When Victims Rule (pdf)

THE ACCUSATION OF ANTI-SEMITISM (PT. 1)
There are various means to thrust the Jewish Thought Police’s self-obsession
of their alleged misportrayals across history onto center stage of classical
works of English literature. In an introduction to a reissue of Charles Dickens’
classic novel, Oliver Twist, for example, published by Bantam Books in 1981,
Jewish author Irving Howe was afforded space to force the reader’s attention
(for nearly four pages) to modern Jewish polemics surrounding Dickens’ character
‘Fagin,’ an “archetypical Jewish villain.” As preface to the novel, readers are
served a mini-history of Jewish objection to the Fagin persona – a Jewish
woman, it seems, had even written a complaint to Dickens that the character
was too negatively stereotypical. Dickens actually wrote back to her, saying,
“Fagin is a Jew because it is unfortunately true, of the time to which the story
refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was Jewish.” [HOWE, p. 369-
373] (A real life model for Dickens may have been Ikey Solomon who had
undergone a much publicized trial in England a few years before the book was
written). The disturbing precedent Howe’s framing of the novel sets, of course
(for those who have the power to enforce such things), is that any literature
must be subject to polemical rebuttal in a kind of aggrieved “class action” to
begin (and essentially merge with, and reframe) the original writing itself.
Hence, a novel becomes – first and foremost – a polemical course on Jewish history
and identity.
In 1962, Oliver Twist was recreated as a British musical comedy. Reflecting
the revisionist times, the actor who played Fagin expressed the character, as one
reviewer observed, “as the dottiest old dear imaginable.” [BELTH, p. 56]
This strategy of revisionism has become common. In 1997, for example,
bowing to Jewish pressure, the Marin Center Showcase Theatre in San Rafael,
California, agreed to a Jewish Community Relations Council question-andanswer
discussion after each performance of Geoffey Chaucer’s “Prioress’ Tale,”
from his famous Canterbury Tales. “Hotly debated,” noted the Jewish Bulletin,
“is whether the ‘Prioress’ Tale’ is indeed a satire of ... violently anti-Semitic attitudes
or merely an expression of them.” [STERLING, 1997, p. 30]
One of the most famous negative portrayals of Jews in English literature is the
character Shylock in Shakespeare’s play, Merchant of Venice. Written in 16th and
17th cengtury England, Shylock reflects the Christian perceptions of the era; he is
depicted as usurious, villainous, fraudulent, exploitive, and cruel. “The most
effective way of making the play acceptable to post-Holocaust sensibilities,” notes
Jewish critic John Gross, “in the view of many directors, is to underscore the prejudices
of the Christian characters, and generally show them in an ugly light.”
[GROSS, p. 329] In some productions of the play, Shylock is even completely
reconstituted, as in Arnold Wesker’s version, where Shylock became “scholarly,
impetuous, and warm-hearted.” [GROSS, p. 335] One French critic, Pierre
Spriet, has even went so far as to dismiss the play entirely, suggesting that the
work is so anti-Semitic, “it must be abandoned.” [GROSS, p. 345] In 1999, an
actor on tour from South Africa, Percy Sieff, was portraying Shylock as “a
worldly, successful businessman who has become embittered by discrimination
and compensated by focusing on money.” [BLOCH, F., 9/10-16/99]
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