RosieBell

Ethnic cleansing

There's only a short time left to hear this programme, The Last Jews of Iraq,  a story of ethnic cleansing, very moving and frightening.  It's presented by Alan Yentob, the BBC grandee and himself the son of Iraqi Jews. 

The Jewish population of Iraq  had existed by the waters of Babylon since 597BC and in 1917 made up one third of the population of Baghdad.   

They had their golden years in the 1920s and 1930s, living a comfortable and integrated life among their Arab neighbours.   When the state of Iraq was created, they regarded themselves as both Iraqis and Jews. 

In 1936 Hitler's Mein Kampf was translated into Arabic and published in Baghdad.   Ideological hatreds began to arise and with growing Zionism in the Middle East Jews began to be regarded as aliens and were  attacked in the streets.



Mein Kampf - the Arab translation on sale in Syria

In June 1941, a Nazi sympathiser, General Rashid Ali al-Kailani seized power in a military coup.   A plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Iraq was formed.  The mayor of Baghdad (a Muslim) intervened, General Rashid Ali fled the city, but there was a 2 day pogrom.  180 Jews were killed.

After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, 98% of the Iraqi Jews left.  Those who remained behind lived under suspicion and official persecution, culminating in public hangings which the government celebrated with a national holiday. 

Any of these stories - Bosnia,  Rwanda, the Sunni-Shi-ite conflict in Iraq - will tell how different communities who had co-existed well enough turned into hostile tribes.  Suddenly your fellow citizens in all their different shadings become one kind of person or another - the person who denounces, pursues, even murders or the person who shelters and protect. 

In 1947 there were 118,000 Jews in Baghdad.  There are now only seven left.

Lifemanship

In his series Lifemanship Stephen Potter invented a reviewer called Hope-Tipping who, in order to make a splash, would take a writer to task for not doing something he was famous for,  e.g. accuse D H Lawrence of showing  a neglect of "the consciousness of sexual relationship, the male and female element in life”.   So Hope-Tipping would be severely disappointed with Irving Welsh's lack of interest in Edinburgh's low life and he would castigate Dick Francis for not drawing on his knowledge of horses and horse-racing. 

Gilad Atzmon has evidently picked up this trick of drawing attention to himself:-

Mein Kampf is an interesting read, a very important document, I could hardly find anything about the Jews – only 2 and a half pages out of 400  about the Jews.

It's one way to get noticed.  

Warm Endorsement

As everyone in the blogosphere knows, Gilad Atzmon has written a book, The Wandering Who, published by Zero Books and with a blurb of warm endorsement  from Professor Mearsheimer - "fascinating and provocative .  . Should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike.'  This has caused a storm.  Professor Mearsheimer defends himself here, and in his comments thread he is in turn warmly endorsed by every Nazi nutter and Holocaust denier in town. 

I haven't read Atzmon's book, and as I wouldn't buy it or ask the library to get it, I suppose I never shall.  But I did check out Atzmon's warm endorsement of his own book (here) which has  put "the entire Zionist network is in a total panic" (according to him).  Atzmon has also photoshopped pictures of the heads of his critics onto naked bodies.  Somehow I don't think he and the Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago are in the same intellectual milieu. 

Atzmon's account of the controversy:-

". . .the Islamophobic agent-provocateur “Harry’s place” [Atzmon doesn't know what an "agent provocateur is, evidently] – who never miss a chance to muddy the water – joined in, intimidating and harassing  a London academic  just because she tweeted that she likes Atzmon’s book

Just before London Tea Time, America woke up. Within the hour, her Zionist stooges were ready to join the campaign. EX- IDF concentration camp guard Jeffrey Goldberg had a clear plan to chew Professor John J. Mearsheimer circulating the same banal and unsubstantiated accusations.

At that stage, it appeared to be a campaign that was run by hundreds of Zionist enthusiasts – but if one scratches the surface, it was actually an orchestrated move of barely more than five Jewish bloggers, [Richard Seymour? Andy Newman?] who have managed to mobilise another twenty or so book burners or shall we call them ‘wandering  sockpuppets’ that habitually attack in different areas of the net and the press, co-coordinating to harass, bully and intimidate, with the same dull, repetitive, accusations, ‘arguments’ and smears.

