Genius and Bigotry: The Odd Coupling

CHOGROD, MICHAEL WY5

GENIUS AND BIGOTRY The Odd Coupling MICHAEL WYSCHOGROD An alertness to anti-Semitism unites almost all contemporary Jews. While Jews are divided on many issues, they can usually spot an...

...If we had the option of withdrawing from the nations and living our destiny in solidarity with each other only, then we would not need to worry that there have been anti-Semites of the caliber of Luther, Wagner, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound...
...We are American, English, French as well as Jewish...
...Mencken also despised the masses...
...There is a core of truth in the traditional view...
...The latter is the training ground for the former...
...The diaries were written between 1930 and 1948 and sealed on Mencken's instructions for 25 years after his death in 1956...
...In the case of Barth, traditional Christian anti-Jewish attitudes undoubtedly played a role...
...his assistant at Smart Set and many others who came into Mencken's wide circle of acquaintances...
...There are Christian believers who accept the teaching of the chosenness and preeminence of the Jewish people in God's plan with humility and love...
...Genius of all kinds can coexist with lunacy and evil...
...Some of His Best Friends...
...This is a fact easier to affirm than to explain...
...Because anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice were irrational, it was inevitable that they would yield to the light of reason...
...A more legitimate argument can be made that anti-Semitism, particularly in the 20th century, is in a class of its own...
...Son of a German immigrant and a Scottish mother, he never tired of comparing English with German culture, never to the advantage of the former...
...The Menckens and Eliots of the world are therefore a painful problem...
...Jews have lived for centuries in environments where anti-Semitism was respectable...
...He really did hate almost everybody and included in the everybody were the Jews...
...What is not so easily understood is Mencken's blindness to the difference between the two World Wars...
...This is why the Westernized Jew is so deeply hurt by anti-Semitism...
...In 1933, Knopf read with dismay Mencken's lead review, "HitJerismus" for the December issue of the American Mercury...
...This is a teaching that Glemp cannot accept but also cannot reject...
...Borough Park and Williamsburgh in Brooklyn probably have the highest concentration of Shoah survivors in the United States and they have the lowest incidence of Shoah conferences and commemorations in the United States...
...How can Jews defend themselves, intellectually and • Judaism, Summer 1981, pp...
...as quickly as possible and "stakfedl sufficiently to set them on their feet...
...spiritually...
...Martin Heidegger was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, philosophers of the 20th century—and a Nazi...
...Trying to understand Mencken is a controversial and hazardous undertaking...
...The enduring friendship between Mencken and Knopf began in 1913...
...Understanding may shade into excusing or forgiving...
...For others, less Christian than Barth, other explanations must be sought, though the effects of Christian antijewish prejudice can linger even after Christianity as such has been abandoned...
...normal anti-Semitism advocated Jewish exclusion from elite social circles...
...At the same time, our apartness has as its purpose the welfare of all humanity...
...Being Jews also, we participate in a culture supplementary to Western culture, but we do not sharply separate the two cultures...
...In the review Mencken discussed Hitler's rise to power with the publishing of Me/n Kampf...
...Knopf avoided any public statement and the Knopf-Mencken relationship continued despite that conflict, Mencken denounced the United States' refusal to open its borders to German Jews...
...Expressing his faith in scientific naturalism, he wrote: "I believe that the phenomena of life are wholly chemical and mechanical....I am a strict determinist and do not believe in free will, though I admit in ordinary thinking free will must be assumed...
...So while Mencken's anti-Semitism was not clearly of the abnormal, murderous kind, it was also not of the harmless variety, if such a variety of anti-Semitism ever existed...
...There was a time," he wrote, "when the club always had one Jewish member, but the last was Jacob Ulman...
...Speaking about his previous attempts to refute the charges of anti-Semitism against Mencken, Fecher writes: 'Today I would be much less ready to take such a stand...
...The author criticized Hitler for inhumanity Put then said that the Third Reich would learn through experience and in the long run Hitler's regime would be domesticated...
