A Response to Ronald Schuchard

I don't think Professor Schuchard's essay, informative and just as it is, will change anyone's opinion or that his account of the friendship between Eliot and Horace Kallen will "radically reform our perception of Eliot as a critic of Judaeo-Christian culture in Europe" (2). The most notable mark of that friendship is that it was strong enough to endure despite the fact that Kallen advocated a position on Judaism that Eliot always rejected. Eliot wanted everybody to be a practicing Christian but meanwhile he wanted Jews to believe in their Judaic faith and to practise it. Kallen wanted Jews to give up their religion in favor of "the American idea" (14). His plan would entail replacing Judaic belief and practice by civic sentiment, patriotic, secular, and democratic. It was a trivial programme, but Kallen kept on recommending it. Schuchard's argument about Kallen is well measured, but it won't win anyone's heart. That some of Eliot's early editors were Jews and that some of his friends—though not his best friends—were Jews is not going to count. Nor will it count that Eliot admired Mannheim, and helped John Amon.

I have never believed that Eliot was prejudiced against Jews, or that he lived under the sway of Action Française, as Louis Menand maintains in a recent New Yorker review:

Eliot's attitude toward women had the same source as his attitude toward Jews: the reactionary program of the Action Française (which had also attracted the interest of Jean Verdenal). The Action Française was, originally, an anti-Dreyfusard political movement; its leader, Charles Maurras, ascribed what he regared as the decline of France to the influence of women and Jews, whom he held responsible for the corruptions of individualism, romanticism, sensuality, and irrationalism. Eliot was a serious admirer of Maurras's book L'Avenir de l'Intelligence, which he read during his year in Paris, and, later on, of Julien Benda's tract Belphegor, which was published in 1918, and which attributes the decay of French culture to (ahead of other undesirables) women writers and Jewish philosophers. ¹

I cannot accept that Eliot's attitude to women and to Jews was arrived at by his reading two books. It would be more reasonable to think that his attitude to women was formed by associating some of them with "so rank a feline smell" and that his attitude to Jews was formed by his associating them with "money in furs." ² I don't think those notions are true, either.

But there is a problem: what would count as evidence? "There is no anti-semitism in my poetry whatever," Eliot told Edward Field, as Schuchard reports (17). I accept that. But Eliot is bearing witness to his conscious attitudes, not to any vague, unconscious animus he may at times have felt. (I have to assure myself these days that I am not anti-Semitic, while I deplore the current Israeli government and regard Ariel Sharon as a murderer). "There is only one word in my printed works which I regret and I do not know what my mind was when I wrote it," Eliot wrote to Herbert Read (16). Schuchard has good reason to think that the word Eliot regretted was "race" in the assertion, in After Strange Gods, that "reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable" (15). "To Eliot, any large number of free thinking New Humanists or any secular humanists, Christian or Jewish would be intellectually 'undesirable,'" Schuchard says, "for in diminishing the role of religion in culture they would threaten the very project of reestablishing a traditional, religion-based culture" (16). That is persuasive, though I don't understand the qualifying word "intellectually," as it does not appear in Eliot's sentence. I have no doubt that Eliot meant to emphasise "free-thinking" more than "Jews," but he specified Jews rather than any other group of people...