Forgotten books and postwar Jewish identity In recent years, Americans have reckoned with a rise in antisemitism. Since the 2016 presidential election, antisemitism exploded online and entered the mainstream of American politics, with the 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue marking the deadliest attack on American Jews. But this is hardly the first season for grappling with domestic bigotry and racism. Eighty years ago, in the wake of World War II, Americans began addressing some of their own antisemitism and racism problems. They wondered how Americans could fight a war abroad against fascist enemies when they had so many of their own sins of bigotry to reckon with at home. Several popular books—fiction and non-fiction—addressed these issues during the 1940s but are mostly forgotten today. I discuss some of them in my new book, Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American. Laura Z. Hobson’s bestselling novel, Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) is the most famous of this group of popular 1940s anti-antisemitism novels; less than a year after publication, Agreement was made into an Academy Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck. But Hobson was not alone in thinking and writing fiction about American antisemitism. She was inspired by other successful women anti-antisemitism novelists. As Hobson wrote to her editor, Richard Simon, of the publishing house Simon and Schuster, “Maybe six other authors are right this minute finishing novels on the same subject—maybe not one will do much by itself, but perhaps all together those authors could become a kind of force for ending the complacency of uncomfortable or scared silence which defaults to the rantings of the bigots, who don’t practice that conspiracy of silence at all.” Several writers were, in fact, working on anti-antisemitism novels. Hobson’s writer-friend Margaret Halsey had published Some of My Best Friend Are Soldiers, a novel attacking racism and antisemitism. As Hobson wrote to Simon, she was also encouraged by the news of the Canadian novelist Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven (1944), a popular anti-antisemitism novel, being serialized in Collier’s magazine. And although Cleveland-based novelist Jo Sinclair (the pen name of Ruth Seid) was farther afield from Hobson’s New York literary circles, by 1946 it would be difficult for Hobson to miss the many New York Times references to Sinclair and her award-winning anti-antisemitism novel, Wasteland, published that year. Through different narrative strategies, these women writers made anti–antisemitism into a subject fitting for popular fiction. These novels also succeeded in making what had been considered a Jewish problem—something for Jewish communal leaders and defense organizations to worry over—into an American problem that required an American solution. But it was precisely this approach that made some reviewers critical of what Hobson and other anti-antisemitism novelists accomplished. They asked: where was the Jewishness in these novels? Why had novelists not provided readers with more of an understanding of the religious traditions, rituals, and joyous festivals at the heart of Jewish life? To some rabbis and Jewish writers who realized how little Americans understood about the distinctiveness of Judaism, it seemed to many like a wasted opportunity. Rabbis and other writers invested in Jewish religious life stepped in to fill the void. They seized the opportunity to present Judaism to a readership of Jews and non-Jews. In books with titles such as What Is a Jew? (1953); What the Jews Believe (1950); Basic Judaism (1947); Faith through Reason: A Modern Interpretation of Judaism (1946); and This is Judaism (1944), writers explained the basics of Judaism. In some ways, it is possible to see the anti-antisemitism genre as having paved the way to the “Introduction to Judaism” genre. These primers on Judaism were books and magazine articles that helped explain Jews and their religion to other Americans. In unexpected ways, increased concern over antisemitism led to greater understanding of what it meant to live a Jewish life. In the past 60 years, the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s and the Introduction to Judaism books of the 1940s and 1950s have faded in popularity. These books and articles were very much of their moment. But they forged genres that proved lasting in American culture: anti-antisemitism remained a popular theme in late twentieth century film, with examples such as School Ties (1992) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and the Introduction to Judaism genre continued to flourish at this time, with popular examples written by Anita Diamant, Rabbis Irving Greenberg, Hayim Donin, and David Wolpe, as well as Sarah Hurwitz, Noah Feldman, and Rabbi Sharon Brous in more recent years. The ideas disseminated by these mid-twentieth century genres have also had a lasting impact on American culture. Americans continue to be outraged by antisemitic incidents in this country. There is still a huge discrepancy between the 1920s through early 1940s era, described in Postwar Stories, when antisemitism was much more accepted as part of the American Way—and the post-1940s reality, when antisemitism continued but lessened and was increasingly called out and interpreted as an affront to American values. As a result of the mid-twentieth century “religion moment” described in Postwar Stories, Americans continue to classify Jews as members of an American religion, despite the problems inherent in that categorization: we all know Jews who consider themselves proudly Jewish, but not religious. Today, we live in a culture that is very much a result of the ideas and attitudes these genres helped to inculcate. With increased antisemitism and questions about the meaning of Judaism during an era when Jewishness has become a more challenging identity, we may find Americans making their way back to these mid-twentieth century genres. Featured image credit: Dorothy McGuire, Gregory Peck & Sam Jaffe in a scene from the 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