By Sunday night the Guardian published an appalling piece by one Andy Newman of Swindon, who, according to one of his “Socialist Unity” editors, attacked Atzmon simply to appease the relentlessly Islamophobic “Harry’s Place” public.

[Now since when did Socialist Unity "appease" Harry's Place?  They have just put up a very rude piece about them  - or is this merely a cunning Zionist smokescreen?]
.  . .

In a final desperate attempt to jeopardize the publication of the book and to silence its author. Richard Seymour AKA ‘Lenin Thumb’,  authored a new anti Atzmon manifesto. 

I read Richard ‘Lenin’ Seymour’s text with interest and found out that for some reason, both ‘avant-garde revolutionary’  Seymour’s text, and Guardian’s ‘socialist’  Andy Newman’s drivel are suspiciously far too similar to the unforgettable ‘Aaronovitch Reading Atzmon’ performance at the Oxford Literature Festival.  [This reading is of the choice bits of antisemitism in Atzmon's work.  Why Seymour, Newman and Aaronovitch should quote the same choice pieces of antisemitism is moronically obvious.]

.......................

One may wonder how come Seymour, an alleged revolutionary radical Marxist, Andy Newman, a mediocre socialist  and Neocon pro war Aaronovitch are caught together naked holding ideological  hands. [Yes, how would a far left anti-Zionist like Seymour pick up with the liberal Aaronovitch?]

How is it that the three try  to prevent myself and others from criticising Jewish political lobbying. For some reason they also don’t want us to look closely into the events that led to the financial turmoil. [Jews' fault of course] How is it possible that a hard core Zionist and ultra radical leftists are not only employing the same ideological argument but also performing the exact same tactics?  Clearly, there is an obvious ideological and political continuum between Aaronovitch, Newman and Seymour. The Wandering Who? scrutinizes this very continuum.

Zionism clearly maintains and sustains  its ‘radical left opposition’ and the logos behind such a tactic is simple- ‘revolutionary’ left is totally irrelevant to both the conflict and its resolution. Hence, Zionists cannot dream of an easier opposition to handle. When the Zionists detect a dangerous rising intellect [Atzmon of course - he tells it like it is] who aims at the truth, they obviously utilize and mobilize the Jewish left together with the few willing Sabbath Goyim executioners to gatekeep the emerging danger. Seymour, Newman and a just few others are always happy to slay the emerging intellect.  [Atzmon again - in case you didn't get the first time who this "intellect" is].

Indeed they were effective for years. From an intellectual perspective our movement is pretty much a desert. Every deep thinker we have ever had [Atzmon for instance]  has been targeted and destroyed by the Jewish Left and their Sabbath Goyim.  But for some reason, they somehow failed with me. My views on Palestine and Israel are now circulated on most dissident journals [bringing them into discredit] and my book The Wandering Who is endorsed by the most important people scholars and activists in our discourse. [please - list of names besides Professor Mearsheimer's?]

So far, all efforts to stop the book have fallen apart. There is no sign of anyone pulling the book out but there are clear signs that the Hasbara orchestrated campaign has backfired. No one surrendered to the Zionist campaign and its stooges. As they said in Tahrir Square, ‘we have lost our fear.’ [ Oh who do you think you are!]   The Wandering Who is now a best seller for more than a week (as far as Amazon ranking can tell). On the Jewish best seller list, it is even more popular than the Babylonian Talmud and the Torah. I guess that this is indeed a great concern for Zionists and  their stooges, but there is nothing they can do about it.

The sheer dreadfulness of this writing passes description. How could a distinguished academic like Professor Mearsheimer read such self-important, bragging crap and pat its author on the back?  OK, this is not Atzmon's book - but if this is how the guy writes - its juvenile abuse, its total idiocy on how left and liberal writers in the UK operate, its paranoia, so that if people criticise him they must be in some kind of "Zionist" conspiracy, its general craziness - now, how could Professor Mearsheimer read anything from a writer like that and endorse it? What was he on?

