143, 161, 174 Judas of Galilee 17 Julian the Apostate 20 Julius, Anthony 177 Julius Caesar 97 Justinian 20 Juvenal 54 Kafka, Franz 144 Kaganovitch, Lazar 28 Kahl, Joachim 118 Kali 88 Kant, Immanuel 51, 53, 163, 179 Karlsbad 68–9 Kerensky, Alexander 28 Kiev 28 kikery 121–2, 130 Kimhi, David 47 Kohanim 7 Kook, Rav 144 Koran 157 Kraus, Karl 80 Laban 81, 86 Lactantius 21 Langmuir, Gavin 159–60 Lassalle, Ferdinand 66–7 Leavis, F.R. 176 left-wing anti-zionism 150 Lenin, Vladimir 28, 68 Leon of Filnek 90 Leroux, Pierre 67 Lessing, Gotthold 23–4, 60, 90–1, 94 Levinas, Emmanuel 179 Leviticus 56 Levy, William Turner 177 Lewis, Wyndham 94 Lieberman, Saul 35, 175 Lilith 88 Limoges 21 limpieza de sangre 1, 30–4, 175 Lindemann, Albert S. 144, 178 Littell, F. 4 Litvinov, Maxim 28

187

INDEX

Loki 11 Lombard bankers 22, 99 London 109, 112, 126, 174–9 Lopez, Roderigo 99, 100 Lorenzo (The Merchant of Venice) 89 Luther, Martin Chapter 3 passim 2, 23, 55, 58, 62, 135, 139, 145, 175 Lyra, Nicholas de 47 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 24 Maccoby, Hyam 174–5, 178–9 Machiavelli 89 Macklin, Charles 98 McLellan, David 176, 178 Macready W.C. 91, 97–8 Mahathir, Mohammed Prime Minister 152 Mahler, Gustav 113 Maimon, Solomon 24, 51, 53, 58, 176 Maimonides, Moses 53, 105 Mainz 21 Majorca 38 Malachi 87 Malaysia 152 Malvolio 100 Mariolatry 22 Maritain, Jacques 130 Marlowe, Christopher 88–9, 95, 98–9, 105 Marr, Wilhelm 3, 74, 139, 155, 175 Martin, Graham 177 Martini, Raymond 35 Martov, Julius 68, 145 martyrdom of Jews 21, 23, 118 Marx, Eleanor 68, 176 Marx, Heinrich 64 Marx, Karl Chapter 5 passim 2, 25, 52, 58, 130, 134, 135, 143, 146, 153, 176, 178 Marxist–Islamist alliance 151 Mary, Virgin 22, 33, 87, 88, 90 masques 100 massacres of Jews 21–2, 28, 31, 37, 50 Mather, Cotton 48 Mathias ( Jew of Malta, The) 89 Matriarchy 88 Matthew, Gospel of 174 Mauberley 167 Maupassant, Guy de 95 Maurras, Charles 108, 113–14, 119, 122, 141–3 Maximinus, St 174 May Laws 27 Mead, Margaret 96, 176 Medea 81, 86, 88

Melanesian 96 Melchizedek 11 Menander 97 Mendelssohn, Felix 3, 74 Mendelssohn, Moses 24, 51, 53, 58, 60, 90, 92 Menshevism 68 merchant guilds 99 Merchant of Venice 90 Merovingian Kings 20 Messiah 17, 46, 129, 146 Meyerbeer, Giacomo 3, 74 Michelangelo 126 middoth 105 Midrashim 35, 76 Milan 18 millenarianism 2, 21, 23, 35, 46, 145, 146 Minos 87, 95 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, comte de 24 Mirah (Daniel Deronda) 92–4 Mishnah 24, 51, 53, 58, 60, 76, 90, 92, 129, 175 Miyazawa, Masanori 176 Moloch 56 moneylending 41–2, 44, 49, 57, 99, 175 Montano, Arias 47, 106 Montenero (Harrington) 91 Montesquieu Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de 23, 24, 60 Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres 176 Moriscos 32 Moses, Prophet 67, 75 Mot 11, 119 Mount Sinai 61 Mufti of Jerusalem 8, 113, 151 Muhammad, Prophet 149, 150, 157 Münster, Sebastian 47 Münzer, Thomas 46, 146 Murray, Gilbert 74 Muslim 21, 32, 34, 37, 60; antisemitism Chapter12 passim; forcible conversion in Spain 31 Muslim Association of Great Britain 151 Muslim Brotherhood 151, 178 Mussolini, Benito 129–30 mystery-cults 11 Mystical nationalism 28 mysticism 26 Nagrela Samuel ibn 134 Nancy (Oliver Twist) 94

