Civil Antisemitism, Modernism, and British Culture, 1902-1939 by Lara Trubowitz (review)

This is a competent and valuable monograph that explores the development of political euphemisms designed to mask and cosmeticize antisemitic feeling, particularly in Britain during the four decades leading up to World War II, though with implications that touch on contemporary politics and popular culture in both the UK and the US. Lara Trubowitz combines movers and movements in a slightly helter-skelter fashion (everything from Djuna Barnes to the English Defence League gets a chapter), but she succeeds in marking the emergence of what she calls "civil antisemitism," a sophisticated rhetorical instrument used to incorporate into mainstream Anglo-American culture a seriously uncivil hostility to the Jews. Some might wonder why she looks away from vicious caricatures of world Jewry which make no effort whatever to conceal or disguise themselves, but her book does the service of calling attention to refined and nuanced versions of ethnic prejudice that have proved embarrassingly palatable to pluralistic, even multicultural societies, such as our own.

Civil Antisemitism traces a calculated effort to "civilize" racial hate discourse, so as to create "more subtle and rhetorically complex expressions of antisemitism," resulting in the "pragmatic submergence" of explicit racial epithets and caricatures. In their place we find "genteel" innuendo and suggestion, which does "not mean that anti-Semitic attitudes in this period are eliminated, or even diminished," only that they are verbally diffused by "civility" and "courteousness" (8). Hence the rhetorical strategy of the infamous Aliens Act of 1905, which was designed to radically curtail Jewish immigration from Tzarist Russia, but spoke of "aliens" and "immigrant classes" (9), largely avoiding the direct mention of Jews. When the Manchester Evening Chronicle threw its support to this legislation, it was never mentioned that the "dirty, destitute, diseased, verminous and criminal foreigner" the editors wished to bar from English shores was in fact a Jew. This mode of displaced hate discourse matured during the next half century, culminating in figures like Wyndham Lewis, a noteworthy English modernist and an acquaintance of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Trubowitz effectively charts the softening and political grooming of Lewis's language as it shifted from the venomous antisemitism of The Apes of God (1930) to the more urbane racism of The Hitler Cult (1939). In the earlier volume, the Russian Jew, David Novitsky, became a "stink bomb" thrown into a small cadre of Englishmen: his voice "threatened to burst into a nigger-peal of diabolic mirth" (150). But by the end of the decade, Lewis was chastising the Nazi antisemites for aggressive and uncivil discourse: he listened to Herr Goering and was disturbed by a raucous voice "ascending to a scream of hate." Besides, the speaker was "deluged with sweat" as he "bellow(ed)" at "the Berlin mob" (164). This is not to say that Lewis faulted the content of Goering's speech, only that it lacked the mellifluous tone and dry underarms of an English gentleman.

In advising his German friends how "to win the ear of England," Lewis notes that "the crude Teuton . . . must lower his voice and coo (rather than shout) Juda verrecke —if he must give expression to such a fiery intolerant notion" (164). This is the rhetoric of strategic euphemism that Trubowitz says the British antisemites of the 1930s succeeded in passing along in the twenty-first century English Defence League. Their literature advised the contemporary generation of hate mongers never to speak of "racial difference, genetics, [or] Zionism" but always to project an "image of moderate reasonableness" (190). The value of Trubowitz's paradigm lies in how readily it exports to other racial domains. In the US we are all too familiar with references to "changing neighborhoods" as code for "A frican American intrusion" or "school choice" as a signifier of deliberate resegregation.

Trubowitz also seeks to turn her analysis of "civil antisemitism" into a commentary on English modernism. In this ambitious task she is less successful, though isolated insights are valid and sensitive. The...