Hearsay, pure and simple

Here’s John Pilger really pissed off with the liberal press:-

On 3 March, the Guardian announced that Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks would be making "an investigative thriller in the mould of All the President's Men out of its book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy. I asked David Leigh, who wrote the book with Luke Harding, how much DreamWorks had paid the Guardian for the screen rights and what he expected to make personally. "No idea," was the puzzling reply of the Guardian's "investigations editor". The paper paid WikiLeaks nothing for its treasure trove of leaks. Assange and WikiLeaks - not Leigh or Harding - were responsible for what the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, has called "one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years".

[To do these parasites justice, they did have to read masses of fragmentary documentation and make some kind of sense of it.]

The Guardian has made it clear that it has no further use for Assange. He is a loose cannon who did not fit Guardianworld, who proved a tough, unclubbable negotiator. And brave. In the Guardian's self-regarding book, Assange's extraordinary bravery is excised. He becomes a figure of petty bemusement, an "unusual Australian" with a "frizzy-haired" mother; he is gratuitously abused as "callous" and a "damaged personality" who was "on the autistic spectrum". How will Spielberg deal with this childish character assassination?

[Actually, the book says a lot about Assange’s courage, brilliant brain and indifference to comfort and material possessions.  When I’d finished reading it I admired Assange more than I had before.]

On the BBC's Panorama, Leigh indulged hearsay that Assange did not care about the lives of those named in the leaks.

Assange‘s indifference to the lives of those named in the link turns up on p111 of the book.  The Afghan war logs in Wikileaks’ possession mentioned “names of informants or those who had collaborated with US troops. . ."

I [Declan Walsh, one of the Guardian team sifting through the leaks] told David Leigh I was worried about the repercussions of publishing these names, who could easily be killed by the Taliban or other militant groups if identified. David agreed it was a concern and said he’d raised the issue with Julian, but he didn’t seem concerned. That night, we went out to a Moorish restaurant, Moro, with the two German reporters. David broached the problem again with Julian. The response floored me. ‘Well, they’re informants,’ he said. ‘So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.’ There was, for a moment, silence around the table. I think everyone was struck by what a callous thing that was to say.

In the event the names were redacted.

As some commenters in the thread point out, Pilger misuses the word “hearsay“.  David Leigh heard these remarks of Assange with his own ears.   It wasn’t reported to him by someone else, which is what “hearsay” means.  There were three other witnesses there who heard this as well, and in the thread David Leigh names them.  However Pilger has been indulging in “hearsay” himself since he presumably is going by what Assange has told him what was said at this dinner. 

As always with Assange and Wikileaks, there is a lovely irony in this.   The creed of St Julian says “We believe in raw data, unmediated and unchannelled.  Cover us with data, oh Lord, so we can save our souls.”   In this instance Leigh is the man who holds the raw data bleeding and dripping in his hands, Pilger has had it cooked and processed.

Pilger also says:-

As for the claim that he had complained of a "Jewish conspiracy", which followed a torrent of internet nonsense that he was an evil agent of Mossad, Assange rejected this as "completely false, in spirit and word".

[Pilger, once a courageous reporter who would travel  to war zones, evidently hasn’t been around the internet much.  It’s perfectly possible that you will be attacked as an evil agent of Mossad because your leaks don’t deal much with the insanity-inducing obsession, Israel, while you agree with a view that has a fairly broad consensus, that the world is ruled by a Zionist entity via its partner, the USA.]

Pilger does not address the most damning charge against Asange’s political and moral judgement in the Panorama programme,  his dealings with the obsessive anti-semite and general loon, Israel Shamir.  A useful summary of this association can be found here by Nathalie Rothschild, though no doubt many will find her surname suspect.

