Mark Twain and the Jews

In the light of what is going on in the world today, I have been re-reading Mark Twain’s 1898 essay, ‘Concerning the Jews’. It is a mixed bag of heartwarming endorsements of those age-old Jewish attributes which we cherish – our desire to live out our lives as peace-loving citizens, our ability to survive through adversity and persecution, our generosity, our determination, disproportionate to our numbers, to achieve excellence in every field permitted to us, and so on.

All this is laced with many of the familiar smears against us, which to this day feed the hatred of antisemites: “The Jew is a money-getter”, he says, immediately diluting that vile accusation with the dubious caveat that Jewish crime is usually of the non-violent sort, such as fraud, in contrast with the violent crimes perpetrated by by their ‘Christian’ counterparts. And Jews are ‘Non-Participants’ in society, he maintains – they keep themselves apart and do not contribute to the political life of the people who host them. Paradoxically, he then goes on to state that the solution for the Jews is to band together as a group, to stand up and be counted as one voice in the nation’s polity.

The onset of antisemitism can be dated to well before the advent of Christianity, says Twain. He reaches back into the history of ancient Egypt to the story that Joseph robbed the Egyptians of their wealth, their cattle, their people and ultimately their land in a destructive rampage which had repercussions lasting for many centuries.

He hands out plaudits with one hand and libellous insinuations with the other, claiming a dispassionate, non-judgemental stance. A negative picture of the Jews is followed by a refutation of those very accusations. But what sticks in the collective consciousness is the vivid depiction initially offered by this devil’s advocate.

For instance, he first trots out an image of the Jew as a shirker of military service, then somewhat sheepishly backtracks with an account of his belated discovery of the bravery and prominence of many Jewish soldiers on the field of battle. And he presents himself as a staunch Dreyfusard but then goes on to state, wrongly, that no “illustrious or wealthy” Jews came to the aid of Dreyfus. As we know today from our liberal media, an initial alignment with the forces of antisemitism is occasionally followed by a tepid and easily forgotten apology.

I would not waste time resurrecting this essay were it not for the fact that I have always admired Mark Twain as a novelist. His comic masterpiece, ‘Huckleberry Finn’, contributed more to the cause of the abolitionists than a thousand impassioned leaflets and still stands as a superb indictment of racial prejudice. Like Dickens, who later (but too late) apologised for his brutally antisemitic portrayal of Fagin, Mark Twain harboured no ill-feeling towards the Jews. Both authors were writing at a time when the true horrors of antisemitism were still to emerge.

Take this example of Twain’s naïveté: “…I do not think that elsewhere [other than in “a world where a barbarous ignorance and a sort of mere animal civilisation prevail”]the Jew need now stand in any fear of being robbed and raided. Amongst the high civilisations he seems to be very comfortably situated indeed, and to have more than his proportionate share of the prosperities going. It has that look in Vienna.” (!)

To borrow a title from one of his books, Mark Twain, writing more than a century ago, was an innocent abroad. There can be no excuse today for well-intentioned souls to ignore the fact that ‘civilisation’ has failed to provide an effective antidote to the worldwide menace of antisemitism.