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Modernism/modernity 10.3 (2003) 419-429



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Lessons Out of School:
T.S. Eliot's Jewish Problem and the Making of Modernism

Jonathan Freedman


What is it about T.S. Eliot's putative anti-Semitism that provokes such prolonged and extravagant response—attacks of increasing stridency from his critics, apologetics of increasing imaginativeness from his defenders? Readers of Modernism/Modernity are doubtless familiar with the latest burst of warfare occasioned by Ronald Schuchard's spirited January 2003 defense of Eliot, "Burbank with a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar," published along with by-and-large critical responses by distinguished modernists. So let me instead offer as evidence of the persistent power of this controversy the following datum. I recently co-edited a special issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review entitled Jewish in America, and my fellow editor and I were surprised to discover that no fewer than five submissions contained allusions to, or denunciations of, Eliot. We accepted one of these, a poem by Roger Kamenetz entitled "The Lower Case Jew," in which Eliot is put on trial by a heavenly rabbinical court for anti-Semitism. Prosecuted by Bleistein and defended by Sir Ferdinand Klein, Eliot is found guilty and sentenced to attend "Hyam Plutzik's grandson's bar mitzvah / . . . [where] he'll hora with Rachel née Rabinovitch / And kazatzki with Allen Ginsberg / who will give him wet sloppy kisses." ("Oh, I am bound to a bagel of fire!" Kamenetz's Eliot cries in response to this doleful fate.) 1 Cruel as such a contrapasso might seem—it nails Eliot on just about every ground I can imagine, including what Kamenetz sees as his snobbery and his panicked homophobia—it was nevertheless striking that we received no submission similarly indicting Pound, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Hemingway, or Cather, to [End Page 419] mention other writers of Eliot's vintage whose attitudes towards Jews were not always respectful.

Taken together, Schuchard and Kamenetz's responses, polar opposites in every other way, pose two similar questions: why now, why still, Eliot? And what, if anything, does the presence of Jews as equal players in the game of culture-making upon which Schuchard comments and to which Kamenetz's poem testifies mean not only for Eliot scholarship, but for our new, reconfiguring sense of Eliot's era?

To address the first of these, as I tried to suggest in my 2000 book, The Temple of Culture, the controversy is rooted in the absolute preeminence Eliot assumed in the booming literary academy of the 1940s and 1950s, especially in America. 2 To be a college professor of English in this period was, perforce, to come to terms with a model of literary history and cultural value that placed Eliot, the work Eliot esteemed (e.g. metaphysical poetry), and the religious vision that Eliot affirmed at the center of critical and pedagogic practice. And such a period was also, and not uncoincidentally, the period in which an Anglo-American professorate which had closed itself off to Jews, frequently on the not-un-Eliotic argument that one needed to have a thorough and deep—a feeling—knowledge of Christianity in order to understand a literary tradition suffused with that faith, began to open up to this previously excluded group. Eliot's responses to Jews rankled many Jewish critics then. 3 They continue to do so, perhaps all the more vigorously as Jewish critics have abandoned the tactics of passing, accommodation, or internalization that marked their early years in the academy. 4 But more, it seems to me, is at stake in this continuing battle. For those critical of the New Critical canon and the rhetoric that informs its continuing study, Eliot offers a case study in that canon's complicity with prejudice, reaction, and the worst episodes in twentieth-century history. For those who wish to defend the canon that Eliot did so much to put into institutional practice, his problematic moments need to be explained. Battling over Eliot, in other words, is a way of battling over the nature and shape of...

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