The words “Julian Assange” are as reliable a nutter magnet as “Israel and Palestine“.  In the Liberal Conspiracy thread on Private Eye’s revelations about Assange’s belief in a Jewish media conspiracy people turn up to say that (a) Private Eye must have been hoaxed or is telling lies; (b) Assange was only saying what’s true anyway.  The same calibre of commenter turns up at John Pilger‘s thread saying (a) David Leigh was telling lies; (b) what’s wrong with killing informants anyway?  

A Permanent Chill

John Gross died recently and I wrote about his Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters here.  The best way I had to “celebrate his life” as they say at funerals these days was to read another one of his books.  So I picked up Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (published 1992).  It’s a biography of The Merchant of Venice - its source material, how it was seen by contemporaries and later interpreted by actors and critics.  As I would expect from anything by Gross, the book is humane, sensible and witty.

At the Cambridge Festival Theatre production in 1926 . . , audiences were given a taste of what a director could do when he set out to be original at all costs.  Shylock made one of his entrances grinding away at a barrel-organ; as soon as Portia launched into “The quality of mercy”, the Duke started playing with a yo-yo.  The director responsible, Terence Gray, dreamed up many similar gimmicks during the years in which he ran the Festival Theatre (1926-1933) - a Twelfth Night, for instance, with Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek waltzing around on roller-sakes.   Gray is a forgotten figure today; but his work was a portent.

P170

The portent is to the productions that strain against the text to offer interpretations that are “challenging” ie flattering to modern sensibilities.

According to Gross The Merchant was a favourite school text, and I remember doing it when  I was 15 or so.  I was sorry I wasn’t chosen to read Shylock -  no doubt a million actors have felt like that since.  It’s a  juicy part.  During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the play was the most performed of any of Shakespeare’s plays, more so than Hamlet or Macbeth, which I I found surprising.

Anyway, it was so long since I had read the play that I read it again while watching Jonathan Miller’s 1973 production.   This is done in Victorian dress, which portrays Bassanio as a young man about town in a checked jacket, while Antonio is a Victorian gentleman merchant but then that makes Antonio’s spitting at Shylock unlikely.  Hatreds by then had become more reticent.  Portia is played by Joan Plowright who is about twenty years too old for the part, and suddenly turns from a warm, charming woman into a brusque, rude bitch who keeps on forgetting Jessica’s name (there’s nothing in the text to suggest that).  Jonathan Miller stresses the Jessica aspect - her estrangement from her father and her religion and nation - and at the end he leaves her isolated, snubbed by this Christian and aristocratic set she has married into, while the soundtrack plays Khaddish. 

John Gross gives this production a total going over in his book, calling it a “burlesque” and says that to make Shylock more sympathetic the Christian characters “were portrayed as corrupt, cold-hearted frauds”.

I did see the play about a decade or so ago done, I think, by the Royal Shakespeare Company.  At the end of the trial scene they showed Shylock’s total humiliation with him falling over, trying to get up, and falling again and again, slipping on coins scattered on the floor.  I found it unbearable. 

Antonio, Portia, Bassano, Lorenzo - they speak poetry and noble sentiments, they represent love, friendship, music.  That makes their unthinking arrogance to Shylock even harder to take.  He is the Jewish money-lender who is either an ugly menace or a figure of fun.  When he gets a chance to bite them, they pull out his teeth.  It is horrible, just as everyone calling him “Jew“ in conversation is.  My modern sensibility can’t see it any other way.  Shakespeare’s audience, the one he knew and wrote for, would not have thought Shylock's comeuppance horrible but just.  And - here’s a modern sensibility, verging on the Madeleine Bunting blather about jihadist bombing being a “critique” of British foreign policy - I don’t find Shylock’s attempted murder of Antonio disproportionate.  Shylock has been abused and ridiculed because of his racial origins.  My modern sensibility allows him any reaction to this, in drama at least.  The forced conversion is vile.  (Actually the revulsion against him is more religious than racial as we would understand it.)    Antonio is impossible to portray - he is a melancholy soul of generosity who is given to behaving like someone in the BNP.  No-one smacks the jeering thug Gratiano - Portia is quite happy to have him marry her companion Nerissa and welcomes him into her gracious palace.