...While Jews are divided on many issues, they can usually spot an anti-Semite and when they do, a collective defining shudder can be observed...
...even to enslave them, but not to murder every last black in the world...
...To a surprising degree, this remark applies to Mencken...
...Jews have naturally found such statistics reassuring...
...They are a growing minority that see the church as the gathering of gentiles around a Jewish core, a new chosen people that does not displace the old but complements it...
...One can speculate that behind such arrogance was a weak sense of identity and there is good reason to believe that such speculation is on target...
...This is why the Shoah is not an important topic of conversation in right-wing Orthodox circles...
...He predicted, however, that this policy would "stir up the Ku Kluxers, and there may be outbreaks here and there of antisemitism," Mencken believed that the impetus for this immigration should come from Christians, as the Jews "have troubles enough already, and are probably doomed to more heareafter...
...Anti-Semitism is primarily a religious phenomenon...
...Karl Barth, one of the most important Protestant theologians of the century, who contributed gready to Christianity's rediscovery of its Jewish roots, confessed in a letter written in 1967, near the end of his life: I am decidedly not a philo-Semite, in that in personal encounters with living Jews (even Jewish Christians) I have always, so long as I can remember, had to suppress a totally irrational aversion, naturally suppressing it at once on the basis of all my presuppositions, and concealing it totally in my statements, yet still having to suppress and conceal it...
...There is no other Jew in Baltimore who seems suitable...
...There is the old witticism about two Jews who are discussing an allegedly anti-Semitic gentile...
...In 1939, Mencken advocated that the German Jews be brought to the U.S...
...But the net result was a profoundly anti-democratic, Nietzschean—Nietzche was one of his heroes about whom he wrote a book—orientation that fueled his caustic wit...
...What the animal cannot do is hurt one's sense of self-esteem...
...Let it be said at once, clearly and unequivocally: Mencken was an anti-Semite...
...But even without the Christian component, anti-Semitism seems to be able to coexist with brilliance and extraordinary creativity...
...Fecher comments that Mencken's hatred of Franklin Roosevelt "was, indeed, maniacal—there is no other word to use...
...These are some of the questions that arise in the Jewish mind, consciously or otherwise...
...The gentiles are jealous of Israel's election and of the Jews' superior moral values...
...Normal anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism without murder, without the gas chambers...
...They saw themselves as respectable anti-Semites, not as murderers...
...No one who lived during the period of the Shoah and did not condemn Nazi Germany unequivocally was a harmless crank...
...Knopf respected and encouraged Mencken's work, believing him courageous to attack in print all manner of subjects and defend constitutional freedoms, especially during a time when censorship and libel cases threatened many magazines...
...is all I can say to this in some sense allergic reaction of mine...
...In contrast to the popular view during World War I that Germany was a dictatorial monarchy ruled by a ruthless military oligarchy, Mencken maintained that the Germany of the Kaiser was "a delimited, aristocratic democracy in the Athenian sense, a democracy of intelligence, of strength, of superior fitness, a democracy at the top...
...Were it to stop hurting, we would have performed the withdrawal that is forbidden...
...The anti-Semite could break his bones or even deprive him of his life, but an animal can do that also...
...We are a people set apart, forbidden to permit ourselves to be absorbed by our host culture...
...Anti-Semitism, it is believed, thrives on ignorance...
...If pressed to explain why it is natural for gentiles to hate Jews, the traditional Jew might speak of the chosenness of Israel...
...Part of this discomfort is simply that Jews, like others, feel their own pain more vividly than the pain of others...
...So the sovereign person had prejudices that he flaunted and the more outrageous these prejudices were, the better...
...So the Westernized Jew must develop a theory of anti-Semitism to protect himself spiritually...
...Such anti-Semitism, bad as it was—and is—can be distinguished from the murderous variety that reached its apex in the Nazi regime...
...Mencken wrote, "The disadvantage of the Jew is that, to simple men, he often seems a kind of foreigner" and "Many of the current Jewish leaders in this country are very loud and brassy fellows...
...Despite his anti-Semitism, the diaries of critic H. L, Mencken also show that throughout his life he had close friends among—as Mencken once put it—"the Chosen...
