Mark Twain’s Jews (review)

Dan Vogel’s Mark Twain’s Jews is predicated on a simple question, one I had posed in 1996: Was Mark Twain an antisemite? Certainly, like many antisemites, Twain was fascinated by Jews, and Vogel notes that Twain “mentions Jews infinitely more frequently than negroes, the race that dominated attention in his time” (p. 2). And while Vogel’s book artfully explores Twain’s two obsessions, Jews and making money, he ultimately offers the conclusion that while Twain could not escape the limitations of his time, he was not antisemitic. Moreover, Vogel suggests that Twain admired American Jewry, especially for their intellectual savvy (and, of course, their business acumen). But it is an argument that is not fully convincing.

The problem, perhaps, is Vogel’s use of the term antisemite. It is only in his last chapter that he defines the word, using David Gerber’s “pyramid of degrees” of anti-Jewish sentiment. Vogel concedes that if there is a hint of prejudice that emerges from Twain’s oeuvre, it is “Innocent anti-Semitic discourse” (p. 117), not meant to harm, but to jostle. Furthermore, Vogel argues that Twain’s humor, his style of earnest delivery, was often misconstrued, which is not an unreasonable assertion. What is problematic, however, is that Vogel often dismisses antisemitism as “Hannibal Syndrome,” arguing that because Twain’s exposure to Jewish culture was inevitably colored by his upbringing in rural Hannibal, Missouri, the anti-Jewish sentiment that often emerges from his writing is inadvertent. Vogel provides proof against Twain’s antisemitism by illustrating Twain’s myriad associations with notable Jews, including Theodore Herzl and Sigmund Freud, and by Twain’s honorific descriptions of Jews in his writing.

However, Vogel is on the defensive, and he directs his assault against two sources: my article, “‘A Number-One Troublemaker’: Mark Twain’s Anti- Semitic Discourse in ‘Concerning the Jews,’” (Studies in American Jewish Literature 15 [1996]) and Sander Gilman’s “Mark Twain and the Diseases of the Jews” (American Literature 65 [March 1993]). Vogel vehemently argues against both pieces, accusing me of being “seduced into making a dangerous insinuation in the ‘come-on’ introduction phrase of the title. It implies,” he writes, “that the phrase was written by Mark Twain and expresses his belief that the Jews are the ‘number-one’ cause of ‘trouble in the world.’” He concedes that I admit that Twain was not a “virulent anti-Semite,” but that “does not repair the implication she engendered by ripping the opening phrase of the title from a story by Bernard Malamud.” How else, Vogel asks, “might one label discourse that slurs Jews?” (p. 115). Indeed, how else to define Twain’s stereotypical rendering of Jews? The purpose of my article was not to disparage Twain, but instead to illustrate how Twain was a product of his cultural roots. Even Vogel concedes that the early Samuel Clemens wrote an article for a Cincinnati newspaper that the “blasted Jews” “adultered” the fuel by mixing coal dust and ground pepper (quoted in Vogel, p. 5). While Vogel stubbornly recognizes “Hannibal Syndrome,” he also cites Shelley Fishkin in her article on “Racial Attitudes” in the Mark Twain Encyclopedia, noting that Twain was never able to fully “transcend completely the limits of his time, his place, and his race” (Fishkin, quoted in Vogel, p. 6). Vogel also defends Twain against Sander Gilman. Gilman argued that Twain, like many Christians at the time, believed that “[t]he Jews are diseased, but their infection is the desire for capital” (p. 112). Vogel suggests that Gilman yoked together this argument, since “no text of Twain’s connects the two afflictions [physical disease and mental obsession of money],” and while clever, it is a complete misreading of Twain (p. 71).

More cumbersome is Vogel’s logical fallacy of proving a negative, showing us what Twain could have done, in terms of antisemitism, but didn’t. For instance, he writes of Twain’s relationship with Bret Harte, a Jewish journalist and long-time associate of...