Gross writes about the ironists coming to rescue Shylock from being seen as the villain:-

“we have been increasingly asked to think of The Merchant as a play which cannot possibly mean what it appears to say, a play which constantly subverts its own surface-values and throws doubt on the purported motives of its characters.. . Shakespeare appears to join in the general scapegoating of Shylock, but he is constantly sending out signals that in reality he condemns it.”

Gross does not believe in an ironic Merchant though he does believe that it is not a simple tale of Jewish evil:-

“Shylock is meant to be a villain.  There can be arguments about his motives and his personality, but there can be no serious argument about his behaviour.  Given the opportunity - an opportunity which he himself has created - he attempts to commit legalised murder.

He is also a Jewish villain.  He did not have to be: Christians were moneylenders too, and the story would have worked perfectly well with a Christian villain. . .Jewishness is one of his primary characteristics: he emphasises it himself, and it is emphasised for him by everyone with whom he has dealings.

His Jewish villainies, moreover, are strictly traditional.  He is a usurer; he is cunning and cruel; he pursues a vendetta against Christians. .

Invested with Shakespearean power and, in time, with Shakespearean prestige, Shylock the Jewish villain became part of world mythology.  He may not have added anything to existing stereotypes, but as the most famous Jewish character in literature he helped to spread them and to keep them vigorously alive4.  He belongs, inescapably, to the history of anti-Semitism.

Yet Shakespeare, though he may often have started out with stereotypes, seldom ended up with them.  He individualised Shylock; he provided him with motives - not pseudo-motives, but motives that anyone can understand; he equipped him with a private life, with compelling powers of self-expression, with senses, affections, passions.. . [H]e is a big character like Falstaff- someone who bursts the bounds of the play in which he appears.

. .We know that in real life Shakespeare was a shrewd and successful businessman, and it is perfectly possible that he had a lurking sympathy with Shylock’s economic realism.  Antonio’s altruism may have been preferable in principle, but that was not the way the world worked.

One thing we can be sure of:  he was not a secret twentieth-century liberal, animated by programmatic opposition to racial prejudice. . . He simply tried to imagine, within the confines of his plot, and within the limits that his culture set him, what it would like to be a Jew.  But dramatic imagination, when it is pitched at the Shakespearean level, becomes a moral quality, a form of humanism, and . . It was a greater step for him to have created Shylock in the sixteenth century than for George Eliot to have written Daniel Deronda in the nineteenth century.   . . Actors who have portrayed a tragic or sorely misused Shylock may have often have gone too far, but it is Shakespeare himself who gave them their opening.

Gross finishes by saying that post-Holocaust there is a permanent chill on the play.

Coda to a death fugue

Further to a post on Shiraz Socialist re Primo Levi:-

Primo Levi always said his experience was utterly untypical.   He survived whereas millions of others didn’t.  It was also untypical in that he was in the concentration camp part of Auschwitz and was starving and labouring under brutal supervision instead of being shot or gassed immediately. 

The first images I saw of the Holocaust were still photos of the piled bodies but what we see mostly in  films, or read in books like Levi’s are narratives, where you follow the journey of those who got through, and leave the bones and ash behind.  It’s the view of Noah’s Ark.  You forget the many drowned and concentrate on the few saved. 

I’ve been reading Bloodlands:-

The Germans began the mass killings of Jews in summer 1941 in the occupied Soviet Union, by gunfire over pits, far from a concentration camp system that had already being in operation for eight years.  In a matter of a given few days in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews in the east than they had inmates in all of their concentration camps.  The gas chambers were not developed for concentration camps but for the medical killing facilities of the “euthanasia” program.  Then came the mobile gas vans used to kill Jews in the Soviet east, then the parked gas van at Chelmno used to kill Polish Jews in lands annexed to Germany, then the permanent gassing facilities at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka in the General Government.  The gas chambers allowed the policy pursed in the occupied Soviet Union, the mass killing of Jews, to be continued west of the Molotov-Rippentrop line.  The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.

