T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (review)

Book Reviews 131 In conclusion, Ostow is concerned that the disCussion ofantisemitism lacked depth, despite the necessity to discover the constants of the syndrome. Antisemitism is not related to any psychopathologic entity or complex. In the case studies, antisemitism. could alternate at various interests with philosemitism. Difficulty in controlling aggression and periods of social distress favored the emergence of anti-Jewish prejudice. Even with the Enlightenment, demonization of Jews was accepted and exploited. In a less optimistic vein, he has a slight hope that the dissemination of the understanding of the nature of prejudicial mythology and apocalyptic persecution might ultimately make a small contribution to the containment of antisemitism. This volume makes no attempt to offer solutions to this irrational strain in the social and political fabric of mankind. In the words ofJean-Paul Sartre in Antisemite andjew (1948): "If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him." Sartre's passion for enjoying the fulness of one's rights is articulated in the charge that "the cause of theJews would be halfwon ifonly their friends brought to their defense a little of the passion and the perseverance their enemies use to bring them down." The persistence of genocide, anti·Israel terrorism, and Internet antisemitism continues to give contrary evidence. Werner Israel Halpern, M.D. Rochester, New York T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form, by Anthony Julius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1995. 308 pp. $49.95. This book is a compelling addition to a Significant movement among Jewish literary scholars: investigating the representation of the Jew and antisemitism in modern British culture. These recent studies depend on but complicate those which earlier had compiled an overflowing dirty laundry list of Jewish literary stereotypes, ferreting out the monstrous literary progeny of Fagin and his ilk in all corners of English literary history. Only now, however, are we being shown the complex cultural interplay of such antisemitic representations with their philosemitic flip side, such as Scott's idealized Isaac and Dickens's Riah, and with images in non-literary texts. Anthony Julius's study, like those of Tony Kushner, Bryan Cheyette, Andrea Loewenstein, James Shapiro, and Michael Ragussis, argues that literary and other cultural representations of the Jew play many complex roles in an intricate British political and ideological discourse. Images of 132 SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No.2 the Jew are now seen to participate in ongoing debates about definitions of Englishness and its relationship to a national identity and a British political culture. Debates about granting Jews the full rights of British citizenship and an integral place in British social life are shown to have been shaped by perceptions of the Jew as a problematic Other who challenges any attempt to define a coherent national identity. As these studies argue, images of the Jew in literary, political, and legal documents, in high and low culture, continue to resonate with the history of the Jews in England, interweaving the Jews' persistently unstable presence from their restoration after medieval exile, to their restricted immigration during the Hitler era, and with their cultural identity in their own latter-day British communities. Amidst the scholarly breadth and cultural challenges of this recent work, Anthony Julius makes a daring contribution. Using the traditional tools of textual explication, but challenging the stance of scholarly detachment, he identifies himself as aJewish reader whose special interest interrogates the time-honored critical enterprise of analyzing T. S. Eliot's poetiC innovation. Julius analyzes Eliot's poetry and prose as a rhetorical relationship between writer and reader by presenting himself as representative of Jewish readers deeply offended by Eliot's antisemitic discourse. For Julius, Eliot's antisemitic poetic imagery and critical essays have the effect of rejecting and therefore excluding Jewish readers from the civilization his writing constructs. Striking a familiar antisemitic chord, Eliot's method dehumanizes Jewish readers by representing their poetic coun~erpartsas the "subhuman" Bleistein and "the manipulative, corrosive sophistication of Klein,~ both of which add up to a "destructive philistinism ," the rats chewing away at the foundations of Christian civilization. In his prose, Eliot finds that "reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable...