An Anti-Semitic Genius

...An Anti-Semitic Genius Dostoyevsky and the Jews By David Goldstein University of Texas 231 pp $17 50 Reviewed by David Singer Editor, "American Jewish Year Book", contributor, "Commentary" Reading this book brought to mind an incident that occurred during my undergraduate days at Yeshiva College, an Orthodox Jewish institution I was enrolled in a course in European intellectual history, taught by a brilliant young professor (himself an Orthodox Jew) who was a great fan of Dostoyevsky's One day, after the professor had finished singing Dostoyevsky's praises —talking about his remarkable skills as a novelist, his astonishing insights into human nature, his boundless compassion for the insulted and the injured student stood up and asked, "Professor, what would Dostoyevsky have done, had he come upon a pogrom that was taking place7" The professor stopped dead in his tracks, smiled sheepishly, and walked out of the room He knew, just as the student knew, that Dostoyevsky was a vicious anti-Semite Literary anti-Semitism, of course, is as old as Western culture itself and extends right down to the present time In fact, a full listing of writers who have expressed hostility toward Jews and/or Judaism—from Shakespeare to T S Eliot, from Voltaire to Celine, from Pushkin to Pasternak, etc —would add up to a Who's Who of Western literature But Dostoyevsky is different He is, after all, the novelist of ideas In four literary masterpieces—Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov ?he presents us with an unparalleled range of humanity Moreover, Dostoyevsky is the most honest of writers, never sacrificing the artistic integrity of his characters on the altar of political or religious orthodoxy (Witness, for example, his sympathetic treatment of Ivan Karamazov's God-denial in the celebrated chapters on the suffering children and the Grand Inquisitor) Finally, Dostoyevsky is the great bearer of the message of Christian love and of the need to reach out to all those who are oppressed and suffering How, then, could he have been an unvarnished anti-Semite7 Dostoyevsky and the Jews is both an attempt to explain the Russian writer's anti-Semitism and an indictment of it David Goldstein seeks to "determine the evolution of Dostoyevsky's ideas and feelings about the Jews as they emerge from his novels, his journalistic articles, his letters, and his notebooks " Further, he tries to situate these varied elements in "a meaningful context and determine the interrelationship and interaction between them " How well these tasks are carried out can be gauged from Joseph Frank's comments in the foreword to the book A leading Dostoyevsky scholar, Frank praises the "thoroughness of the documentation, the rigor of the analysis, and the impartiality that Goldstein maintains in presenting the evidence " Although Goldstein stresses that Dostoyevsky and the Jews is "not intended as a work of denigration," it certainly adds up to that Frank, speaking candidly, tells us of his "unrelieved sense of dismay" in confronting the truth about his "cultural hero " One of the major virtues of this book is that it does not overstate the importance of the Jewish question for Dostoyevsky In point of fact, he depicted only a single Jewish character at length in his fiction—Isai Fomich Bumstein in The House of the Dead On the other hand, all of his works (fiction and non-fiction) are studded with stylistic allusions to Jews and Judaism Most importantly, in 1877 Dostoyevsky penned a long essay on the subject in The Diary of a Writer Goldstein makes it clear that Dostoyevsky became increasingly preoccupied with the issue as he grew older, and that his anti-Jewish views developed in three stages "Initially nothing more than objects of scorn and derision, peddlers, smalltime moneylenders, Jews were too ridiculous to be really hated By the end of the [1860s] they had become financiers and manipulators, occult masters of the stock exchanges and state treasuries dedicated to the destruction of the foundations of Christian civilization [Ultimately] they became nihilists, the driving force behind the revolutionary movement and agents of socialist subversion " To fully appreciate the raw hatred underlying Dostoyevsky's anti-Semit-lsm, it is necessary to encounter it in the original Here, then, are two of his pronouncements on the Jewish question The first, in the form of a Biblical parody, deals with Judaic teaching "Go thou forth from among the peoples and form thine own entity, and know that henceforth thou art one before God Exterminate the others o. reduce them to slavery, or