ADAM KIRSH REVIEWS ANTHONY JULIUS…

Posted By on May 27th, 2010

Albion’s Shame
In Trials of the Diaspora Anthony Julius offers an encyclopedic history of English anti-Semitism

BY ADAM KIRSCH | 7:00 am May 25, 2010

Of all the qualities that Anthony Julius displays in Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England—intellectual force, extensive erudition, a lucid prose style—the most admirable is surely his moral fortitude. For to write this encyclopedic study, which covers almost a thousand years of English history, Julius had to expose himself to an endless series of hateful lies about his own people. By the end of the book’s 600 pages of text (another 200 pages of notes follow), the reader is more than ready to sympathize when Julius concludes, “to study [anti-Semitism] is to immerse oneself in muck. Anti-Semitism is a sewer. This is my second book on the subject and I intend it to be my last.”

It’s easy to believe that it was painful to write the book, since even reading it is—appropriately enough, given the title—a kind of trial. Julius’s survey of anti-Semitic acts and ideas and discourse, from the blood libel of the middle ages to the fanatical anti-Zionism of the 21st century, offers an object lesson in how demoralizing it is to be slandered, even when one knows that the slander is false. Indeed, the wilder and more palpably incredible the slur, the more destabilizing it can be for the victim, since it thrusts him into a world in which the truth simply does not matter.

For many hundreds of years, for example, most English people believed that Jews had a religious obligation to kill Christian children and drink their blood. Julius shows how this crime was charged against the Jews again and again in the middle ages: in Norwich in 1144, Gloucester in 1168, Bury St. Edmunds in 1181, Lincoln in 1255, and on and on, until the Jews were finally expelled from England by King Edward I in 1290. The fact that no Jew ever committed such a murder and that Jewish law is radically opposed to bloodshed, did not stop the blood libel from flourishing. But while no Jews ever ritually murdered an English Christian, Christians inflamed by such accusations did murder very many English Jews. In York in 1190, for instance, 150 Jews died—many by suicide—when a looting mob trapped them in a castle.

In this respect, medieval anti-Semitism followed the same logic as Nazi anti-Semitism—the logic of the big lie, which charged Jewish victims with committing the very crimes that were being committed against them. The victim’s rational instinct in this situation is to reply and rebut, to demonstrate the falsehood of this or that charge against the Jews; but this response is entirely beside the point. As Julius writes, “what characterizes anti-Semites is not so much their falsehoods and their misbeliefs as the malice with which they promote them. They hate Jews. The errors in logic, in history and theology, in politics and sociology, come later.”

Yet this raises a question about Trials of the Diaspora itself. Julius is a respected intellectual, the author of a groundbreaking book on the anti-Semitic tropes in T.S. Eliot’s poetry, and a prominent London lawyer, known for his work as Princess Diana’s divorce lawyer and as defense counsel for Deborah Lipstadt in the David Irving Holocaust-denial case. Why, one might naturally wonder, would he devote so much time and work to documenting English anti-Semitism, if the content of anti-Semitism is null—if his book is, as he puts it, “mostly … the explication of nonsense—pernicious nonsense, at that”? One possible motive is scholarly—the simple desire to make a truthful record of the Jewish and English past—and Julius has certainly done a masterly job of that. It’s hard to imagine anyone needing to write this sorry history a second time.

But the temper of this book is not simply scholarly. Its forensic drive and controlled irony are lawyerly, in the best sense of the word. A case is being made here—but not, as Julius would be the first to insist, a case for Jewish innocence. It is not only unnecessary to make that case, it is degrading: You don’t argue with a sewer. If, knowing this, Julius still felt compelled to write Trials, his purpose was, rather, demonstrative. By so thoroughly documenting and analyzing English anti-Semitism, Julius puts himself in a position of mastery over it. A Jew, he shows, does not have to fear anti-Semitism; just as important, perhaps, he no longer has to fear thinking about anti-Semitism.

[…]

Continued at:
http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/34288/albions-shame/

Categorized under: ANTI-SEMITISM.
Tagged with: no tags.

Comments are closed.