TRIALS OF THE DIASPORA

A History of Anti-Semitism in England

By Anthony Julius

811 pp. Oxford University Press. $45

Anthony Julius has written a strong, somber book on an appalling subject: the long squalor of Jew-hatred in a supposedly enlightened, humane, liberal society. My first, personal, reflection is to give thanks that my own father, who migrated from Odessa, Russia, to London, had the sense, after sojourning there, to continue on to New York City.

With a training both literary and legal, Julius is well prepared for the immensity of his task. He is a truth-teller, and authentic enough to stand against the English literary and academic establishment, which essentially opposes the right of the state of Israel to exist, while indulging in the humbuggery that its anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Endless boycotts of Israel are urged by this establishment, and might yet have produced a counter­boycott of British universities by many American academics, whether Jewish or not. However, under British law the projected boycotts may be illegal. The fierce relevance of Julius’s book is provoked by this currently prevalent anti-Semitism.

An earlier work by Julius, “T. S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form,” impressed me as the only just and responsible treatment of Eliot’s polite hatred of the Jewish people. Admiring Eliot’s earlier poetry, Julius subtly demonstrated Eliot’s evasion of some modes of anti-Semitism while extending others. Eliot was not Ezra Pound or Wyndham Lewis, but a great poet indulging a prejudice he himself regarded as a cultural and religious argument.

“Trials of the Diaspora” takes its title from its final epigraph, Philip Roth’s pungent observation in his still undervalued novel “Operation Shylock”:

“In the modern world, the Jew has perpetually been on trial; still today the Jew is on trial, in the person of the Israeli — and this modern trial of the Jew, this trial which never ends, begins with the trial of Shylock.”

A remarkable solicitor, Julius casts this huge book as a series of trials, not of the Jews but of the English. His indictments tend to be fairly moderate, because only three or four European nations have been more honorable than Britain toward their own Jews, at least since state and popular violence against them ended with the medieval period, when it was dreadful indeed. After many massacres, the expulsion of 1290 effectually ended the Jewish presence in England until they were readmitted under Oliver Cromwell.

The best chapter in “Trials of the Diaspora” concerns the cavalcade of anti-Semitism in English literature, with its monuments in Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale,” Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” and Dickens’s “Oliver Twist.” My only criticism of Julius is that he somewhat under­plays the ultimate viciousness both of Shylock and of Shakespeare’s gratuitous invention of the enforced conversion, which was no part of the pound-of-flesh tradition. As an old-fashioned bardo­lator, I am hurt when I contemplate the real harm Shakespeare has done to the Jews for some four centuries now. No representation of a Jew in literature ever will surpass Shylock in power, negative eloquence and persuasiveness. A “perplexed unhappiness” is the sensitive response of Julius, but I would urge him to go further. Shakespeare, still competing with the ghost of Christopher Marlowe, implicitly contrasts Shylock with Barabas, the Jew of Malta in Marlowe’s tragic farce. I enjoy telling my students: let us contaminate the two plays with one another. Imagine Shylock declaiming: “Sometimes I go about and poison wells” while Barabas intones: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” It is Shakespeare’s continuing triumph over Marlowe that such an exchange will not work. Shylock is darker and deeper forever.

For Julius, “The Merchant of Venice” is both an anti-Semitic play and a representation of anti-Semitism. I dispute the latter: the humanizing of Shylock only increases his monstrosity. Who can doubt that he would have slaughtered Antonio if only he could? But I like a fine summary by Julius: “Shylock is an Englishman’s Jew — wicked, malignant but ultimately conquerable.”

Dickens created the second most memorable Jew in his superb Fagin. There is no third figure to compete with Shylock and Fagin, not even Joyce’s Poldy Bloom, whose Jewishness is disputable anyway, marvelous as he is.

How does one estimate the lasting harm done by Shakespeare’s and Dickens’s egregious Jews? Himself a usurer, Shakespeare must have known how much he had invested in Shylock. Is that why he punishes the Jew with such ignoble humiliation? The zest of Dickens for his urban apocalypses burned through his own humane sense of fairness. Yet nothing mitigates the destructiveness of the portraits of Shylock and Fagin.

The greatness of Shakespeare and of Dickens renders their anti-Semitic masterpieces more troublesome than the litany of lesser but frequently estimable traducers: Thomas Nashe, Daniel Defoe, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Wyndham Lewis, down to the contemporary poet Tom Paulin and the dramatist Caryl Churchill. Ezra Pound scarcely can be blamed upon the English, and T. S. Eliot, despite his conversion in citizenship and faith, remains an American phenomenon, a monument to a past illness, a literary malaise now largely vanished.

I am grateful to Julius for his calm balance, and I do not ask him to be Philip Roth rather than himself. There is an English passion for the grotesque, of which Shylock and Fagin are among the triumphs. American literary anti-Semitism is now sparse indeed. The new English (and Continental) anti-Semitism is hatred for Israel, which among all the nations is declared to be illegitimate. The United States remains almost free of this disease, and any current writer would not be tolerated for portraits like those of Hemingway’s Robert Cohn in “The Sun Also Rises,” Scott Fitzgerald’s Wolfsheim in “The Great Gatsby” or the several Jewish males who are Willa Cather’s villains. This is hardly to congratulate ourselves, but to point out that the United States, despite bigots left and right, does not encourage the genteel anti-Semitism that is woven into the English academic and literary world.

Early in this book, Julius links anti-­Semitism to sadism. He might have done even more with this, since sado­masochism is something of an English vice, and is so much a school-experience of the upper social class. And yet his chapter on “The Mentality of Modern English Anti-­Semitism” shrewdly relates bullying to the puzzle of what appears to be an incessant prejudice, never to be dispelled.

At his frequent best, Julius refreshes by a mordant tonality, as when he catalogs the types of English anti-Semites. The height of his argument comes where his book will be most controversial: his comprehensive account of the newest English anti-Semitism.

To protest the policies of the Israeli government actually can be regarded as true philo-Semitism, but to disallow the existence of the Jewish state is another matter. Of the nearly 200 recognized nation-states in the world today, something like at least half are more reprehensible than even the worst aspects of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. A curious blindness informs the shifting standards of current English anti-Zionism.

I admire Julius for the level tone with which he discusses this sanctimonious intelligentsia, who really will not rest until Israel is destroyed.

I end by wondering at the extraordinary moral strength of Anthony Julius. He concludes by observing: “Anti-Semitism is a sewer.” As he has shown, the genteel and self-righteous “new anti-Semitism” of so many English academic and literary contemporaries emanates from that immemorial stench.

Harold Bloom’s forthcoming books are “The Anatomy of Influence” and “Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last ­Poems.” He teaches at Yale.