Society was to blame for the letters, not twisted psychologies In complex ways, social inequalities create the conditions for people to feel that writing anonymously might be useful for them. On top of this, social crises create anxious contexts, when the receipt of a threatening, obscene, or libellous anonymous letter might seem especially hazardous. Throughout history, ‘experts’ have put out careless suggestions about the types of people likely to write these letters, with poor people, busybodies, menopausal, repressed women being identified as likely ‘types’. I do not think that particular personality types are more or less likely to write anonymously, but that some people, for various reasons, respond to moments in their lives, or react to social or personal situations by writing such letters. We must be careful, when discussing anonymous letters, to not assume we have a full or typical sample. The anonymous letters that were considered sensational by the press, or actionable at law, were probably atypical. Very many were disregarded, burned, ignored, or thrown away. In the twentieth century, for example, the media and the police became particularly focused on letter campaigns where there was a female suspect and where letters were sent within a tight neighbourhood, especially if these letters were deemed to be obscene or threatening. Similar letters with an obvious male suspect, or sent to workplaces and not homes, were, in contrast, not the focus of significant legal attention. In only 39 of the 105 cases I examine in Penning Poison do we have a known writer. Despite the fact that men would have written the vast majority of anonymous letters throughout history (often because of disparities regarding available time, resources, abilities, and money), 17 of these ‘unmasked’ writers were women and 22 were men, implying a much greater focus on identifying female writers. One suspect, Annie Tugwell, was watched around the clock by three policemen for over three weeks in the summer of 1913. This seems to be a disproportionate response. It also appears that material evidence was planted by the police in that case to secure a conviction. In the Victorian period, there were many assumptions that only the poor would write anonymous letters. In 1870 attention was drawn ‘to the nuisance that the new half-penny post was likely to become by mischievous persons sending obscene, slanderous, or grossly offensive remarks on the open cards’. This came with the assumption that a cheaper delivery system would encourage poor people to write anonymously. However, until the early twentieth century, most of the convicted writers of anonymous letters were affluent men who appeared to be respectable members of their communities. The people in control of the medium—the male, the respected and the rich—were those who appeared to abuse it. In the book, I include the case study of Rev Robert Bingham, the curate of Maresfield in East Sussex, who in 1810 wrote fake threatening letters, penned as though from the ‘Foresters’, local people connected to enclosures in nearby Ashdown forest. These letters threatened arson, and in January 1811 Bingham’s parsonage burned down. Eventually suspicion settled upon the curate himself; Bingham was seen moving stacks of wood the day before the fire, and had planted a flower over his books, buried in the garden. Despite very weighty evidence against him, Bingham was acquitted. In later cases, the local police, juries, and judges refused to accept that respectable people accused of letter-writing episodes were actually the most likely culprits (unless the accused person was a menopausal woman). In many cases, the legal system first prosecuted a person who seemed to be rough or uneducated, before finally convicting the actual perpetrator, often a person with education and cultural capital who was pretending to be less respectable in their letters. This happened in Redhill, Surrey, in the 1910s, when greengrocer Mary Johnson was repeatedly accused (and twice convicted) of writing letters that were actually penned by her more respectable neighbour, Eliza Woodman. Johnson was hounded out of the town, and settled in Croydon, despite being proven to be innocent. In Littlehampton in the 1920s a similar situation occurred, with Rose Gooding imprisoned for letters written by her more outwardly respectable neighbour, Edith Swan. Something like what social psychologists call ‘the fundamental attribution error’ pushes us to seek individual psychological explanations for letter-writing campaigns when social contextual explanations could be much better. The majority of speculation as to the mental dispositions of writers (their ‘personality types’), hinged on perceptions of respectability and preconceived ideas about the particularity of feminine malice. An unbalanced fascination with female letter-writers in the twentieth century was influenced by a wider cultural and social fascination with deviant women. It was not an epidemic of female mental illness, but British society was not interested in complex societal explanations and instead sought psychological factors—being