Rethinking Eliot, Jewish Identity, and Cultural Pluralism

Since first publishing my essay, "'It is I who have been defending a religion called Judaism': the T.S. Eliot and Horace M. Kallen Correspondence" (1997), I have grown even more convinced that Eliot's relation to both living Jews and Judaism as a cultural entity within the West was far more complex than what Anthony Julius presents in T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (1995). ¹ At the time, I sought to challenge what I then regarded (and still do) as Julius's tendentious and overdetermined insistence not only that Eliot's strongest poetry is sustained by deep currents of anti-Semitism but that he never recanted from the ideology apparently reflected in that work. Though I admired many aspects of Julius's superb close readings and appreciated his cogent exploration of the nexus of fascism and literary modernism, I couldn't help but notice that Julius's argument for a career based on an aesthetic of "energetic ill will" was based on very early works such as "Sweeney," and "Burbank" (EAL, 138). By neglecting much of the poet's greater achievements, Julius insisted that an anti-Semitic ethos was at the foundation of the most important work. In spite of being deeply hurt by the cruel imagery as a young reader of Eliot's early poetry, I have long been impressed by the critical arguments championed by Peter Ackroyd and others that the poet's conversion to Anglicanism engendered a significant break with his anti-Semitic animus.

Though long suspecting that Eliot was something more than an unrepentant fascist and anti-Semite, I had always found the evidence of this debate (on either side) a bit thin. Imagine my surprise when just a few weeks after laying Julius's book aside, while conducting research on American Zionism at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, I discovered the yellowed but well-preserved sheets of correspondence between T.S. Eliot and Horace M. Kallen, a Jewish American philosopher, sociologist, and Zionist polemicist who was a prolific and widely read author; these pages quite literally spilled onto my lap. It was an eerie experience to realize I held in my hands the original documents, and it obviously took quite a bit longer to determine what it all added up to. In many ways, I have been reflecting on that moment ever since.

By the end of the day, I knew I was studying documents that (especially in the enduring absence of any published correspondence after the year 1922) had the potential for greatly raising the stakes and enhancing the scope of the often shrill debate over Eliot's anti-Semitism, to which Julius was only the most recent contributor. Over the next few days, I noted that the correspondence, which extended from 1927 (and according to Ronald Schuchard there are probably missing letters from much earlier) through at least 1960, encompassed two exciting threads. Besides the fact that the letters reveal the evolution of Eliot's surprisingly nuanced thinking about cultural difference and multiculturalism in the post-Holocaust years, they also contain a lively exchange about the role of secularism in American culture. These are the issues that form the previously unknown and exciting parameters of what Eliot actually thought about the subject of diversity—and the position of Jews in Western culture.

Perhaps I should begin with the implications of the most charged phrase of what was often a lively debate, when Eliot candidly concluded after many years of engaging with Kallen's thought that: "It is I who have been defending a religion called Judaism." Just what did Eliot mean by that unlikely formulation? To understand that, we need to come to terms with his interlocutor's own struggle to define the relevance of Jewish civilization to modernity. Born in 1882 in Berenstadt, a village in the German province of Silesia, Kallen arrived in the United States at the age of five when his father became the rabbi of...