exploit them Believe in thy victory o'er the whole world, believe that all will be humbled before thee Hold all things in abomination and have no commerce with anyone in thy daily life Live, loathe, unite and exploit " The second pronouncement concerns the supposed international Jewish conspiracy "The Bismarcks, the Beaconsfields, the French Republic and Gambetta, etc —the power they all represent is nothing but an illusion And increasingly so with each passing day Their master, the master of all, the master of Europe is the Yid and his bank The Yid and his bank are now reigning over everything over Europe, education, civilization, socialism—especially socialism, for he will use it to uproot Christianity and destroy its civilization And when nothing but anarchy remains, the Yid will be in command of everything For while he goes about preaching socialism, he will stick together with his own, and after all the riches of Europe will have been wasted, the Yid's bank will still be there The Antichrist will come and stand above the anarchy " In explaining Dostoyevsky's anti-Semitism it is important to distinguish between rational and irrational factors Goldstein focuses on the rational, arguing that Dostoyevsky's Great Russian messtanism (a heady blend of chauvinistic nationalism and religious orthodoxy) led him to incite his people, the "God-bearers," against the "People of the Book " As Goldstein puts it "The profound but arrogant and exclusive love [that Dostoyevsky] bore for Russia inspired in him a no less profound hatred for a community whose very existence constituted in his eyes a formidable challenge to his nation and the 'God-bearing' mission he claimed for it " Dostoyevsky, according to Goldstein, could not allow for two chosen peoples, to establish the credentials of the " Russian Christ," he had to defame the Jews Andinhisviewthearchenemiesof the "new Israel" also were conspiring through economic and political means to prevent Russia from achieving its proper place in the sun Thus, in doing battle against the " Yids," Dostoyevsky was willing to join forces with the most reactionary elements in Russian society (his closest friend in the last decade of his life was the sinister and maleficent K P Pobedonostsev), and to draw upon any and all anti-Semitic sources (the chief inspiration for his essay on the Jews in The Diary of a Writer was The Book of the Kahal, by the Jewish apostate and convert Yakov Brafman) Goldstein certainly is right to set Dostoyevsky's anti-Semitism against the background of his political and religious thought Indeed, his Jew-hatred may well be wholly explicable in these terms But the rational approach does not account for the other Dostoyevsky, the towering novelist who fathomed the depths of the soul, who probed the inner recesses of the mind, who expressed solidarity with suffering humanity, who preached the need for Christ-like love, and who depicted in detail a character driven to destruction by a guilty conscience It does not tell us how that Dostoyevsky could have hated the "Yids" with so much venom It leaves us to assume that Dostoyevsky the novelist was a liar, and that his literary creations are fundamentally dishonest Interestingly enough, Dostoyevsky always insisted he was not an anti-Semite As he wrote in a letter to a Jewish correspondent late in his life "And now let me tell you that I am not at all an enemy of the Jews nor have I ever been " Goldstein, having immersed himself in Dostoyevsky's anti-Jewish writings, dismisses such statements as hypocritical nonsense Frank, in his foreword, argues that Dostoyevsky's denials indicate a guilty conscience Yet there was no need to deny atall,nottoothersorto oneself Is it possible that Dostoyevsky, or at least a part of him, is speaking honestly'' Could it be that the novelist who left us a legacy of literary masterpieces did not, in fact, hate the Jews7 Might it be the case, in short, that his anti-Semitism reflected a dark, irrational—and completely uncontrollable —force within his personality'' Certainly Dostoyevsky was fully aware that good and evil exist side by side in the human heart One of the characters in The Possessed says " 1 am capable of desiring to do something good and of feeling pleasure from it, at the same time I desire evil and feel pleasure from that too " And the whole of The Brothers Karamazov is built around the following theme "The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible God and the Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man " Perhaps the Jew-hating Dostoyevsky is the most Dostoyevskyan character of them all...