uptight, sexually repressed, menopausal, having a ‘dual personality’, enviousness. No doubt some of the writers discussed in Penning Poison could have been diagnosed with psychological disorders if they were assessed today, but the fact of the matter is that, in most cases, their mental states were not assessed properly at all and cannot now be reconstructed. Anonymity creates disinhibition—people feel freer to write because they are less likely to be challenged about their words. Many anonymous letters show the author to be play-acting a role—as a member of a gang or even as the moral voice of the community itself. Social psychologists call this deindividuation. In particular, it is noticeable that in quite a few of the cases discussed in Penning Poison, the writers lived marginalised and often powerless lives within their respective communities. Not signing their name permitted these writers to create an entirely new persona for themselves: they became powerful not powerless; popular not lonely; racy not mousy. They had (at least in their own imaginations) a crew, a gang, a village, a street, a housing estate, behind them. Seen this way, anonymous letters share many similarities with online anonymity, apart from the potential size and scope of the audience. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
England and Egypt in the early middle ages: the papal connection When the Venerable Bede (d. 735) looked out from his Tyneside monastery across the North Sea, over the harbour at Jarrow Slake to which ships brought communications, wares, and human traffic from Europe and the Mediterranean—how then did he picture Rome and the papacy, the city and institution he thought so central to English and even world history? His grasp of its visual culture cannot have been great. We know that Bede never saw Rome (in fact, he never saw any city or town). Our usual reference points of its basilicas, shrines, walls and mosaics—indeed, its sheer urban and suburban mass—cannot have meant much to him. He surely saw books from Rome, and perhaps church vestments and other textiles, although how distinctively ‘Roman’ these looked we do not know. He made a great deal of the relics of Roman saints brought to his island. But the kinds of relics of which he spoke were hardly spectacular: tiny wrappings of cloth, filled with dust, tagged with plain, fingernail-sized labels—to the modern eye, they resemble more covert bundles of narcotics than tokens of God’s elect on earth. Rather, the main visual medium through which Bede and many others in the early Middle Ages must have experienced Rome was through the physical format itself of the papal decrees which his monastery and wider political community received. Throughout the first millennium, these papal letters were not routine bureaucratic documents, and they would have not gone unnoticed. They took the form of enormous, metres-long scrolls of Egyptian papyrus. So fragile is papyrus that no more than about two dozen of the original letters sent by early medieval popes survive anywhere in Europe (the others, in their thousands, have come down to us via later copies and citations). The few we retain, however, indicate that the visual message which opened up before the eyes of those who unrolled these documents firmly located Rome, the papacy, and the mainstream of the Christian world within a culture which was distinctively eastern Mediterranean. One such survival appears on the cover of my recent book, England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages. The artefact now sits in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where it was sliced into eight fragments by an overzealous librarian in the nineteenth century. It records the intervention of Pope John VIII into the legal privileges of the monastery of Tournus (eastern France) in the year 876. Textually, it is fairly mundane. Yet the external features of this papal manuscript are extraordinary when compared to what else we know of other European medieval documents. Like other papal survivals, it is huge—an amazing 3.2 metres in length (and specimens of up to 7 metres survive elsewhere). Like other surviving scrolls, it is written in a strange, seemingly deliberately baffling Roman script. And the use of papyrus, not parchment, as a format is by itself astonishing: this was a medium definitively phased out of use across most of Europe in the seventh century. By the ninth century, stocks must have been very difficult to obtain. The Tournus letter’s most remarkable feature, however, is its grand opening statement. This is not in Latin at all, nor by a papal notary. Instead, the letter begins with a half-metre-wide proclamation in Arabic, and its scribe was presumably Egyptian. What this Arabic actually says is contested. The extant script is almost undecipherable; a traditional reading, that it refers to Sa’id ibn ’Abd al-Rahman, an early-to-mid-ninth-century finance director of Abbasid Egypt, may or may not be secure. In any case, its scribe probably added the text to the plain sheet of freshly manufactured papyrus in Egypt, the caliphal province which held a virtual monopoly on the papyrus industry. This was completely standard procedure, inherited from the Roman Empire. Such ‘protocols’ are found elsewhere on Byzantine and Arabic papyri. Essentially, they certified that rolls of new papyri, whose manufacture was state-supervised, had passed through the right authorities before distribution. A rough modern-day analogy might be the duty-stamps found on exported whiskey and cigarettes. From Egypt, some stocks must have made it to Rome. But that is where things get weird. One would, I