188

INDEX

Napoleon I 26, 52, 64 Nathan the Wise 90 Nazis Chapter 11 passim 2, 3, 23, 28, 31, 32, 36, 38, 44–5, 48, 55, 70, 73, 76, 79, 98, 121, 126, 128, 131, 133, 151, 156, 178; Pound relationship 122 Nehemiah 9, 174 neo-Darwinism 154 neo-Hebraism 47 neschek 121 New Christians 25, 36 New Testament 4, 16, 17, 18, 47, 53, 57, 75, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 146, 149, 165 Newman J.H., Cardinal 117 Nicaea, Council of 18 Nicholas II 28 Nicholas de Lyra 47 Nicholls, William 175 Nietszche, Friedrich 2, 26, 28, 52, Chapter 6 passim 73–82; 128, 139, 142, 145, 176 Nilus, Serge 27 Northern Kingdom 7 Nuremberg laws 32 Odysseus 75 Origen 18, 166, 167, 171, 172, 174 Original Sin doctrine 123 Orleans 21 Osborne, John 96 Ostjuden 158 Paganism 18, 28, 34, 54, 94, 119, 128, 134, 147, 166, 167, 172 Palestine 20, 70, 148, 151, 178 Panarion 174 Papal Inquisition 37 Paquin 120 pariah 1, 2, 3, 30, 35, 48, 49, 147, 154, 160, 163, 179 Paris Disputation 35, 46 Parkes, James 18, 174 Passion Plays 1, 38 patriarchy 87, 88, 93 Paul, St 11, 16, 21, 30, 45, 46, 57, 58, 104 pawnbrokers 22, 52–3, 99 Pearson, Gabriel 112, 177 Pelagian heresy 104 Peñaforte, Raymund de 34 Pepin dynasty 20 Persian Empire 9, 10 Pharisee 11, 17, 101–6, 160, 174

Philo 11, 105, 167 philosemitism 42, 47, 74 Phlebas (The Waste Land ) 115–17 Pico della Mirandola, Count Giovanni 47, 106 Picquart, Colonel Marie-George 27 Pilsudsky, Jozef l28 Plague, The Great 38 Pliny the Younger 174 Plutarch 97 pogroms 27, 28, 121, 152 Poland 23, 28 Poliakov, Leon 175 Polish Jews 53, 112, 139–41 Portia 61, 90, 104–6 Pound, Ezra Chapter 9 passim 12, 107, 166–7, 177–8 Rashbam (Rabbi Samuel ben Meir) 48 Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac) 22, 47–8 Rav (title of Abba Arika1) 44 Recha (Nathan the Wise) 90 Reck, Michael 178 Reformation 23, 49, 106 Reinhardt, Max 113 Reinische Zeitung 64 religio licita 2, 45, 144, 155 Renaissance 41, 106 Reuchlin, Johannes 47, 106 Rialto 111 Ricks, Christopher 177 Rodin, Auguste 126 Rohling, August 76 Roman Empire 2, 10–11, 45, 61, 76, 114, 147, 148, 157, antisemitism of 55, 57; crucifixion of Jesus 17 Romans Epistle to 174, 177 Romanticism 88, 93, 119; Hitler’s 141–2 Rose, Paul Lawrence 160–1, 179 Rosenbaum, Ron 146, 178 Rosenberg, Edgar 94 Rosenzweig, Franz 80 Rothschilds 3, 25, 28, 58, 65, 78, 177 Rougemont, Denis de 176 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 1, 23, 60–2, 70, 142, 176 Ruether, Rosemary 4 Russia 24, 27, 28, 52, 78 Ruth, Book of 8–9 Sabbath, The 23, 55, 102, 132 Sadat, Anwar President 151

