Old, unhappy, far off things

Sixty-five years ago this month the Daily Express published a particularly horrific picture on its front page.  Under the heading Hanged Britons: Picture that will shock the world, it showed two British sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, who had been murdered by Irgun paramilitaries in the Mandate of Palestine.  The sergeants had been kidnapped and killed in reprisal for the execution of three members of the Jewish underground organisation in what was becoming an increasingly ugly guerrilla war. 

There had been other terrorist incidents in the course of the conflict, but what became known as “the sergeant’s affair” was different.  The sheer ugliness of the event – the bodies were also bobby trapped – brought the conflict home to the people of Britain, causing the most widespread anti-Semitic rioting the country had ever seen, notwithstanding the fact that the killings had been condemned by British Jewish leaders.

By the end of the August holiday weekend there had been serious anti-Jewish rioting in Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool, with more minor disturbances in Bristol, Hull, Warrington and London.  Although there were no fatalities a number of people were beaten up and property destroyed, including a wooden synagogue in West Derby.  In Eccles, John Regan, himself a former sergeant, harangued a crowd of some seven hundred people, saying “Hitler was right.  Exterminate every Jew – every man, woman and child.  What are you afraid of?  There’s only a handful of police.”

Serious stuff, but in the end it all proved to be so much hot air, not just Regan’s incitement, for which he was charged and fined, but the whole violent wave.  Even obvious fascist politicians like Jeffrey Hamm, formerly of the British Union of Fascists and now in charge of the League of Ex-Servicemen, could not make any lasting political capital out of the incident.  The Express, which had triggered the violence with its sensational front page lead, backed off in shock, calling for calm and describing the attacks on innocent shopkeepers as a national disgrace.

That short hot summer has left almost no memory.  It’s a pity, really, because as history the whole episode is really quite intriguing.  Although superficially caused by an event far from these shores, it revealed much more about problems and difficulties far closer to home: the problems of austerity Britain. 

George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published two years after the sergeants’ incident, is supposedly about a dystopian future.  In actual fact it was much more about a dystopian present, as people reading it at the time would have recognised.  The drab London he depicts in the novel was not some imaginative construct but a living reality.  Like so many other British cities, it had not fully recovered from the war.  Vacant lots and bomb sites were everywhere.  With a housing shortage came a serious problem of homelessness. 

The war, and its financial legacy, also had had a profound effect on the economy. Some foodstuffs, like butter, meat were still rationed. Confectionary had come off ration in 1949, but distribution had to be brought back under state control because demand was simply too great. Shortages meant that people took to producing their own food in back gardens and allotments. Income tax was at an extraordinarily high level, more than twice what it is today. Bureaucratic red tape was a major feature of everyday life, also brilliantly reflected in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the 'social comedies' being produced by Ealing Studios, movies like Whisky Galore and Passport to Pimlico.

The war had been won; the peace was clearly being lost.  Food shortages and serious unemployment were compounded by a fuel shortage in the bitter winter of 1946-47, when coal was rationed in a coal-rich country.  Unhappy and bewildered, people looked for scapegoats, turning to the greatest scapegoats of all – the Jews.  Rationing created a vigorous black market which, by common perception, was controlled by the Jews. It’s not that surprising that so many ordinary people were taken in by this, especially as Ernest Bevan, foreign minister in the Labour government of the day, made anti-Semitic remarks, including one to the effect that the Jews of Europe were “pushing to the front of the queue.”

Cities like Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, where the rioting was worse, also happened to be the places most affected by unemployment and general deprivation.  What began there as anti-Jewish riots soon turned into a looting free for all.  But the whole thing passed just as quickly as it had emerged.  The hooliganism had been based on personal frustration not on any deep rooted anti-Jewish hostility.  It was too soon after the Holocaust, details of which were still being revealed, for anti-Semitism to become a credible cause.  1947, as Lionel Trilling said in an article on the subject (New Statesman, 28 May), was the end of a chapter, not the beginning. 

The following year the state of Israel was formed and the sergeants’ affair, and the riots, forgotten.  It left one painful and unnoticed irony: Clifford Martin was Jewish.  

Behold, Grandma Moses, the Useless Idiot

Alice Walker, a professional American African American woman, wrote The Color Purple and she’s been dining out on it for years. Alice Walker, the professional American African American, is a well-known radical, active in all sorts of progressive and fashionable causes, and she’s been boring people relentlessly for years.

Alice Walker walks in a higher plain: she walks with Gandhi; she walks with Martin Luther King; she even walks with Jesus. She drips with compassion for all children, “humanity’s most precious resource”, to use her own words, though she can’t even manage a human relationship with her own child, Rebecca, who has said that she felt “more of a political symbol that a cherished daughter.” Shades, I think of Charles Dickens’ Mrs Jellyby from Bleak House, as another blogger noted. Like Mrs Jellyby, the “telescopic philanthropist”, Alice Walker is a prig; a sanctimonious, preaching, hypocrite. Worst of all she is a self-important, self-regarding fool.

So, what’s brought this on? I should say that I had little interest at all in this woman, the avatar of the second rate, grossly inflated beyond all proportion, famous for being famous, an individual whose talent stands in inverse proportion to the size of her mouth.

She is not a writer for whom I have any respect, representing all that is cankerous in modern liberalism, exposed so brilliantly by Nick Cohn in his book What’s Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way. I would continued to have ignored her but for the fact that she decided to join the so-called Freedom Flotilla 2, an act of political agitprop by the murderers of Hamas, supposedly intended to end the Israeli blockade of Gaza. She has not the first clue over the true objectives.