The image of the German concentration camps as the worst element of National Socialism is an illusion, a dark mirage over the unknown desert.  In the early months of 1945, the chiefly non-Jewish prisoners in the SS concentration camp system were dying in large numbers. . . Some of the starving victims were captured on film by the British and the Americans.  These images led west Europeans and Americans towards erroneous conclusions about the German system.  The concentration camps did kill hundred of thousands of people at the end of the war, but they were not (in contrast to the death facilities) designed for mass killing./ Although some Jews were sentenced to concentration camps as political prisoners and others were dispatched to them as laborers, the concentration camps were not chiefly for Jews.  Jews who were sent to concentration camps were among the Jews who survived.  This is another reason the concentration camps are familiar; they were described by survivors, people who would have been worked to death eventually, but who were liberated at war’s end.  The German policy to kill all the Jews of Europe was implemented not in the concentration camps but over pits, in gas vans, and at the death facilities at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz.

. . Auschwitz was an unusual combination of an industrial camp complex and a killing facility.  It stands as a symbol of both concentration and extermination, which creates a certain confusion.. . The literature of Auschwitz [was] written by its survivors, Tadeussz Borowski, or Primo Levi, or Elie Wiesel.  But this sequence is exceptional.  It does not capture the usual course of the Holocaust, event at Auschwitz.  Most of the Jews who died at Auschwitz were gassed upon arrival, never having spent time inside a camp.  The journey of Jews from the camp to the gas-chambers was a minor part of the history of  the Auschwitz complex, and is misleading as a guide to the Holocaust or to mass killing generally.

Auschwitz was indeed a a major site of the Holocaust: about one in six murdered Jews perished there.  But though the death factory was Auschwitz was the last killing facility to function, it was not the height of the technology of death: the most efficient shooting squads killed faster, the starvation sites killed faster, and Treblinka killed faster. . . By the time the gas chamber and crematoria completed at Birkenau came on line in spring 1943, more than three quarters of the Jews who would be killed in the Holocaust were already dead.  For that matter, the tremendous majority of all the people who would be deliberately killed by the Soviet and the Nazi regimes, well over ninety percent, had already been killed by the time those gas chambers at Birkenau began their deadly work.  Auschwitz is the coda to the death fugue.

Bloodlands p 382-383.

I haven’t got If This is a Man to hand, but I remember when they arrive at Auschwitz he says of most of the people with him - men, women and children - that “they were swallowed up by the night”.  Those must have been the great majority who were killed immediately.

Get a move on

Howard Jacobson can write prose in a rhythm that can really move you along.  I’ve just picked up Roots Schmoots and come across this paragraph:-

I don’t recall any family rambling or cycling, but we could  have rambled or cycle, so many resemblances did we bear to the cheerful, thoughtful, self-improving gentile lower-lower middle classes of 1950s Manchester.  And yet, had any authentic gentile rambler peered late through our particular windows, he would have beheld scenes of such primitive industry that he must have supposed to be tinkers from some part of Turkey not mentioned in any atlas.  For, like many Jewish families of that time, ours was a market family . . - and when we were not sitting in a circle on the floor, straightening out and putting into bundles the banknotes which my father shook like confetti from his market apron, we were making up bags of discoloured chocolate to be thrown free, as crowd-pullers, from my father’s stall; or counting out plastic poppet beads from a hessian sack and popping them together to make necklaces; or stylishly arranging a sponge, a facecloth, a toothbrush and  a shoe brush in a see-though bag on which we then stapled a label saying HOLIDAY KIT, to be sold the next day to gentile cyclists who were looking for that very thing to fit inside their saddle-bags.

The observation, the detail, the feeling of family solidarity and industry conveyed, the engaging warmth - yes, Howard Jacobson is an excellent writer.    I’ll enjoy reading Roots Schmoots as I know it will be full of insight, critical intelligence and wit. I read his columns in The Independent and when he and Caryl Churchill were fighting over that nasty piece of work, Seven Jewish Children, I was on his side.

I do wish though he wouldn’t write novels.  I have read a couple of them - Kalooki Nights (all over the place) and The Act of Love (absurd) and now I have pushed myself through The Finkler Question, which won the Man Booker prize, to the delight of those who share Jacobson’s fears of rising anti-Semitism.

My first objection was to the main character, Julian Treslove.  He’s the same mournful romantic guy, doomed to be humiliated that starred  in The Act of Love and Kalooki Nights.  As Maxie in Kalooki Nights got together with women with a diaeresis in their names - Zoe and Chloe - so does Julian fall for women whose names begin with “J” so there’s a June, a Josephine, a Janice culminating with a Juno.  This, you understand, puns with Ju/Jew - the only purpose being to annoy me like fuck with its pointless pattern making.  Julian’s romanticism includes fantasies of having women literally die in his arms and so he names his sons Rodolfo and Alfredo from La Boheme and La Traviata.  The problem with doing that is that when one of them gets involved in some serious novelistic action, it’s incongruous, as if one of Donald Duck’s nephews, Hughie, Dewey and Louis, was  required to be Elizabeth Bennet’s suitor in Pride and Prejudice.  

After about a hundred pages of Julian and his friendship with the popular philosopher Finkler and the  tragic bereaved Czech Libor which I wasn‘t faintly interested in,  Finkler goes on Desert Island Discs and says vis-a-vis Israel/Palestine matters, that he is ashamed to be a Jew, and at that point the novel starts to get going.  Finkler sets up an ASHamed Jews movement, and there is scope for a story with satirical bite, that of a progressive who is brought down by the forces that he unwisely consorts with.  That is the story of Kingsley Amis‘s Girl, 20 (which I thoroughly recommend) when the trendy 50 something violinist tries to get  down with the yoof, and the yoof basically do him over.  But this does not last long enough though there are a few pages featuring the anti-Jewish Jew who is trying to make his foreskin re-grow, and recording the process on a blog, which are a good dig against both obsessively anti-Jewish Jews and blog performances generally, showy off buggers that we are.  

The Finkler Question is a roman a clef e.g.  when one character says of a film director “He has said he understands why some people might want to blind my grandson” (in an anti-Semitic attack) she is referring to Ken Loach and the play that is a great hit among the progressives, The Sons of Abraham, is of course Seven Jewish Children.  I daresay some of the activists in Finkler’s ASHamed movement are identifiable as real people as well. 

The novel deals with various themes:- resurgent anti-Semitism against the diaspora arising from the obsession of the Western left with Israel; the difference between Jewish and gentile culture; the nature of philo-Semitism.  These are presented as the thoughts of a character (e.g. one searches the internet and sees a frightening list of anti-Semitic incidents) or in unlikely dialogue.  They are interesting and important ideas and Howard Jacobson could write any amount of articles on them.   I’d love to read a non-fiction book on his on philo-Semitism for instance. But they didn’t work in the novel as they are not incorporated into its fabric but are pinned on it like badges.  

What could have shaped the novel, of how Finkler goes from being an anti-Israel secularist to saying Khaddish over and over for the dead Libor, doesn‘t take up enough space, which is filled with the limp character Julian and his dull inability to get on with women and his life.  Like Kalooki Nights, the novel is all over the place.

Jacobson says of stories:-

Just as it is impossible to write a novel that is without melancholy, so is it impossible to write a novel without a story.

A story, mind, not a plot: it is a mistake to confuse the one with another. For it is a story for a person of a particular appearance to walk into a particular room wearing a particular expression. No more need ever happen, for my money, always provided that something or other is made vivid – maybe the person, maybe the room, maybe the expression, or maybe nothing other than the way the author feels or doesn't feel – absence of feeling being as good a story as any – about one or all of them.

. . .

Though Dickens plotted like a dervish, I would swap every coincidence and denouement he contrived for a single passage of description of the torpor of a Victorian Sunday in London, or the rains coming out again in Lincolnshire.

