Hitherto I have not grasped the stinging nettle of anti-Semitism, indeed the word has only been used once here, in December 2019.
“31 July 1979
Lunch with Harold Wilson at the Travellers’ Club … Some talk of anti-Semitism, especially Ernest Bevin’s. Wilson has heard of the relish with which Bevin, on becoming Minister of Labour and National Service in 1940, boasted that he would call up all the East End Jews. “Real working-class anti-Semitism”, says Wilson. I suggest it is more a characteristic of the lower-middle class, and he agrees.(Kenneth Rose)
It is worth remembering Kenneth Rose was a Jew and suffered bullying and anti-Semitic prejudice when he was at Sandhurst, prior to being commissioned in the Welsh Guards. His calibration of Bevin’s class is typical of KR who set store by such fine distinctions. To digress, The Spectator Christmas Crossword has this clue: “Labour chief not quite accepting support of Jews? (7)”” (Dress to be Killed)
First, I have forgotten the answer to the crossword clue. Secondly, anti-Semitism has only popped up on my radar since 7th October last year. It has polarised opinion, specially in London, in a way few other issues do. People protested against Poll Tax and the Iraq War but there were no marches in favour of the tax or the war. Now there is a large body of people taking to the streets to show their support for Palestinians and a smaller body demonstrating their support for Israel. I am proud that the people of this country are prepared to demonstrate, whatever side they take and however cold the weather.
In The Way We Live Now Trollope depicts the anti-Semitism prevalent in Victorian England. He is holding up a mirror to society and is no more anti-Semitic than he is anti-aristocracy. He often paints his aristocratic characters as debauched, profligate, stupid and morally bankrupt. His novels come alive precisely because his characters are massively exaggerated to the extent that they are satirised. That is not to say that anti-Semitism did not exist in Victorian England – it most certainly did – but it did not impede Disraeli from becoming Prime Minister. He had been a practicing Jew as a child but, with the rest of his family, converted to Christianity (Church of England branch) in 1817 when he was thirteen.
The Holocaust should, after centuries, have led to the extinction of anti-Semitism but we know it didn’t. I don’t have any answers. However, if you are finding me a bit lightweight on this important issue I reproduce an abstract of Anna Peak’s booklet (eleven pages) published in 2016. She approaches the subject as an academic.
“There is a wide critical consensus that Anthony Trollope was anti-Semitic and that his later novels especially are notable for the ugliness of their anti-Semitism.
1 This view has its roots in the assumption that Trollope was a conservative whose views either never changed or became more reactionary as he got older and in the anxiety of critics to condemn Trollope for anti-Semitism in order to establish their own purity. Yet the argument that Trollope was anti-Semitic has been built almost entirely upon one novel, The Way We Live Now (1875), and almost entirely upon the portrayal of one character (Augustus Melmotte) in that novel – a narrow foundation that is unfortunately in keeping with a consistent critical tendency to make sweeping statements about all of Trollope’s works based on a few of them.
2 The critical condemnation of Trollope as an anti-Semite has also rested upon an assumption that Trollope’s narrative technique is uni-layered and that all quotations from his novels can therefore be taken at face value, despite a growing body of scholarship that suggests Trollope’s narrative technique is in fact complex and embodies a moral relativism.
3 More troublingly, in making their case that Trollope was anti-Semitic, critics have leaned upon an implicit definition of “the Jew” as male. Further, critics have assumed that the Victorians constructed Judaism exclusively in terms of race without regard to religion; this critical reluctance to deal with Victorian religiosity, for fear of being thought religious, has served to elide discussion of the relations between racism and religious belief. In fact, Trollope’s Christian Protestant views undercut his own attempts to deconstruct prejudice, but if we reconsider The Way We Live Now in light of the sophistication of its narrative technique and include in our consideration the novel’s portrayal of multiple characters, including female ones, we can see that the novel also satirizes anti-Semitism and deconstructs “the Jew” as a male racial Other in order to argue for greater tolerance of both religious conviction and female independence.”
(“Rethinking Trollope and anti-Semitism: gender, religion, and “the Jew” in The Way We live Now,” Anna Peak)
Given that Melmotte is at the end of the novel considered to be probably Irish, it is hard to say how he can be offered as evidence of Trollope’s anti-Semitism.