...n inherently controversial distinction might be drawn between normal and abnormal anti-Semitism...
...This is perhaps the most disturbing question of all...
...If we fail to make this distinction, we lose sight of the frightful escalation that was the essence of Nazi anti-Semitism...
...Gentiles hate Jews...
...they think their pain is being minimized when it is categorized as merely a species of the genus prejudice...
...He was uneasy when a few Jews moved into his neighborhood...
...There were those who denied the charge, prominent among them Charles A. Fecher who went to great lengths in his 1978 study Mencken: A Study of His Thought (Alfred A. Knopf) to refute it...
...The alternative was to agree to surrender one's beliefs to another judging authority and that destroyed one's autonomy...
...His vision was that of a wopld full of idiots with only a small number of thinking people who loathed the masses and were, in turn, loathed by them...
...He was an essayist, not a systematic philosopher...
...Among Mencken's circle of friends and co-workers were Alfred and Blanche Knopf, his publishers and close friends...
...So we must combine our apartness with a deep solidarity with humanity...
...One of Mencken's closest friends and life-tong supporters, publisher Alfred Knopf financed the influential magazine American Mercury, where he installed Mencken as editor...
...A person can be a great mathematician or composer and a thoroughly evil human being...
...They did not like Jews and insisted on reducing the number of Jewish physicians and lawyers in Poland, but when they saw what the Nazis were doing, they rejected it totally...
...It is such binds that generate hostility...
...He was an attack dog who came to life when he could sink his teeth into a victim whose intellectual and moral destruction he enjoyed...
...Those who participate in the shudder are part of the people and those who do not, are not...
...While there is some truth to this view, most Jews are not comfortable subsuming anti-Semitism under the broader heading of prejudice...
...A large part of the answer lies in the complexity of human beings...
...Because we do not have that option, because we may not sever our link with non-Jewish humanity, the existence of such anti-Semites must continue to hurt...
...But this is how it was and is...
...Recendy, Joseph Campbell, the scholar of mythology from Sarah Lawrence College, was also exposed as a racist and anti-Semite...
...It has gradually yielded to "a camorra of pecksniffs and time-servers, a breed of professional job holders and mob-orators...
...To deprive them of many of their human rights, yes...
...Because of their sins, the Jewish people are in exile and therefore powerless, exposed to all the harm the gentile world can inflict on Israel...
...even more disturbing, although Barth recognized and rejected it, the anti-Semitism seemed to have a life of its own beyond Barth's will to control it...
...We must insist on deepening our Jewish identity while remaining deeply interested in the fate of the nations...
...But they insist they must get out...
...For years, H. L. Mencken has been suspected of anti-Semitism...
...Do the ways we react tell us something about our Jewishness...
...So it is good that it hurts...
...The more traditional attitude was expressed in Cardinal Jozef Glemp's infamous homily at Jasna Gora, Poland's holiest Catholic shrine, on August 25, 1989 dealing with the Auschwitz convent in which he called on "My dear Jews," and admonished, "do not talk to us from the position of nation raised above all others...
...Anti-Semitism and the Shoah simply do not arouse the surprise these phenomena do among less traditional Jews...
...The nonjewish world is seen as a culture of violence and the Jew as the symbol of nonviolence, the lamb among the lions...
...The traditional Jew was also hurt by anti-Semitism but only in an external sense...
...Do we need to explain why lions devour lambs and sharks eat other fish...
...Given the prestige Jews bestow on intellectuals, how can such people hate us...
...They are questions that are worth thinking about...
...Beyond Mencken, how should Jews react to instances—there will surely be more in the future—when respectable cultural figures turn out to be anti-Semites...
...Why are there highly educated and talented people who are anti-Semites...
...Given these views, his hatred of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt is better understood...
...On one level, Mencken's anti-Semitism was of the normal variety...
...They cannot fail to interpret the Jewish claim to chosenness as an exercise of religious arrogance that must be rejected...
...Knowing what made Mencken the person he was, we can understand him without condoning his evil fulmina-tions...