Well, you could say he’s making a virtue out of necessity as Jacobson could describe the rains beautifully, but not in a novel that makes me want to read to the end.  His novels have no momentum, whether of character or incident. 

Novels were frivolous once.  You didn’t read them before lunch or on a Sunday and they weren’t regarded as literature.  Writers who wanted to be treated as serious wrote verse tragedies, which were mostly dreadful.   Now a writer who wants to be treated as serious writes a novel, when he or she could be writing biography, criticism or travel.  Howard Jacobson has done criticism and travel, with sensitivity and observation, and could do biography.  He’s a highly intelligent guy and a good writer.  If only he didn’t write novels.

Cheek, brass neck, chutzpah

The old Jewish joke defining “chutzpah” tells the story of guy who, on being tried for murdering his parents, threw himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he was an orphan.

Father Cantalamessa, [preacher to the papal household] noting that this year the Jewish festival of Passover and Easter fell during the same week, said that Jews throughout history had been the victims of “collective violence” and drew a comparison with current attacks on the Church over the scandal.

Speaking during a ceremony at St Peter’s Basilica commemorating Christ’s Passion, he read to the congregation, which included the Pope, part of a letter that he had received from an unidentified Jewish friend, who said that he was following “with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the Pope and all the faithful of the whole world”.

“The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism,” Father Cantalamessa said his friend wrote to him.

A dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church compares the kind of media attention it has been getting for  covering up the crimes its priests carried out against children to the persecution of the Jews.  A little like, say, David Duke, leader of the Ku Klux Klan,* comparing  abuse on the internet to being the victim of a lynch mob.

Easter and Passover in the same week?  Well, I suppose this Easter may be a better one than it used to be for Jews living in Christendom:-

“For many centuries, Jews living in Christian societies were well advised to stay indoors at Easter time because violent sermons were preached that blamed them in perpetuity for deicide, or awarded them the collective responsibility for the murder of “the Christ.”. . Pogroms and lynchings were incited in the name of Christianity. . . It was not until the time of Pope John XXIII and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, in the 1960s, that the Roman Catholic Church explicitly repudiated the “Christ-killer” slur of the Jewish people. (Christopher Hitchens, The Gospel According to Mel, from Love, Poverty and War).

Here’s an interesting piece about the Dreyfus Affair, which, among other things, was distinguished by the anti-Dreyfusards’ vile anti-Semitism and the Church not looking to any concerns about justice but increasing its own power:-

The church, however, was anything but equivocal. In sermons and its own rightist newspapers, the hierarchy insisted that France could regain greatness only by re-embracing its Catholic roots. That meant returning to the verities of sacrament and piety and resisting secularism, science and other symbols of the modern age. Visible among those, . . . was Gustav Eiffel’s thrusting tower, which, to the chagrin of many Catholics, rose to challenge the new Sacré-Coeur basilica for domination of the Paris skyline. Eiffel was incorrectly described in the rightwing press as Jewish.

Passions like that did not vanish overnight, and Dreyfus’s 1906 exoneration was a short-lived triumph. French reactionaries, more outraged than demoralised, quickly regrouped. . . . Anti-Dreyfusard nationalists cajoled the country into that long-anticipated rematch with Germany in 1914. Though France emerged devastated, the rightists rebounded yet again, waving the banners of fascism and a new, more vicious anti-Semitism.

Tragedy came next: Vichy, Drancy and the dispatch of more than 75,000 French citizens and refugees to Nazi death camps. The dark forces that the Dreyfusards thought they had vanquished returned to sweep Europe.

Dreyfus’s ordeal did produce a few lasting changes, however. Anger over the church’s role helped inspire the early-1900s laws that made France an irrevocably secular state. . .

Things have to be very bad for any organisation or people before they can start claiming the miserable distinction of being as persecuted as the Jews.  Editorials in The New York Times don’t really meet the case.

*No offence meant to ordinary Roman Catholics or decent and conscientious priests.  I don’t think they’re like members of the KKK.