Why I will never stop reading novels by antisemitic writers

Yesterday my daughter turned 15 and, after a long period of “young adult” fiction, finished her first adult novel. Sally Rooney has been clear on what she thinks of Israel. I mentioned none of this, of course. What Jewish father isn’t pleased to see his daughter fond of reading? More to the point, I would not have a problem with her reading antisemitic books, or with enjoying them.

Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy seemed not to know Jews existed, which was fine. I could excuse Chaucer and TS Eliot because their difficult language made their malice feel part of a remoter world. But with Anthony Trollope, Dickens and Roald Dahl, whose words I loved and whose company I adored, I found pictures of myself I didn’t recognise. These were writers of exquisite moral sensitivity, men with the most finely grained minds. They wrote of the dirty, cheating, filthy Jew: the maggot in society’s apple. The experience was like running toward friends I idolised and trusted, hearing them laugh at someone they loathed, and realising they meant me.

Charles Dickens[Missing Credit]

I admired these writers for good reasons, and their work often shows their souls fighting back against their prejudice. In the best of the antisemitic writers, you sometimes see a war in which their living characters fight back against their dead opinions. Ferdinand Lopez struggles against Trollope’s antisemitism much as Anna Karenina struggles against Tolstoy’s misogyny, but with less success. Both threw themselves under trains; only Anna escaped with her heroism intact. Trollope’s Madame Marie Goesler, the widow whose miasma of Jewishness should have kept her out of the Palliser circle, enchanted even her author, to the credit of them both. Dickens, whose genius remained more journalistic, never really wrote his way past Fagin, though he had the grace afterwards to be ashamed.

How strange it felt, even in the company of Mark Twain, to discover an enemy where I had expected a friend. All the writers I have mentioned are dead, but none are lost in the past. They work their wonders in our living culture, and slur the Jews in passing. Jean-Paul Sartre is credited with saying that antisemites accuse Jews of stealing not because they believe it, but because they enjoy making the Jew empty his pockets to prove his innocence. When writers don’t do that, their decency can feel like generosity. You want to be able to count on your friends, not feel they are doing you a favour by not turning away.