I recently wrote Eyeless to Gaza, an article published on BrooWaha, the online newspaper, drawing attention to the political realities behind Freedom Flotilla 2, an armada made up partially of the malicious and partially of the moronic. I made it plain that this is an ‘aid’ convoy that carries no aid. What it does carry is a lot of left-liberals, useful idiots, as Lenin is once supposed to have described such people. Of Walker specifically this is what I said;

The useful idiots, incidentally, include Alice Walker, the American writer, who has joined the flotilla, saying she is concerned about ‘the children.’ Perhaps she might have considered talking with Khaled Abu Toameh, an Israeli-Arab journalist, who has actually spoken to ordinary Palestinian people, as opposed to the publicists of Hamas. If she did she would have discovered that there is no shortage of food and that shortages of medicine are caused by infighting between Fata and Hamas. The latest news from the Gaza Strip itself confirms this, officials blaming Fata for “political blackmail”

I really don’t see this woman now talking to anyone, or being able to make any sense of what’s being said to her. Prior to sailing with the pompously named Audacity of Hope - thankfully now ‘becalmed’ in Greek waters along with the rest of the diminishing armada - she issued a statement so sanctimonious that people watching her at the press conference could not possible have missed her halo;

I see children, all children, as humanity’s most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left. One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation. Not to mention in speeches that circle the globe…we must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid… So, Gazans, and especially the children, we are on our way. We are coming. We hear you. We are coming

And on that note she floated away. Actually I’m surprised she needed a ship at all. Surely the waters would part before this modern Grandma Moses as the Red Sea parted before, well, Moses!

They are coming alright, or rather they are not, which is probably as great a relief to the people of Gaza, spared this woman’s oleaginous embrace. The ocean of compassion, incidentally, does not extend to the children of southern Israel, for all Walker’s maudlin mawkishness, children whose homes have come under attack by Hamas rockets. These terrorists, moreover, with no qualms at all, hide the launch sites in civilian areas, effectively using Palestinian children as a shield. Does Grandma know?

Howard Jacobson, a prize winning British author, wrote an excellent expose of Walker in all her laughable hypocrisy. Beyond highly charged emotionalism the woman gave not a single valid reason for joining the flotilla, for wanting to end a blockade absolutely necessary to prevent the terrorists who control Gaza from getting hold of more weapons.

One would have to be a complete fool not to see through Walker’s partiality, to see through all her tendentious colour purple (oops!) prose. Alice Walker comes in peace, with the side possibility of wished-for martyrdom (but who would dare assault a ship carrying Grandma Moses?). If the Israeli military attacks, she said, it will be as if they attacked the mailman. Let there be some Jacobsen light;

Wrong on a thousand counts. As a writer, Alice Walker must understand the symbolic significance of words. The cargo is a cargo of intention. It is freighted with political sympathy and attitude. It means to blunder into where it isn't safe, clothed in the make-believe garments of the unworldly, speaking of children and speaking like children, half inviting a violence which can then be presented as a slaughter of the innocents.

Even before the deed, Alice Walker has her language of outraged moral purity prepared -- "but if they insist on attacking us, wounding us, even murdering us..." The Israeli response is thus already an act of unprovoked murder, no matter that the flotilla is by its very essence a provocation. Whatever its cargo, by luring the Israeli military into action which can be represented as brutal, the flotilla is engaged in an entirely political act. To call it by any other name is the grossest hypocrisy.

Meanwhile Grandma cools her heels in Greek waters with the other useless idiots as this gesture begins to look more farcical by the day. The Israeli government has behaved brilliantly in becalming the armada politically, something even the Guardian has been obliged to admit. Even the IHH, the terrorist front based in Turkey, has withdrawn support, because of ‘technical problems.’ In point of fact it’s because the Turkish government is anxious to restore its previously good relations with Israel, disrupted by last year’s flotilla.

So Walker sits still, I assume, audaciously hoping on the Audacity of Hope. She might be moved to entertain the others with a rousing spiritual or two. Or perhaps not, just in case the waters of the Aegean are not quite as obliging as those of the Red Sea.

Jud Süß - the medium is not the message

Jud Süß is the most notorious anti-Semitic movie ever made. Commissioned by Joseph Goebbels and directed by Viet Harlan, the story is partly based on the novel of the same name by Lion Feuchtwanger, though his message has been twisted and corrupted almost out of all recognition.

The book and the film are both about Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, an eighteenth century Jewish financier in the service of the Duke of Wurttemberg. In the book he frustrates a plan by the Duke to subvert the duchy’s constitution, sacrificing himself in the process. In the movie he is a malevolent schemer and a sexual blackmailer, one who rapes a Christian girl, who subsequently kills herself in shame. It’s meant to induce hate, drawing on heavy Jewish stereotypes; it did induce hate, along with movies like Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), acting as an appetiser for the Holocaust.

Jud Süß is banned in Germany; it has been for the past sixty-five years. But a new interpretation, premièred at the Berlin Film Festival last year, is now on general release in the country. Directed by Oskar Roehler, Jud Süß- Film ohne Gewissen (Jud Süß - Film Without a Conscience) is a movie about a movie. It’s about another kind of seduction, another kind of blackmailer, with Joseph Goebbels in the role of manipulator and schemer.

In the original the moneylender is played by Ferdinand Marian, a onetime ambitious actor in German cinema. Marian originally declined the part but the Propaganda Minister ‘persuaded’ him to change his mind by a mixture of flattery and blackmail, vague threats against his Jewish wife, hints of possible troubles to come.