...In the summer of 1938 he wrote from Berlin: The situation of the Jews is dreadful...
...They show Mencken as an anti-Semite, a racist, a mean-spirited and vituperative critic of colleagues who considered him a friend, and a Germanophile who never wrote a bad word against Hider but ranted at length against American participation in World War II...
...He did not have some deep, thought-out theory about the evil that Jews represented...
...In December of 1943, Mencken noted that the Maryland Club permitted Jews from out of town to eat there occasionally...
...For the rest of us, Western gentile culture is not a foreign enterprise but, to a large degree, our culture...
...Then, too, he was a Germanophile...
...These are the presidents who led the United States in wars that defeated Germany...
...Being attacked by an animal is painful but it is not an encounter with hate...
...In his introduction to the newly published The Diary of H. L. Mencken (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), Fecher writes about Mencken's attitude toward Jews and blacks: "Like everybody else who is going to read it, I was shocked...
...The fact is that he did not have thought-out theories about many things...
...It can be argued that abnormal anti-Semitism (even if we are willing to use the term) is but the flowering of respectable anti-Semitism...
...Nonjews can also deplore anti-Semitism and they often do...
...I do not know of anti-black racists who believe it to be essential to murder all blacks in the world...
...For the deeply traditional Jew, the existence of anti-Semites and anti-Semitism is natural...
...Many enjoyed reading him because they saw him as a slayer of sacred cows...
...highly educated and creative people are not supposed to be infected by it...
...Mencken refused to notice this...
...Anti-Semitism was considered a prejudice rooted in ignorance and amenable to cure by education...
...later, Knopf published most of Mencken's books...
...Ultimately the piece did appear in the December 1933 issue, eliciting a hostile public reaction...
...Among Blacks, the reverse seems to be true...
...Whatever can be said in defense of the German case in World War I, by the time World War II rolled around, Germany had turned into the vilest criminal commonwealth in world history...
...he just didn't like them as he did not like blacks, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, religion and a host of other things...
...While never explained, the anomaly has been recognized for what it is, an exception to the general rule that remains in place: anti-Semitism decreases as education increases...
...George Jean Nathan, his co-editor at the magazine Smart Set, Philip Goodman, a life-long friend and one of his early publishers...
...But Jews are also in a bind...
...All decent Germans seemed ashamed of the business...
...Finally, there is Mencken's hatred of religion...
...As the public's educational level rises, the incidence of anti-Semitism declines...
...It has much to do with the Jewish claim to be the chosen people...
...And what are Jews to make*of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Richard Wagner and a number of other representatives of high culture who were anti-Semites...
...Mencken further observed that Harry Truman had referred favorably to three journalists, Walter Lippmann, David Lawrence and Frank R. Kent of the Baltimore Sun, adding: "I think Kent did not enjoy being bracketed with two Jews...
...There were Polish anti-Semites who risked their lives saving Jews...
...When God chose Abraham, he promised that "in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed" (Genesis 12:3...
...Here is a prejudice that coexisted with genius...
...We see our Jewish culture as part of Western culture through Christianity and the other ways in which the Jewish influence has made itself felt in the West...
...There was a time when England was properly aristocratic...
...At times, he seemed to disapprove of the Nazi persecution of Jews...
...For years, public opinion surveys in this country have shown that anti-Semitism is inversely proportional to education...
...They deplored and fought it but they remained alive to deplore- and fight...
...This hatred was not directed at any one religion to the exclusion of others, though he hated the fundamentalist version of religions more than their liberal forms...
...He firmly believed that to be a person meant to have prejudices, judgments that one did not need to justify...
...In another passage, he expressed his delight that a resort he had visited excluded Jews...
...In an unpublished entry from the diary he refers to two Baltimore Jewish businessmen as "awful kikes.'" Of black women he wrote that they are "all essentially child-like, and even hard experience does not teach them anything...
...On October 24,1945, when the whole world knew about Auschwitz and the other death camps, Mencken wrote: 'The course of the United States on World War II...was dishonest, dishonorable and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, in supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace...
