A Response to Ronald Schuchard

I owe much to Ronald Schuchard's earlier work on Eliot, and this essay makes a new reason for gratitude. It draws many remarkable connections between Eliot's life and his treatment of Jews in person and in poetry. Since I disagree with some of Schuchard's conclusions, let me start by summarizing what I take the essay to establish beyond a doubt. Eliot looked at the Jews under three almost separate aspects: as a religion which he respected at a distance; as a scattering of unaffiliated individuals, part of the urban human debris which he loved and feared and out of which he made poetry; and as a religion-turned-culture, an ethical climate of feeling gradually defining itself in secular language, a tributary of the protestant freethinking which Eliot saw as the essence of the disintegrative spirit of modernity. Sometimes, in addressing Jews whom he knew well, Eliot tried to reason with this remnant, to argue them back into a semblance of their proper religious attachment. This was a very odd business—something Schuchard refrains from saying. During his last years, Eliot was conducting his own conversion of the Jews back to Judaism. There is a note of muffled humility and sanctimony unique to him in the pathetic exclamation to Victor Gollancz: "You seem to have to me enough of Judaism in you to qualify as a Jew in my sight!" (21)

Schuchard's account is shaded by a certain tenderness toward Eliot. We are told that he "arrived in London by mischance in August 1914," though his chances were rather good, and that he "took refuge" in Merton College, as if he were one more refugee (1). A surplus of tenderness may be necessary if one is to judge kindly the harsh things Eliot said about the Jews in the first three decades of his career, from which he retreated in the last two decades. Perfect anti-Semites are rare, and Eliot was not one of them. He was friendly or respectful to many Jews, and, during the Second World War, an active force for assistance to Jewish emigrants. Eliot practiced better than he preached. Fortunately, the history of prejudice is full of similar examples. Unfortunately, it is worse in some ways to preach than to practice intolerance. You do more harm than good in proportion as your words outrun your actions. But let us distinguish between kinds of anti-Semitism. There is the anti-Semitism of exclusive clubs and restrictive covenants; and there is the anti-Semitism of pogroms and the Holocaust. Belloc, Chesterton, Wharton, Fitzgerald, all had a stake in anti-Semitism of the first kind, and a story like Saki's "The Unrest-Cure" depends on the forbidden richness and hilarity of the very idea of passing from prejudice to persecution. Ezra Pound in the 1940s became a convert to anti-Semitism of the second kind. Eliot was closer to Saki, though more obsessed than most of his type, and he never crossed into persecution. As he turned away from those who did, he was occasionally startled by reminders of the distinctness of his own anti-Semitism, which in its context had been neither murderous nor benign.

Sidney Schiff, John Rodker, Jacob Isaacs, Mark Gertler, Ada Leverson—concerning these Jews and others, Schuchard remarks that Eliot "moved in their company" (7). I take that uncontroversially as part of the record. The same holds for his later and less guild-centered friendships with George Boas, Benjamin Cardozo, Horace M. Kallen, and Groucho Marx. His championing of Isaac Rosenberg really belongs in a separate category—it exhibits in a high degree the generosity of disinterested judgment. For the rest, it was impossible in the twentieth century to cherish a deep interest in art without moving in the company of a large number of free-thinking Jews. Many, after all, were patrons of the avant-garde, many were champions of particular artists, many were artists themselves. That Eliot could claim Jews among his friends in...