4 ms·
pre-WWII British literature is knee^h^h^h^helbow deep in casual antisemitism. Graham Greene, Stella Gibbons, John Buchan... they all got in on the act. Of cour
by colinb 5y ago
pre-WWII British literature is knee^h^h^h^helbow deep in casual antisemitism. Graham Greene, Stella Gibbons, John Buchan... they all got in on the act.
Of course, there were plenty of writers who didn't fall into this trap, but I grew up reading my Dad's knackered Penguin paperbacks and hit this kind of thing often enough to find it unsurprising if endlessly gross.
I don't really buy the whole "let astray" thing. Either Chesterton had rare penetration of thought, combined with half-witted bigotry that all his own, or you think he was so dim he couldn't identify stupid arguments put to him as an adult. You can't have credulous and analytic at the same time.
- gumby 5y agoYes, I remember a character in a 1920s novel as being described as "fashionably anti-semitic" (i.e. adopting it casually as part of fitting into society) -- perhaps an even more damning form.
- dang 5y agoPeople are complex mixtures of intelligent and dumb. This applies just as much to us. Only hindsight fallacy (which maybe could be called present blindness) makes it seem otherwie.
- pjc50 5y agoWalter Scott's Ivanhoe is mostly great, and has Rebecca as a normal fully realized character who is Jewish .. and her father Isaac as the most ludicrously horrible collection of moneylender stereotypes. Very odd and easily ruins reading it. In the 20s it was indeed becoming fashionable, along with eugenics and English fascism of the Unity Mitford kind. Just another outgrowth of believing that superiority is hereditary.