A gulf of ignorance – or more probably the detachment of an inbred disinterest – can go but only a little way towards explaining the seeming heartlessness of English satirists and respected fictionists in their characterisation of Jews as comic victims of ridicule in the first half of the 20th Century, their prejudices imbued, we may assume, with stiff-necked attitudes so often customary in the works of their 19th Century literary masters.
It’s a kind of Pavlovian response that is no better instanced than in this character sketch by the popular English novelist Henry Seton Merriman when exhibiting his deep-dyed hostility to one of his villains (1892).
He was dark of hair with a sallow complexion and a long drooping nose—the nose of Semitic ancestors. A small mouth, and the chin running almost to a point . . . He returned and stood at the table with slightly bowed legs—not the result of much riding, although he wore top-boots and breeches as if of daily habit—but a racial defect handed down like the nasal brand from remote progenitors . . . He knew that he only possessed one thing to risk, namely, his life; and true to his racial instinct, he valued this very highly, looking for an extortionate usury on his stake . . . Here again was the taint of the blood that ran in his veins. The curse had reached him—in addition to the long, sad nose and the bandy legs . . . for a Jew never makes a soldier or a sailor, and they are rarely found in those positions unless great gain is holden up.
The Old Bunch.
Like Anton Chekhov in his early drama, Platonov, even a modern master of sophisticated English prose can fall prey to reflexive prejudices as a product of an atavistic cultural inheritance.
Consider, then, Evelyn Waugh in whose Vile Bodies (1930) there can be read ‘Dirty yid,’ spoken of a Jew by a struggling actress; indeed, there is also Waugh’s Scoop in which the foreign correspondents arriving in Ishmaelia are described as ‘All the old bunch,’ with the exclusion of just one reporter. ‘Yes, and there’s a highbrow yid . . . but we don’t count him.’
For those who affect the condescending manners of the quintessential Mayfair Man-About-Town we should look no further than The Romantic Lady (1921) by Michael Arlen, a bestselling writer of Armenian origin. There is an offhand back-handed putdown of another émigré class in this character sketch :
[He] had actively sat as member for __ since he was twenty-six, was now recognised as one of the leaders of the Opposition, and certain, in spite of his youth, of office at the fall of the Liberal ministry. It was after all, so original of him to be so clever and polished and dark and ambitious without being a Jew.From his writings it’s clear that Michael Arlen cunningly adopted an English class consciousness and xenophobia to negotiate the exclusiveness of London’s high society. And, here, in this passage can be detected a kind of inverted antisemitism, which both praises the virtuosic outsider and condemns him.
The brass plate of Snipcock & Tweed may have slipped over time, but its significations still have a precarious hold on Britain’s collective unconscious . . . and stir half-forgotten guilty impressions from reading certain popular fictions in our youth . . .
So let’s take a look at these extracts from pages of hazy recall with their concordances to a DATELINE of world events at the time of publication as a sobering counterpoint. As Max Hastings writes in the same vein:
‘Before the second world war, such [antisemitic] sentiments were commonplace, not least in the “Clubland Hero” thrillers of Buchan, Sapper and Dornford Yates. “Bolshevik Jews” were responsible for many of the villainous conspiracies frustrated by Richard Hannay, Bulldog Drummond and Jonah Mansell, before they gave the culprits a good flogging.’Let us then begin with a quintessential Edwardian . . . because I intend this modest conspectus of hints and glints and glimpses to end with one.
The Un-Rest Cure.
We begin in the first decade of the 20th Century with Saki (H H Munro).Before they’re sorted out ...
Here, as we advance into the 1930s, ‘well-bred’ snobbery blends with not-so-subtle racial antipathy signalled by biblical allusion to the condemned and redeemed.DATELINE 1933: The Nazi Party assumes control of the German
I put up at . . . a second-rate hole [in Paris] . . . It had two distinct clienteles . . . there was a sprinkling of English honeymooners . . . balanced by an equally large sprinkling of doubtful Semites; altogether a very well-proportioned mixture of sheeps and goats—like Judgement Day, you know, only before they’re sorted out.
an’ send them to prison if they don’t.
Yes, the insular British can be blinkered to the point of ostrich-like self-deception, but what is difficult to accept, however, is the cold reality of an extraordinarily casual dismissal of human suffering by that favourite English schoolboy mischief-maker, William Brown, created by Richmal Crompton.
DATELINE 1935: The antisemitic Nuremberg Laws for the Protection
of German Blood and German Honour are passed in Nazi Germany
by the Reichstag; together with the Reich Citizenship Law, which
declares that only those of German or related blood are eligible
to be Reich citizens.
[ William and the Nasties, 1935.]‘What did you say they were called?’ said William. ‘Nasties,’ replied Henry, who as usual was the fount of information on the subject. ‘They can't be called nasties,’ said William. ‘No one would call themselves a name like that. That mus’ be what people call them that don’t like them.’ ‘No, it’s their real name,’ persisted Henry. ‘They really are called nasties. Nasty means something quite different in Germany.’ ‘Don’t be silly,’ said William. ‘Nasty couldn't mean anything but nasty anywhere. What do they do?’ ‘They rule all the country,’ said Henry, ‘an’ make everyone do jus’ what they like an’ send them to prison if they don’t.’ ‘I’d be one of them if I was in that country,’ said William, ‘but I bet I’d find a better name than nasty.’ ‘I tell you nasty means somethin’ else in Germany,’ said Henry. ‘Well, why can’t they say somethin’ else instead of nasty then?’ demanded William. ‘Haven’t they got any sense? What else do they do?’
‘The Effects from Transfusion of Jewish Blood.’
‘I must say we could do with a bit of Hitler here . . .’
‘I keep on telling Weinberg he must ring up the Embassy and have the man deported the country’s not big enough to hold both of us either he goes or I but of course all these Jews are in league I must say we could do with a bit of Hitler here though I do rather bar rubber truncheons and sterilisation . . .’
‘A sub-Aryan called Cohen.’
‘There’s no such person – in the office of Vanning, Waldron and Smith, anyway.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘I looked them up in the official list . . . I checked up on accountants as well. And there wasn’t a Vanning . . . Not a solitary one. So far as this crowd goes, the partners now are Waldron, Smith and a sub-Aryan called Cohen . . . ’
‘A modern Jewish colony provokes an outburst . . .’
concentration camp (Auschwitz I) outside the Polish city of
Oswiecim, located in German-annexed Upper Silesia.
In November, German authorities order the Warsaw ghetto to
be sealed, confining more than 350,000 Jews (about 30 percent
of the city's population) in an area of about 1.3 square miles,
A wounded dog bites any hand however friendly and to bite at something, at everything, became for me too often the means of relieving my feelings. A few weeks later the contrast between my own state and the sight of happy civilians leading a normal life in a modern Jewish colony provoked the following outburst: “The spring is fully upon us in a blaze of sunny days and sprouting grasses. The red mud everywhere has turned to green, the birds sing as never before, the anemones grow out of the concrete and the young repulsive Jewish male casts a furtive suggestive look at the young repulsive Jewish female as they walk together beside the plough.” In the mood I was then in, I am sure I would have written the same words had I found myself in Scotland instead of in Israel.
Harold MacMillan, 1st Earl of Stockton Eton (1906–10) |
Last Word from T S Eliot at 5.55pm September 14th 1943, Wigmore Hall, London.
Post postscriptum: Cricket averages of consuming interest to Brits.
“War crime!” sneered McIntosh. “I paid my first visit to Belsen in ’38, Major, when you people back home knew more about Hutton’s centuries than Hitler’s rest-homes for the Jews. Things were much the same then as they were later.”
•
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html