Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
of Jews into the credit market had been that “commerce passed to a nation covered with infamy and soon was distinguished only by the most frightful usury, monopolies, the raising of subsidies and all dishonest means of acquiring money.”35
Nirenberg comments as follows on these antique speculations:
Because the Jews were generally imagined as the most fanatically irrational segment of the species (indeed, as the very origins of fanatical irrationality), they provided the perfect proving ground for the powers of Enlightenment. Perfect because Enlightenment won either way. If even the Jews could be “regenerated” then there were no limits to the emancipatory powers of Enlightenment anthropology. But if they could not, it simply meant that reason had reached the boundaries of its authority, and that the Jews lay on the other side [italics mine—BH]. For philosophes bent on exploring the boundaries of their anthropology, the Jews were a “limit case,” an example whose pursuit charts the extremes of a concept. In this case the limits were those of humanity, and the question “Can the Jews be regenerated?” was also the question “Are the Jews human?” In the words of the lawyer Pierre-Louis Lacretelle in his legal brief of 1776 on behalf of the Jews of Metz, “The real question in this case … is whether Jews are men.” Or as the philosophes more often put it “Is the Jew more a human or a Jew?”36
It will be evident how neatly the argument I have been developing in the preceding pages fits with these remarks of Nirenberg’s. If one is committed to the regeneration of humanity, then if humanity, for its part, seems obstinately committed to resisting the proffered regeneration, for example through its obdurate resistance to reason or its devotion to making money, things look bleak. But if irrational fanaticism and cupidity can be seen as vices leaking into humanity from a source located beyond its borders, then immediately things look brighter, the prospects for regeneration more realistic. Blaming such things on the Jews, that is to say, has the useful result of allowing one the luxury of regarding non-Jewish society as, if not altogether healthy, then at least as not suffering from a disease inherent in it, and so as capable of being restored to whatever counts for a given tribe of political theorists as health.
The same interplay of myth and interest is to be found in more recent examples. Bryan Cheyette’s Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 is a mine of such instances.37 Chayette shows how George Bernard Shaw (1912), for example, in his preface to Androcles and the Lion finds it convenient to articulate the political distinction he wishes to draw between “socialism” and “materialism” in terms of a more general and quasi-religious distinction between “baptism” and “circumcision.” “Throughout his Preface to this play Shaw contrasts the universalist world of ‘baptism’ with the particularist world of ‘circumcision’ which reinforces the binary opposition between a socialist Jesus and a materialist Jewry or, as he puts it elsewhere in the Preface, ‘God and Mammon.’ Shaw defines a ‘Christian’ as someone who ‘to this day’ is ‘in religion a Jew initiated in baptism instead of circumcision’ (483) and, at the same time, points to the need to ‘make Christ a Christian’ and ‘melt the Jew out of him’ (487).”38
Shaw’s political interests in the play, in other words, are in forging a link between Christianity and the socialism just at that point beginning to achieve a foothold in British politics. Britain was at that historical moment an overwhelmingly Christian country; yet it was also a country in which a large majority of people of all classes, while certainly Christian in religion, were sharply opposed to socialism in politics. It is therefore to the advantage of Shaw’s political project to be able to represent a commitment to Christianity as in some sense intrinsically a commitment to socialism.
To achieve that effect, Shaw needs some way of associating the denial of socialism with a denial of Christianity. This is the work done for him by the myth of “materialist Jewry.” The myth works for him in two closely connected ways. By allowing him to equate the distinction between baptism and circumcision with that between God and Mammon, it allows Shaw on the one hand to suggest that socialism is the natural political home for the vast majority of his Christian fellow citizens. But on the other hand, that equation allows him in addition to defame opposition to socialism by associating it with a marginal and despised group: a group, moreover, not only placed by its religion beyond the limits of Christian society but also offering through the mythic association of Jews with money, a permanent source of infection of the baptized Christian world by the world of circumcision with its insidious fidelity to the forces of Mammon.
At this comparatively early stage in Shaw’s thinking, the disease metaphor shows its face in a more or less explicit form in the phrase “melt the Jew out of him”—as if what were required to cure Christian/socialist society of the infection represented by the forces of Mammon/circumcision were somehow analogous to relieving a cold by sitting in a sauna or steam room. But as the century wears on, both the disease analogy and its implications become more explicitly realized in Shaw’s writing.
Shaw, in his later plays, both stressed the pernicious nature of non-universal racial, national or religious particularisms and continued, with added stridency, to suggest “eugenic” means of ending such differences. His Preface to On the Rocks (1933), in this regard, was to state blandly that “extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly” (574). Shaw, just as problematically, was to apply this Edwardian eugenicism to the rise of Nazi Germany. In a letter to Beatrice Webb in 1938, Shaw declared that:
We ought to tackle the Jewish question by admitting the right of states to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains they think undesirable, but insisting that they should do it as humanely as they can afford to, and not shock civilization by such misdemeanours as the expulsion and robbery of Einstein.
Shaw’s letter, rather worryingly, constructs Jews as a potentially “undesirable” “strain” who might, at any time, be thought to be outside of established nation states.39
A couple more cases may suffice to exemplify the extraordinary degree of presence, amounting in effect to near omnipresence in intellectual debate concerning the redemption of society from this or that social evil, both of the disease metaphor itself, and of the characteristic devices of projection and self-deception that the metaphor both dominates and serves.
The first of these cases concerns a well-known passage, italicized below, in After Strange Gods, a book that the poet T. S. Eliot published in 1934, but unsurprisingly, refused to republish, at least as a whole, after World War II. The book discusses the prospects for a society based on the Christian and Catholic orthodoxy that Eliot had long embraced. “The population should be homogenous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious backgrounds; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable. There must be a proper balance between urban and rural, industrial and agricultural development. And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.”40
Much ink has been expended over the question of whether Eliot was an antisemite.41 That question, for better or worse, I propose to leave on one side. The question that interests me here is a different one—namely, what could have induced a man of Eliot’s intellectual capacity to imagine for a moment that the words italicized above could constitute a remotely sensible addendum to the sentence that contains them?
A number of references in Eliot’s poetry of the period—“Sweeney among the Nightingales,” “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar,” “Gerontion,” and “The Waste Land,” among them—combine to create the impression that for Eliot at the time, images of the Jew functioned as a powerful poetic image of the destructive forces of materialism and religious and cultural confusion that that poetry locates at the heart of contemporary Western civilization. An obvious way of exonerating Eliot from the charge of antisemitism would be, indeed, to point out that we are dealing here merely with poetic imagery and hence only with culturally embedded images of “the Jew” rather than with real