...It has tempered my admiration for Mencken and made me aware of weaknesses I had not known...
...Knopf wrote to Mencken, "I've just read your piece on Hitler...
...Fecher has now changed his mind...
...The slimy 'morality' of the unleashed continued on page 58 Genius and Bigotry continued from page 39 rabble," he concluded, "has conquered the clean and masculine ideals of the old ruling caste...
...So while normal racism is bad enough and must be fought with all available energy, Jews sense that anti-Semitism is in a class by itself...
...Mencken replied that if any reader took it for a defense of Hitler then Mencken would have to give up trying to express himself in plain English...
...Mencken loved to be outrageous...
...they refused to condone murder...
...That is the only way we can help them, and that is the only way we can avoid going down into history as hypocrites...
...Even if Esau hates Jacob, it is not permissible for Jacob to hate Esau...
...One strategy is to integrate anti-Semitism into the other racial, national and religious hatreds that afflict humanity...
...Could it be that there is, after all, something wrong with us...
...Esau hates Jacob" it is said and that ends the discussion...
...What does all this tell us about Mencken's anti-Semitism...
...A good thing that this reprehensible instinct is totally alien to my sons and other better people than myself....But it could have had a retrogressive effect on my Hoc-trine of Israel...
...He enjoyed his prejudices and gave vent to them with a great deal of verve, frequendy contradicting himself in the process...
...Ulman was married to a Christian woman...and had litde to do with the other Jews of Baltimore...
...The English in England and the Anglos in America were a lazy and dissolute bunch...
...It is the latter that happens when Jews encounter anti-Semitism...
...When he died the board of governors decided that he should be the last of the Chosen on the club roll...
...Six volumes of his essays were published under the tide Prejudices...
...They are no longer roughed, but the pressure on them is terrific...
...290-291...
...Hostility against "them" is perhaps particularly virulent when that group is racially different from us but things can also get bad when the differences are merely national or religious...
...He is no anti-Semite," one of the Jews remarks, "he hates everybody...
...Yet he deeply disapproved of American involvement in World War II...
...When so-called normal, or respectable, anti-Semitism is permitted to fester long enough, it will inevitably turn into its murderous version...
...But it is one thing to deplore and condemn something, it is another to experience one's existence threatened...
...Seen from this perspective, ant^Semitism is but one of the hatreds extant in our world...
...Jews, he said, have power because of their influence in the mass media of many countries, which they should not use to malign Poland...
...He did not advocate murdering Jews...
...Glemp's quarrel is, of course, with God who, according to the Hebrew Bible (considered sacred by Glemp), chose the people of Israel...
...In 1981, Nathan Perlmutter summarized the results of several polls: 'The younger and more educated the Black, the less likely he is to hold favorable views of Israel and of Jews....Generally, [in the overall population] the younger and the more educated survey respondents are, the less anti-Jewish they are...
...The old governing class [of England]," he wrote during World War I, "with its honorable traditions, its tenacity to order, its sturdy common sense, its steadiness in great emergencies, is now practically an outlaw class...
...The American consulate is jammed every day...
...One characteristic of black anti-Semitism, however, is that it seems to increase with educational achievement...
...After all, it is one thing to dislike Jews and another thing to advocate large-scale murder of them...
...The division of the world into "us" and "them" seems deeply rooted in human nature...
...All religions were humbug designed by unscrupulous clerics to pull the wool over the eyes of the weak-minded masses...
...Pfui...
...Charles Angoff...
...It is the nature of lions and sharks to behave the way they do and it is surprising and unnatural (as in the circus) when these animals behave differently...
...Normal anti-Semitism tried to limit the influence of Jews in the professions...
...Where they are to go is not mentioned...
...Believe me, my own personal feelings are not at stake but I think you gravely underestimate the really terrific concern that many of our own supporters have about Hitler...
...Gentile secularists cannot have sympathy with this view since they do not believe in the existence of God, much less in one who chooses one people above others...

Vol. 15 • June 1990 • No. 3


 
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