189

INDEX

Sadducee 17 Salambo 116 Samaritans 20 Samson 75 Samuel, Babylonian Amora 25 Samuel, Prophet 55, 75 Samuel ibn Nagrela 134 Santayana, George 110 Sartre, Jean-Paul 95 Sawyer, John F.A. 174 Scapegoat 25, 103, 119, 123 Scherle, Victor 177 Schlick, Morris 113 Schnitzler, Arthur 113 Schoenberg, Arnold 113, 132 Scholem, Gershom 80 Schopenhauer, Arthur 73 Scott, Sir Walter 91–2, 94, 96, 142 Second Coming 2, 35, 45 Sephardic Jewry 53, 158 Seraphim 169–70 Set 11 Seth 11, 16 Shakespeare, William Chapter 8 passim 2, 88–91, 113, 115, 119 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 131, 141 Shema 20 Shki’in 175 Shylock Chapter 8 passim 86, 89–91, 94, 113, 177 Sisebut 21 Smith, Grover 165, 167 Social Darwinism 139 Socrates 73 Solomon, King 9, 75 Sombart, Werner 132 sophists 42 Soviet Union 28, 68, 72, 145, 152–3, 176 Spain Chapter 2, passim 1, 2, 25, 44, 59, 175; expulsion of Jews 23 Spanish Inquisition 36–7 Stalin, Joseph 72, 143 Steiner, George 177 Stöcker, Adolf 26 Stoics 170 Stokes, Adrian 126 structuralism 73 Suicide bombers 150, 152 Svengali 94 Sylvester, Bishop of Rome 18 syncretism 8–9

Tacitus 54; antisemitism of 11 Talmud 23, 24, 35, 37, 43, 45–8, 53, 68, 76, 86, 99, 124, 129, 178; church suppression 46; Jesus reference 17 Tamburlaine 89 Tammuz 106 Tempest, The 89, 115 Temple 9–10, 17, 32, 46, 71, 75, 77, 131, 146 Tertullian 56, 174 Theodosius II 20 Theseus 88, 95–6 Thessalonians 21, 46, 57, 174 Theudas 17 Toland, John 23 Tortosa Disputation 35 Tosefta 17 Toussenel, Alphonse 67 Trachtenberg, Joshua 162, 179 Treitschke, Heinrich von 26 Trilby 94 Trollope, Anthony 94 Trotsky, Leon 28, 145 Typhon 119 Ukraine 28 Umwertung 80 usury 22, 25, 43, 49, 57, 89, 98–9, 102–3, 105, 113, 121–2, 124–5, 127, 132, 147, 154, 163, 175, 177; Talmud view 124 Vaterland 27 Venice 61, 88–91, 97–8, 100–1, 105, 119 Vienna 80, 111, 113, 139 Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de Chapter 4 passim 2, 24, 28, 65, 75, 78, 135, 142–3, 158, 175; Saul, play by Voltaire 55 Wagner, Richard 2, 26, 50, 74, 125, 135, 139, 142, 155, 175, 179 Wandering Jew legend 119, 161 Warsaw 112 Wasserman, Jakob 80 Waugh, Evelyn 94 White Russians 28 Wilamowitz, Ulrich von 74 William of Norwich 22 Wistrich, Robert 178 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 113 Wordsworth, William 141–2

190

INDEX

xenophobia 7, 34, 157–9 Yiddish 112, 145, 176 Zeus 10 Zinoviev 28 Zion 2, 4, 25, 27, 61, 86, 111, 144–5, 151

Zionism 28, 44, 48, 61, 68–70, 80, 142, 150, 152–3, 158, 176; Western imperialist connection alleged 153 Zukovsky, Louis 125 Zola, Emil 27, 95 Zweig, Stefan 80, 113

191

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Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity (Theory, Culture and Society Series)

Antisemitism and Xenophobia in Germany after Unification

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Jewish Cultural Nationalism: Origins and influences (Routledge Jewish Studies Series)

Studies in Jewish myth and Jewish messianism

Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies

Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought

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Morality and Modernity (Ideas Series)

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Beyond Enlightenment: Buddhism, Religion, Modernity (Routledgecurzon Critical Studies in Buddhism)

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Jews and Judaism in Modern China (Routledge Jewish Studies Series)

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Jewish philosophy and the crisis of modernity: essays and lectures in modern Jewish thought

Materialism and Psychological Continuity

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Endurance and Pyschological Continuity

Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s (Studies in Antisemitism)

OECD Studies on Environmental Innovation Environmental Policy, Technological Innovation and Patents (OECD Studies on Environmental Innovation)

Studies in Hebrew Language and Jewish Culture

Studies in Jewish and Christian History

STUDIES IN HEBREW LITERATURE AND JEWISH CULTURE

Marx and Modernity: Key Readings and Commentary (Modernity and Society)

Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s (Studies in Antisemitism)

Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (Routledge Jewish Studies Series)

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Modernity and Postmodern Culture (Issues in Cultural and Media Studies)

Habermas, Modernity and Law (Philosophy and Social Criticism series)

Rosenzweig's Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity

Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity (Theory, Culture and Society Series)

Antisemitism and Xenophobia in Germany after Unification

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