Robert Boyes in his report on the film in The Times makes it clear that the director’s intention is to show that this is how the Nazi regime operated, less by force than by a process of cooption and moral corruption. Marian is shown visiting the troops supervising the construction of Auschwitz. There he witnesses a screening of Jud Süß. When the body of the dead girl is held up the soldiers shout Jew! Jew! at the screen, their faces contorted with hate. All too late Marian has a moment of personal epiphany, realising that he has become an integral part of the coming Holocaust.


The film has caused some controversy in Germany, not least because it draws on the same racial caricatures as the original. Charlotte Knobloch, the head of the Central Board of German Jewry, has gone so far as to suggest that it should not be on general release, worried, as she is, about new stereotyping. But it seems to me that there is a serious and important message here and I’m not at all sure how one could make it without drawing on the corruptions and vices of the original.

I’ve not seen the movie so I cannot say if the director has been successful or not in his primary aim, but banning and interdicts, based on fear and presupposition, is not the answer. Yes, movies do have the power to seduce, something Goebbels, a propagandist of genius, clearly understood. Nevertheless, so much depends on the context, so much depends on the times; so much depends on the atmosphere.

Anti-Semitism does exist in the modern world, there is no point pretending that it does not, though the assumption that people are all as simple-minded as the simple-minded, that they are all ready to be seduced anew, seems to me to be disingenuous in the extreme. It’s the same censorious attitude that led to the prolonged ban of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Olympiad; the same attitude – dare I say it? – which allows the 1940 Jud Süß to be shown in Germany only to approved researchers and only after they’ve received a preliminary lecture on ‘context’. This is all so much condescending and paternalistic rubbish: in the case of the original the medium was not the message; the Nazi state was the medium and the message.

According to Boyes there are plans to release Jud Süß- Film Without a Conscience in Britain. He urges his readers to watch it, even if it hurts. I will; I shall.

A Devil’s Tale

I read a review of Ruth Harris’ The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France, published earlier this year, in which the author said that the affaire Dreyfus tore apart French political and social life for more than a decade. Actually it tore it a part for several decades, introducing arguably the greatest fault line into modern French political life, the cause of several earthquakes, ending in the transient ‘victory’ of the anti-Dreyfus forces in the Vichy state of Marshal Petain.

The whole business arising from the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French army, on a blatantly false charge of treason, was only superficially about ‘justice’. The struggles that took shape around the head of this man, incarcerated on Devil’s Island in a way that made the Man in the Iron Mask look almost fortunate, saw France divide into two great political camps: the traditionalists, the church, the conservatives and the anti-Semites on one side, the liberals, the secularists, the republicans and the modernisers on the other.

The key, if there is a key to the whole business, lies in differing perceptions of the Jews as a race and Catholicism as a religion. People are often quick to remember some of the hysterical polemics of the more obscurantist among the anti-Dreyfusards, not stopping short of the blood liable, the accusation of medieval origin that the Jews collected Christian blood to make matzos. But the Dreyfusards did not baulk from hitting back with their own nonsense, spreading the stories of bestiality among Catholic priests, of clerics who supposedly had sex with chickens and goats.

In the end the victory of the Dreyfusards came not just with the release and rehabilitation of a man who had in some ways become almost irrelevant as a man but with the formal separation of church and state; with the formal creation, in other words, in a fully secular republic, embodied in the statute of 1905.

It was this republic that the right grew to hate, expressing its mood through new politically militant organisations like Charles Maurass’ Action Française. This hatred of the secular, liberal and - as the right saw it - Jewish state came to a head in the February riots of 1934, arising from a scandal caused by the revelations about the affairs of the embezzler Alexandre Stavisky, like Dreyfus also a Jew.

France’s political civil war really only came to an end, paradoxically, with the initial success followed by the ultimate failure of the Vichy counter-revolution, a reaction against all aspects of French republican history from 1789 onwards. France of the reactionary right took shape in its hostility to one man and all he represented for them. Its death perhaps began with the sacrifice of one woman, a French citizen and a Jew. Her name was Madeleine Levy, arrested by the Gestapo in November 1943 and sent to Auschwitz, where she died. She was Alfred Dreyfus’ granddaughter.

Norwich and the Blood Libel

So far as the great currents of European anti-Semitism are concerned England, I believed, always stood apart. Yes, there were incidents like the Massacre at York during the reign of Richard I followed by the final expulsion of an impoverished community a hundred years later, though there were few of the wholesale pogroms that were a part of Medieval life in the rest of Western Europe from the First Crusade onwards. Put another way, I believed that England added nothing that could be defined as unique to the experience of Jewish persecution. I now know that not to be true: England added one of the most enduring anti-Jewish myths – that of the blood libel.

The latest edition of History Today carries an article by Miri Rubin, entitled Making of a Martyr: William of Norwich and the Jews. This concerns the case of a twelve year old boy who was found dead in 1144 close to his home town of Norwich in the east of England. At that time the town had a small but flourishing Jewish community which enjoyed the protection of the crown. The circumstances of William’s death are not at all clear, though six years after the event Thomas of Monmouth, a monk of the Norwich Cathedral Priory, wrote The Life and Passion of Saint William of Norwich, a determined attempt to prove that he was martyred by the local Jews, killed as part of a ritual sacrifice.

Thomas’s motives are not entirely clear. There was, of course, an abiding tradition of religious anti-Judaism in the church. There was some resentment over the role of the local sheriff in giving protection to the Jewish community, a particular source of anger among the peasants, compounded, perhaps, by church teaching. It also has to be said that talking up the cult of Saint William was good for business, if I can put it like that, as possession of relics attracted pilgrims and pilgrims, the tourists of the day, brought wealth.

The story was already in wide circulation when Thomas arrived in Norwich. Popular opinion was firm in the belief that the Jews were responsible, a view rejected by royal officials for lack of proof. William was also held to be responsible for a number of miracles, leading to the creation of a local cult, something generally discouraged by the church, which preferred more ‘international’ saints.

It was after Thomas made it his business to investigate the story that it acquired more than a purely local significance. The fact that the authorities in the person of Sheriff John de Chesney had rejected the unfounded accusations, and given the Jewish community protection in Norwich Castle, is explained away as the result of bribery. The malevolence of the Jews stands in contrast to the purity of William; in exchange for their evil came his good. The blood libel, the notion that Jews deliberately used Christian children in ritual sacrifice, had entered history. To this day it has never gone away.

The following century William was joined by Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, an even more celebrated case, mentioned by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales. On the Continent they were joined by such figures as Simon of Trent, Christopher of Toledo and others. The latter case is particularly important in that it had a clear political purpose, facilitating the final expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

With the emergence of the secular age the blood liable simply underwent a metamorphosis, taking on modern racist and anti-Semitic forms. In Russia in 1913 one Menahem Mendel Beilis was put on trail on a charge of ritual murder, a particularly notorious case the facts of which Bernhard Malamud was later to use in his novel The Fixer. The post-war Kielce Pogrom in Poland is directly attributable to the blood libel. It continues, even so far as the present day, part of an ever-present anti-Jewish narrative arising from the cloisters of Medieval Norwich.

The Tragedy of John Amery

My attention recently to An English Tragedy, a play by Ronald Harwood which depicts the final weeks in the life of John Amery, executed for treason in December 1945. It was broadcast on Radio Four a week last Saturday. Unfortunately I missed it and by the time I found out it was no longer available on iPlayer.

But, from a position of knowing virtually nothing at all about the subject, I’ve done a spot of quick background reading. It’s a tragic story; tragic for him and tragic for his family. It’s a story of self-destruction, the deliberate self-destruction of a man who in some ways recalls the fictional character of Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He even had the same life-long attachment to his teddy bear.

John came from a very privileged background. He was the son of Leo Amery and brother of Julian Amery, both members of the Conservative Party who rose to high office. Leo was to serve as Secretary of State for India in Churchill’s wartime cabinet. But John, for some not fully explained reason, was a life-long bad 'un; a man extended every opportunity who invariably wasted every opportunity. There is something odd about him, something I can't quite pinpoint. It's a mixture of things; he was at war with his world; he was at war with his parents; he was at war with himself.

John was a worry to his parents from a very early age. Nanny used to tell them of the terrible tantrums that he had, and that he was a very hard child to manage. One of his first teachers described him as "extremely abnormal" with a tendency to live inside himself. His behaviour at Harrow was such that his worried parents referred him to a psychiatrist, who concluded that he had no moral sense of right and wrong. From Harrow he was sent to a boys' school in Switzerland only to return after contracting syphilis, which he claimed to have caught while working as a rent boy.

And so it went on, this litany of troubles and endless rebellion. At the age of twenty he married Una Eveline Wing, an actress who turned out to be a prostitute. He married despite the wishes of his parents, leaving with Una for Paris after they refused their permission. Still his parents indulged him, bailing him out from disastrous business endeavours and criminal exploits. Always short of money, Una was to claim that he continued to work as a homosexual prostitute.

Apart from the general dissolute air he cried with him, he was something of a fantasist. Hating communism, he claimed to have fought with the Spanish Nationalists after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936, being awarded a medal of honour while serving with Italian volunteer units sent to Franco by Mussolini. In fact this was a lie, though still in wide circulation. Even Harwood believes it to be true. Far from fighting in the war, Amery did not enter Spain until 1939 after the conflict was over.

On his return to France he took up with Jeanine Barde, yet another prostitute. He also fell under the influence of Jacques Doirot, leader of the fascist Parti Populaire Francais. It was now that he adopted a lavish form of anti-Semitism, yet another way of objectifying his hatred of the world. The Wikipedia article describes him as a 'fascist' though I can find no evidence that he ever belonged to any fascist party. Fascism was just another attitude for him, a style and a fashion. There is something more, something about his anti-Semitism, though let me hold on that for a bit.

After the Germans conquered France in 1940, he came to the attention of the occupation authorities, having written some articles critical of British bombing, receiving a personal invitation to come to Berlin from. There, as a guest of the Germany government, he made propaganda broadcasts to Britain beginning in November 1942, on the same network as William Joyce, the so-called Lord Haw Haw. In England Leo Amery was assured by both Churchill and the King that this was no refection on him or his loyalty. Still, he took the final step of going to a lawyer and finally disinheriting his wayward son.

John made nine broadcasts in all, though clearly he soon exhausted his usefulness, as the Germans sent him back to France at the end of the year. There he married for a second time, to Michelle Thomas, his third prostitute lover. This seems to have been the one consistent act in his life, this taste for a particular type of sexual professional!

Back in France he was impressed by the volunteer force that Doriot and others had raised to fight alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front. This gave him the idea that a similar British unit might be recruited from among British prisoners of war. He was allowed to trawl POW camps in France for the purpose of recruiting. Despite the harsh conditions in these places, and the semi-starvation rations, his mission was almost a complete failure. In the end something like fifty men signed up for the so-called Legion of Saint George.

Amery's connection with this unit was ended in October 1943, when it was taken over by the Waffen SS and renamed the British Free Corps. Far from being a 'corps', this force, of purely propaganda value, had less than thirty men at any one time, weaker than a German platoon. Amery returned to Berlin, where he continued to write and broadcast propaganda before travelling to Italy in late 1944 to aid the Salo Republic, Mussolini's rump fascist state in the north of the country. He was captured by Italian partisans, eventually being handed over to the British.

Back in Britain, and with the war now at an end, he was charged with treason. Despite being previously disowned by the family, both Leo and Julian did their best to come to has assistance.

Unlike that of William Joyce, the case against Amery was cast-iron; he was an obvious traitor. Still, he had some powerful connections among the old establishment. There were strong grounds, moreover, for showing that he suffered from a form of mental illness, a defence that had saved the American poet Ezra Pound from similar accusations. But John, in his final act of rebellion, pleaded guilty on 28 November 1945 despite being warned by the judge of the consequences of such a declaration. It was, in effect, an act of suicide, a final way of wounding his family. He was duly hanged at Wandsworth Prison by Albert Pierrepont on December 19, aged thirty-three years old.

In his radio broadcasts from Germany Amery said that he was preventing a "world dominated by Jewry." The tragic thing is, the thing I alluded to above, is that he was quarter Jewish himself, though the family had kept this secret well hidden, something that Harwood discovered in the course of his research for An English Tragedy. Leo Amery's mother had been born in the Jewish quarter of Budapest, though he chose to keep this inconvenient fact hidden because he thought it might impede his rise through the ranks of the Conservative Party, given the casual anti-Semitism of the day. The irony is that while John was broadcasting on the dangers of world Jewry from Berlin he himself would have been eligible for deportation and extermination by the lights of the Wansee Conference.

Was this knowledge part of his self-loathing, part of his lifelong war with his family? It's possible-and Harwood speculates that it was an important factor - but we will never know for certain; indeed, it is uncertain that he new himself. Was his guilty plea an act of expiation or a final act of spite? Again that is something that we will never know.

I have to say there is for me something oddly compelling about John Amery, something compelling in the tragedy of his life, a life that never found an anchor in anything at all other than the worst of causes. He carries shades of Arthur Rimbaud, another professional bad boy. But Rimbaud had true talent. All Amery's potential was squandered into nothing.

Mad Mothers

'Mothers' Movement' was the name for a confederation of anti-war, pro-Nazi, anti-Communist, and anti-Semitic groups: National Legion of Mothers of America formed by Father Charles Coughlin in 1939; National Blue Star Mothers; Crusading Mothers of America; We, the Mothers; and We, the Mothers, Mobilize for America, five or six million members strong at their peak.

The movement was also anti-Roosevelt, viciously so. Agnes Waters argued that FDR wanted to rule the world as a communist dictator in league with the Jews! Her whole world view is so bizarre that it is difficult that any woman, let alone six million, could have been attracted to this movement. Her range of conspiracy theories was even more outlandish than those of the Nazis. Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, had, so she said, invited Hitler to attack Britain to allow him to raise taxes. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 this came by Stalin's invitation, because he needed an external threat.

Her political logic gets even worse, and it's difficult to believe that any person could entertain such conflicting views without actually being clinically insane. Roosevelt and the Jews were conspiring to end American independence by returning the country to the rule of the British Empire. This would then be merged with the Soviet Union; Christianity would be outlawed, and a world government would be created, ruled over by Roosevelt and Hitler!!! Hitler, you ask? He hated the Jews, how could he possibly unite with Roosevelt, the Jew lover and Communist? Well, you see, the Nazi leader was secretly a Bolshevik, and would make an open confession to that fact at the end of the war. Where, one has to ask, were the men in white coats?

The ever resourceful Mrs Waters had a 'cunning plan' to thwart this dastardly scheme. First, impeach Roosevelt, before making Henry Ford commander-in-chief. Second, abolish conscription in favour of drafting all of the convicts, and let them do the fighting. And what if there were not enough convicts? Why, that's easy: take Mexico, Central and South America and force all the Latinos do the fighting for you. How one was to achieve this with an under-strength convict army is not quite clear. The indomitable Mrs Waters was ready for the Jews though; "Just let the Jews come in and the pistol-packing mamas will take care of them. There will be nothing left of them." So, no need for the convicts then!

Compared with Waters Elizabeth Dilling appears almost sane, though her malevolence was much more purposeful and to the point. When the Senate debated the Lend-Lease legislation in February 1941 she led a delegation of 500 women from Chicago to Washington, where they picketed the Capitol and harangued senators who were in favour of the measure. For all this she won over only one senator-Dennis Chavez from New Mexico.

Catherine Curtis, a fellow anti-Semite, founded the 'Women's National Committee to Keep the U.S Out of the War' shortly after Hitler invaded Poland. Growing in influence, she later took over the leadership of the larger National League of the Mothers of America. In this capacity she went on a speaking tour, blaming British imperialism for the war. Her friend, the aviator Laura Ingalls, flew over the White House, dropping Curtis' anti-war leaflets on the way. Ingalls was later discovered to be a German agent and a traitor.

Yet another of these 'wild women' of the right was Lyrl Clark Van Hyning, who set up 'We the Mothers Mobilize for America' in February 1941. By the early summer of that year the group was claiming a membership of 150,000 women nationwide. For Hyning Jesus and his disciples were all gentiles, except, of course, for Judas. The Jews had inspired the American Civil War, the assassination of Lincoln, the First World War and the Second, as well as the election of Roosevelt.

This alliance of right-wing groups did not disperse, unlike other non-interventionist groups, after the United States entered the war. If anything, some became even more viciously perverse. One member of the Philadelphia branch of the National Legion of the Mothers of America said that that the attack on Pearl Harbor had really been the work of the English, flying the Japanese flag; another that she would willingly be shot for treason, rather than fight on the same side as the Soviet Union.

But in the end they counted for little, hardly surprising when one considers the delusions and fantasies which filled the minds of those who took on the national leadership. What puzzles me, and the question I would have to ask, is why a national movement of pacifism and non-intervention, reasonable enough positions, whether one agrees with them or not, came to be controlled by the kinds of people normally to be found on the more outrageous fringes of politics and society?

France and the Jews

There had long been a tradition of latent anti-semitism in French society, evidenced by some of the responses to the Dreyfus Affair, though in the prosperous years of the 1920s this was but of marginal importance. The onset of the Depression, compounded by the influx of German Jews seeking refuge from Hitler, brought a fundamental change in attitudes.

Increasingly bad, the general political atmosphere became quite poisonous with the creation of the Popular Front government in 1936, headed by Leon Blum, a Jew. In March 1936 Charles Maurras of the right-wing Action Française, wrote "One thing that is dead is the spirit of semi-tolerance accorded to the Jewish State since the War...A formidable 'Down with the Jews' smoulders in every breast and will pour forth from every heart."

Maurras went on to call for the murder of Blum, though he was far from being the most violent anti-Semitic propagandist. That dubious honour surely belongs to the novelist Celine, conceivably the most eccentric genius France has ever produced. His diatribes against the Jews in Bagatelles pour un massacre and École des cadavers were so delirious that Andre Gide even suggested that they might be intended as a Swiftian satire. One critic went so far as to suggest that he may even have been paid by the Jews to discredit anti-Semitism!

People like Celine were never going to escape from the outer limits of political sanity, but anti-Semitism became an acceptable mode of discourse in the political mainstream, even cutting across the divide between left and right. It also became intertwined with new forms of pacifism, increasingly strong in post-war France, which argued that the Jews and the Communists were pushing the nation towards conflict with Nazi Germany.

During the Sudeten crisis in the summer of 1938 Ludovic Zoretti, a Socialist, wrote that France did not want to "kill millions of people, and destroy a civilization just to make life a bit easier for 100,000 Sudeten Jews", a sentiment echoed by Armand Chouffet, a Socialist deputy, who said "I've had enough of the Jewish dictatorship over the Party...I won't march for a Jewish war."

So, the mushroom grew in dank soil; a soil of economic crisis, fertilised by resentment of refugees, anger over alleged Jewish influence in politics and society, and a fear of of being lured into a new war.

Nazis and Zionists

Few people now have ever heard of Leopold von Mildenstein, once involved in an attempt to construct a working political 'partnership' between the Nazi state and Zionist movement. Now, could any subject be more loaded than that?!

I have to move carefully here, and will try to be as objective as I can. The chief point to hold in mind is that the aim of Nazi policy for much of the pre-war period was to encourage as much Jewish migration from Germany as possible. Inevitably, whatever political and ideological differences existed, this aim overlapped, to a significant degree, with similar aims by the Zionists, anxious to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

One has to remember that when the Nazis came to power in January 1933 they had no agreed solution on how the perceived 'Jewish problem' was to be tackled. There were those, of course, like Julius Streicher, who advocated an immediate expulsion of all Jewish people from German territory, though more moderate influences were quick to point out the implications of such a move for the German economy, still in deep depression. Beyond approving limited gestures, like the one-day boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933, Hitler gave no clear lead in the matter, which left the way open to initiatives by agencies within the state; agencies like the SS, which began to research possible policy options. And from the midst of the SS came Baron Leopold Itz von Mildenstein, a self-appointed 'expert' on the Jewish question.

Mildenstein, who was born in Prague in 1902, had taken an early interest in Zionism, even going so far as to attend Zionist conferences to help deepen his understanding of the movement. He actively promoted Zionism as a way out of the official impasse on the Jewish question; as a way, in other words, of making Germany Judenrein (free of Jews).

The Zionists, whose movement had grown tremendously in popularity among German Jews since Hitler came to power, were keen to co-operate. On April 7 1933 the Juedische Rundschau, the bi-weekly paper of the movement, declared that of all Jewish groups only the Zionist Federation of Germany were capable of approaching the Nazis in good faith as 'honest partners.'

The Federation then commissioned one Kurt Tuchler to make contact with possible Zionist sympathisers within the Nazi Party, with the aim of easing emigration to Palestine. Tuchler approached Mildenstein, who was asked to write something positive about Jewish Palestine in the Nazi press. Mildenstein agreed, on condition that he was allowed to visit the country in person, with Tuchler as his guide. So, in the spring of 1933 an odd little party of four set out from Berlin, consisting of Mildenstein and Tuchler with their respective wives.

Mildenstein's experiences were later reported in twelve instalments in Der Angriff, Goebbels' own paper, beginning on 26 September 1934, under the title Ein Nazi faehrt nach Palestina ( A Nazi travels to Palestine). Perhaps the most curious aspect of this whole bizarre affair is that Der Angriff even commissioned a medal to celebrate this journey, with a Swastika on one side and a Star of David on the other.

On his return, Mildenstein's suggestion that the solution to the Jewish problem lay in mass migration to Palestine was accepted by his superiors within the SS. In 1935 he was put in charge of the Jewish Desk in the RSHA-Section 11/112-, under the overall control of Reinhardt Heydrich. SS officials were even instructed to encourage the activities of the Zionists within the Jewish community, who were to be favoured over the 'assimilationists', said to be the real danger to National Socialism. Even the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 had a special Zionist 'provision', allowing the Jews to fly their own flag.

In the end Mildenstein fell out of favour, because migration to Palestine was not proceeding at a fast enough rate. His departure from the RSHA after ten months in office also saw a shift in SS policy, marked by the publication of a pamphlet warning of the dangers of a strong Jewish state in the Middle East. It was written by another 'expert', who had been invited to join Section 11/112 by Mildenstein himself. His name was Adolf Eichmann.

A New Torquemada

It was just so fascinating to learn in the Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph that Amadinejad the Mighty, the pretender president of Iran, is of Jewish ancestry, something that he has kept well hidden…until now. There is a picture of his identity card, showing that his name was changed from Sabourjian, a Jewish surname meaning ‘cloth weaver’, when the family converted to Islam after his birth.

Insofar as one is able to judge these things on the basis of appearance alone, I always thought he looked very Semitic, much more so than the average Iranian. There was always for me something slightly odd about his continuing Holocaust denial and exaggerated hostility towards Israel, a state that has never harmed Iran in any direct manner.

Yes, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial exist elsewhere in the Muslim world, but no leader of any note has stuck to this position in such a public, consistent and wholly egregious manner, even to the point of hosting conferences on the question. Well, now we know; it’s a form of over-compensation, a symptom of those uncertain of themselves and their true belonging. Converts, after all, are often far more enthusiastic about their new faith, and hostile to the old, than those born into a tradition. I would say that this puts him, emotionally and psychologically, on exactly the same level as Tomás de Torquemada, another famous convert and Jew-hater.

Torquemada was the first Inquisitor-General of Spain, confessor to Queen Isabella, and a driving force behind the decision to expel the Jews after the conquest of Granada in 1492. Before that he was notorious for his persecution of the so called ‘crypto-Jews’, those who had converted to Christianity, usually to save their lives, but continued to practice the old faith in private. He was the most ferocious Inquisitor Spain ever had and, as I have said, of Jewish ancestry himself but more Catholic than the most Catholic.

So, Torquemada and Amadinejad, men of different faiths, but a shared passion, the passion of hate and the passion-dare I suggest?-of self hate. In general I believe anti-Semitism, especially when it attains pathological heights, says so much about the people who embrace it than it does about the supposedly malign power of the Jews. It suggests to me that they have something they wish to hide, something about themselves, something about their background and identity. I’m not suggesting that they all have Jewish ancestry like Torquemada and Amadinejad-that would be absurd-, simply that hatred of that kind is not arrived at by any process of rational deduction. It’s merely a sign of some deep-rooted personal insecurity.

Oh, and incidentally, so far as the Holocaust is concerned, by the criteria laid down at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, Amadinejad would most likely have been considered a full Jew regardless of his personal faith. Ironically he may therefore himself, in different circumstances, have been a victim of the very Holocaust that he denies ever took place.

Martin Luther: Father of German Anti-Semitism?

If you ever read Von den Jüden und ihren Lügen (On the Jews and their Lies) you may possibly feel that you have entered into a world inhabited by the likes of Julius Streicher: the language is vicious, the imagery unrestrained in its ugliness.

But look more closely; you will find none of the preoccupations with race and blood that were the key feature of the forms of anti-Semitism promoted by Hitler and the like. For Luther a Jew who converted was no longer a Jew. It's even more basic than that: for the salvation of the Jews was a precondition for the salvation of all. Luther's world was one of imminence; a world poised on the threshold of the Second Coming.

In anticipation of this the forces of Anti-Christ, whether they be Jews, Muslims or Catholics, were gathering, threatening to prevent the final victory of Christ. This was a danger for all, faithful and faithless alike. If the Jews would not convert they must "driven out like mad dogs, so that we do not partake in their abomniable blasphemy...and thus merit God's wrath and be damned with them." It was this fear that explains Luther's explosive sense of frustration at Jewish intransigence, and all of the venom and malice that erupted thereafter.

So, you will find him in the Nazi pantheon, admired by Hitler and the like, with his work displayed in a glass case at each and every Nuremberg Rally. At the time of the Kristalnacht, Martin Sasse, a Nazi and a Lutheran Bishop, was to express satisfaction that the pogrom had occured on Luther's birthday, and that the founder of his church deserved to be remembered as "the greatest anti-Semite of his time."

And yet Luther was a sixteenth century Christian, a Reformer, a man who set German against German in a way that did not sit comfortably with Nazi ideology and racial politics. Rassenpolitik, published in 1943, specifically targets Christianity as an enemy of the National Socialist world view. From this perspective the churches are guilty of building walls were none should exist; of dividing German from German; a place were the marriages between 'Aryans, Jews and Negroes are blessed'. The Reformation started as a 'German Revolution', but degenerated into a battle over dogma, where "Luther finally bound the conscience to the Jewish teachings of the Bible." And thus the real distance is displayed in all its clarity.

Vichy and the Jews

There was a strong ideological underpinning to anti-Semitism in wartime France, going back to the Dreyfus Affair and before. Even so, the conduct of the Vichy state cannot be explained simply by reference to a pre-history of a prejudice, nor, indeed, by the presence of German troops on French soil. This question raises a complex set of issues, but let me simplify it to this: the action of the Petain government in relation to the Jews was conditioned, more than anything else, by a determination to preserve French autonomy and freedom of action, paradoxical as it sounds. For example, the first Jewish Statute of October 1940 owed nothing whatsoever to German pressure. More than this, when the Germans started to adopt their own policy in the Occupied Zone Vichy followed closely on, not because it 'feared' for its own people, but because of concerns over the disunity of France, over divergence between the free and the occupied zones.

Remember too that Vichy claimed authority, or attempted to claim authority, over all of France, not just the south. Admiral Darlan, Prime Minister of France from December 1940 to April 1942, created the Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs in March 1941 entirely on his own initiative, for the simple reason that he wanted to pre-empt a German plan to set up their own agency, operating in the north alone. Also the General Union of the Israelites of France, a Jewish umbrella organisation on the lines of the Eastern European Judenräte, was established by Vichy in November 1941 solely to steal a march on the Germans. This attempt to keep up with the Germans, to ensure policy that applied to the whole and not the part, meant that anti-Semitism moved in an ever more radical spiral. But it was urged on by men like Pierre Laval, who replaced Darlan as Prime Minister in April 1942, and René Bousquet, who had responsibility for the police, men who were not ideologically anti-Semitic, for political and organisational reasons; for reasons, in other words, of national prestige and autonomy. This does nothing to lessen the moral turpitude involved in a policy that ensured greater safety for French Jews in areas under the control of the Italian Fascists, areas where they were safe from their own police.

Jewish Anti-Semitism

What, can such a thing exist? Oh, yes, it can! I would refer any who are interested in this in the first instance to On the Jewish Question by Karl Marx, ripe in ostensible anti-Semitic sentiments along the lines of the following

What is secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular god? Money. Well then, emancipation from haggling and money, from practical, real Judaism would be self-emancipation of our age.
The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails.

He was later to refer to Ferdinand Lassalle, a fellow socialist, though not one to Marx's taste, as a 'Nigger Jew'. Distasteful, I know.

There is also the tragic figure of Otto Weininger, an Austrian philosopher, who committed suicide at the age of twenty-three. His magnum opus, Geschlect und Charakter (Sex and Character), is chiefly a rather repellent essay in misogyny, though he also contrasts the perceived deficiencies of his fellow Jews with the 'manliness' of the Aryans. Anyway, you might get a flavour of the book from this;

Greatness is absent from the nature of the woman and the Jew, the greatness of morality, or the greatness of evil. In the Aryan man, the good and bad principles of Kant’s religious philosophy are ever present, ever in strife. In the Jew and the woman, good and evil are not distinct from one another ... It would not be difficult to make a case for the view that the Jew is more saturated with femininity than the Aryan, to such an extent that the most manly Jew is more feminine than the least manly Aryan.

To be fair, I should add that that his work was admired by such figures as Ludwig Wittgenstein, though this did nothing to stop the Nazis using it selectively in their own propaganda.

There were others not beyond expressing some anti-Jewish sentiment to ingratiate themselves with the host community, and here I am thinking specifically of Walther Rathenau, industrialist and politician, who in a publication of 1897 described his fellow Jews as an 'oriental horde' camping on German soil. He was casting himself here as an educationalist, urging his co-religionists to discipline themselves, adjusting to 'German values', so they would no longer be the subject of derision. In later publications he corrected himself, coming to believe that his strictures had been too harsh, though he continued to draw contrasts between Germans and Jews in his later writing, generally disadvantageous to the latter.

Who are the Barbarians?

I have before me the latest issue of Standpoint (July/August). It's the leader I'm looking at, headed Obama and the barbarians. It's not the main topic that I'm thinking about; rather it's the developing argument about the nature of modern barbarism, which Daniel Thomas, the editor, says comes in many forms, including Diana Mosley interrupting one of her dinner parties calling for a moment's silence in memory of Julius Streicher. It's eccentric, certainly, but was such a gesture barbarous?

Streicher was a repellent man; there is no doubt in my mind at all about that. He was the sort of man who would not be invited to sit down with civilized and cultured people at any decent dinner party. Der Stürmer, the paper he edited, is possibly the most repugnant publication ever, with its relentless cadence of hatred. Even some senior Nazis were repelled by it. Göring refused to have it in his offices and Baldur von Schirach refused to allow its distribution among the Hitler Youth.

Yes, Der Stürmer was ugly and Streicher repellent, but did he deserve to hang for being the editor, because that was effectively the chief charge, the only charge, for which he stood trial at Nuremberg? By any reasonable standard Streicher's anti-Jewish obsessions betoken some kind of deep-rooted psychological problem. The way he presented his defence, the things he said and the way he died give further evidence of this. But he was hanged while Albert Speer, in every way more culpable, survived.

Should people, be hanged, then, for expressing repellent views? Who, then, would stand in that wind? Yes, of course, one has to consider the times, the revelations that came after the Nazi state died. Nevertheless, in retrospect, I just wonder who defines the nature of barbarism. Would it have included Andrey Vyshinsky, the chief Soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg, the man behind the Moscow show trials, in every way bloodier than Streicher?

It's never easy to measure moral dilemmas in absolute terms. Perhaps Mr Thomas might remember this when he next passes judgement on the forms of barbarism

Jews and the Black Death

There is an excellent article entitled Black Death and the Burning of Jews by S. K. Cohn in Past & Present (no. 196). On the basis of an analysis of contemporary chronicles, Cohn argues that attacks on Jewish communities were rarely the spontaneous work of faceless and impoverished mobs. Rather many of the assailants came from the higher ranks of Medieval society, even including the aristocracy. Indeed, some attacks, the author continues, were started by the nobility in accordance with the law. In one particularly chilling letter of the day it is noted that the Jews of Villeneuve "have been burnt by due process." Jacob von Köningshofen, a chronicler based in Strasbourg, explains how "the Bishop and lords of the Imperial cities agreed to do away with the Jews." The notion of the 'lower class' mob, Cohn argues, is a modern invention.

Albert of Cologne, another chronicler, lays stress on the "horrible means by which the Jews wished to extinguish all Christendom, through their poisons of frogs and spiders, mixed into oil and cheese."