Ezra Pound and the Rothschilds

628 LINDA MUNK Ezra POW1d and the Rothschilds LINDA MUNK Paul Morrison. The Poetics ofFascism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Paul de Man New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996.178. $62.50 cloth According to Holinshed's Chronicles (1578), William the Conquerer urged Jewish money-lenders to follow him to England from Rouen: they would become the monarch's 'engines of finance' and his chief source of revenue. In the nineteenth century, paper money was backed by gold; in the twelfth century, gold was backed by Jews, who were indispensable to the royal treasury. Legal tender was scarce then. From the early twelfth century, and for reasons that have been rehearsed by social historians, moneylending at interest, or usury (,foule usure'), became in England an exclusively Jewish occupation. (Things were different on the continent: see Jacques Le Goff's Your Money OT Your Life.) Jews loaned out commodity-money to English nobles, whQ needed capital to payoff debts, to wage wars, to build houses of good stone. So useful were Jewish bankers that William Rufus, son and successor of the Conquerer, forbade a Jew to convert to Christianity: conversion, he declared, would 'rid him of a valuable property and give him only a subject.' A Jewish capitalist was the monarch's 'valuable property'; converted to Christianity, he would become another subject. From the Norman conquest until the tail end of the thirteenth century (when all Jews were expelled from England), how were the great Anglo-Norman and early Gothic cathedrals financed? Did Ezra Pound consider the medieval glass at Peterborough and at Norwich (or what Cromwell left of it) in terms of usura? Durham with its massivecarved pillarswas begunin the year 1093: stonecutter may have been kept at his stone by usura. (I allude to Pound's Cantos: 'With usura hath no man a house ofgood stone / eachblock cutsmooth and wellfitting'; 'Stonecutter is kept from his stone / Weaver is kept from his loom / WITH USURA'; 'Not by usura St Trophime / Not by usura Saint Hilaire' [Canto xLv1.) Peterborough came by usura. During the reign of Henry II (1154-89), money to build the Cathedral at Peterborough, and the Abbey of St Albans, was raised and advanced by the Jewish banker Aaron of Lincoln, whose fortune reverted to the crown after his death. (Most of my information about Jewish money-lending in medieval England derives from a 1939 monograph that appears to be the source of several recent studies ofJewish stereotypes: Montagu Frank Modder's The Jew in the Literature ofEngland to the End afthe Nineteenth Century. See especial1y chapter 1.) In 1210, we are informed by Leon Poliakov, King John 'demanded so exhorbitant a contribution from the Jews that the latter were unable to comply.' Thus Abraham of Bristol was thrown into a dungeon where (in a proleptic reversal of the Shylock story) 'one of his teeth was torn out every day: on the eighth day the unfortunate usurer committed suicide.' The crime was extraction: but whose? During the reign of Henry III (1216-72), hundreds of thousands of pounds were escheated to the crown from the legacies of deceased Jews. EZRA POUND AND THE ROTHSCHILD5 629 About 1275, the Jewish business of money-lending was taken over by Italians from Lon:tbardy, andJewsbecamedispensable. Besides, itwas rumoured, they were coin-clippers. (Freud has linked gold to the phallic organsi but has anyone linked theactofcoin-dipping toitsphallicsubstitute and equivalent: circumcision?)Under Edward I, all unconverted Jews were officially expelled from England: wearing badges to distinguish them (in conformity with the decision of the Fourth Lateran Council), seventeen thousandJews, moreor less, along with their portableproperty, embarked in the autumn of 1290, just before the Feast of All Souls. Absurdly, the term 'floating currency' comes to mind: the drift of signs. Sartre is right: 'The Jew is over-determined.' Paul Morrison's The Poetics ofFascism circles in one way or another around 'the political commitments' of Ezra Pound and I.S. Eliot as 'they related to current theoretical orthodoxies.' It also rehearses the' "scandal" that has come to be attached to the name of Paul de Man.' Tired of the Eliot business (and stumblingblocks ), I shall not discuss Mr Eugenides, the...