The blood libel known as “The
Prioress’ Tale” is probably the most venomous outburst of anti-Semitism
in world poetry in general, and in English poetry in particular. In this
regard, Chaucer easily dwarfs Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, and T. S.
Eliot – to name a selection of anti-Semites of the highest echelon of
British literature. The issue of Chaucer’s anti-Semitism is a sore point
in the criticism that is written about this poet. Similarly to the case
of Shakespeare, it is not pleasant that Britain’s greatest 14th
century poet should be tainted with Jew-hatred. The issue took on a new
urgency after the Second World War when anti-Semitism, at least for a
certain time, went out of fashion. One solution that was advocated was
to ignore the libel by omitting it from Chaucer’s writings. Another
approach suggested mitigating it by noting seemingly positive figures of
Jews in his writings. But these have only aroused derision, and rightly
so. The most “creative” idea, in regard to purifying Chaucer of the
anti-Semitic taint, was to make “The Prioress’ Tale” a sort of
distorting mirror from which emanates a sarcastic critique of
anti-Semitism by Chaucer. This is based mainly on the characterization
of the prioress in the Prologue, where the author seems to accuse the
nun of false piety and dual morality. If, supposedly, the prioress is an
object of the author’s mockery, so also is the story he puts in her
mouth. In other words, if the prioress is an anti-Semite, her story is
actually Chaucer’s attack on Jew-hatred, and the harshness and cruelty
of her words are actually the harshness and cruelty of Chaucer’s
criticism – meaning that the poet, a philo-Semite par excellence,
wrote, without our realizing it, “a satire on theological
anti-Semitism”.
*
A
treatment of T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism must begin with a poem that
precedes “Bleistein with a Cigar”. Indeed, hints of Eliot’s revulsion
toward the Jews can already be found in his early poems, but in the
period of the flowering of his poetry, at the end of the second decade
of the century and in the 1920s (indeed under the influence of Ezra
Pound, his benefactor and spiritual mentor?), overt anti-Semitism
appears for the first time in the characteristic description of the
Jewish landlord in “Gerontion”, which is also among the poet’s
best-known poems.
The constellation of symbols in the
poem elevates (or perhaps we should say, lowers) the Jew far beyond just
another hackneyed anti-Semitic description of a greedy landlord who
blackmails his helpless tenant and refuses to renovate his decaying
house. The significance is universal. The weighted sentence, “My house
is a decayed house,” goes beyond its immediate meaning and receives in
this poem a universal import that presumes to connote a disintegrating
civilization, an import similar to that of the weighted concept in
Hebrew of khorban habayit. Thus the Jew, the sole human figure
who appears in the poem along with the forces of nature, Satan, a spider
and other evil spirits, takes on a demonic dimension as an Antichrist,
as befits the religiosity-suffused poetry of Eliot.
The
passage in “Burbank” in which rats and Jews rustle “underneath the piles
(and) lots” could certainly have served the Nazis in the classic image
where the Jews are likened to rats and rodents who rustle in cellars and
spread plagues. This is precisely the opening image of Goebbels’ 1941
film, “The Eternal Jew” (“Der ewige Jude”). The caricature of
Bleistein, seemingly less virulent at first glance, is also intertwined
with the venomous anti-Semitism of the period in which the poem was
written. The first two decades of the 20th century witnessed
a flowering of anti-Semitic journalism whose beginnings were late in the
previous century. This included the Libre-Parole in Paris edited
by Drumont, the Simplicisimus in Munich, and the Kikeriki
in Vienna (the latter two under Jewish ownership), from which Philip
Ruprecht, also known as “Pips”, drew his inspiration for illustrating
Der Stürmer – which began to appear in 1923, that is, close to the
writing of “Burbank”. The description of Bleistein is a perfect copy of
Pips’ caricature in Der Stürmer. In no way can a distinguished
intellectual and historian of the arts like Eliot possibly be absolved
on grounds of lack of knowledge or understanding of the deadly
anti-Semitism of his day.