think, expect the papal notaries who prepared this magnificent, highly formalised document for Tournus to have at least trimmed off this half-metre block of Arabic text inserted by the Abbasid functionaries. On the contrary, the Arabic is retained in full, and is by some distance the single largest graphic element on the letter, where it stands out as pivotal to its visual power. It was surely kept on purpose. If those handling the letter could not read giant sweeps of official, Arabic chancery script, then they must have still recognised its connotations. At the head of the document, it signalled the claims of Rome and the papacy (and with them, the letter’s recipients) to a privileged hyperconnectivity with a universal Christian culture that stretched far beyond the bounds of the Latin west, and even touched upon the aesthetics, technologies, and trade networks of Islamic civilisation. This Arabic contribution to the document was something to be prized, not neglected. There’s no reason to believe that this would have been the only instance where such an Arabic protocol became embedded into a papal letter or decree. Rates of survival are too poor for us to assert that this single case was exceptional. Nor does the fact that later copyists failed to note such features when transcribing the many papyri which we have lost mean anything: even modern editors of the Tournus document have not always bothered. Hence my—slightly provocative—choice of this letter for a French recipient for the cover of England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages. I think we should take very seriously the possibility that a great many of the lost original papal letters for early medieval England would have looked just like this: that the archives of Canterbury, York, Wearmouth-Jarrow and Glastonbury could well have counted documents emblazoned with the Arabic calligraphy of Umayyad and Abbasid officials as their most prized possessions—that is, as both sacred texts issued by the pope, and as key witnesses to their legal title. When the early medieval English imagined Rome and the papacy, then, they may have often done so through the prism of what remained, for many, their most immediate sensory experience of its distant allure. This was an experience which none of us would associate with Rome today. To experience the popes and their city from afar meant to gaze upon metres-long rolls of an unfamiliar, precious, Egyptian fabric, and to watch them being unfurled in a church, palace, or place of assembly, to reveal decrees penned in a strange southern Italian script, sometimes even an Arabic one that looked stranger still. Was this the Rome of Bede, Offa, Wulfstan, Æthelred? If we want to take a more radical approach to thinking about English religion and politics in the first millennium—one which expands our sense of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ worldview beyond the familiar Insular tropes and images and destabilises our weary modern assumptions about what its Christian identity involved—then this seems to me like a good place to start. Feature image: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Latin 8840. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
Thinking disobediently? A person who “thinks disobediently” can be invigorating, maddening, or both. The life and writings of Henry David Thoreau have provoked just such mixed reactions over time, scorned by some; cherished by others. What seems bracingly invigorating can also seem an off-putting mannerism. That’s also a significant reason why Thoreau lingered in provincial obscurity during his life but rose to iconic status after death to become one of the few figures in American literary history besides Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway to achieve something like folk hero status—at least for many. Against-the-grain thinkers are often easier to take from a distance than upfront. Socrates, Nietzsche, and Gandhi are some others who come to mind. Thoreau’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that “first instinct upon hearing a proposition was to controvert it.” Emerson usually found this cantankerousness energizing, but he also wearied of it; and so, to a much greater extent, did more conventional-minded folk, especially if they’d never seen Thoreau’s sweeter and more vulnerable side, as Emerson had. His author-physician friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had little time for willful idiosyncrasy, dismissed Thoreau as an Emerson clone who “insisted in nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end.” In Thoreau’s writing as well, we often find him insisting on the importance of such gestures as rejecting the gift of a doormat for his Walden cabin because “it is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.” This dogged staunchness repelled even some who were closer to him, like one neighbor who quipped that she would no more think of taking Thoreau’s arm than the arm of an elm tree. Never mind that still others who knew him more intimately disagreed, especially among the younger generation of Concord like Louisa May Alcott and Emerson’s son, who remembered him as a kindly playfellow and guide. Standoffish resistance, with a satirical bite, was the face he tended to present to the adult world. This side of Thoreau, however, is also key to the special force and bite of his writing, which for many latter-day readers has made his writing seem more vibrant and provocative over time than Emerson’s more abstract prose. Judged by their writings alone, Thoreau emerges as the far more memorable flesh-and-blood figure, Emerson by contrast as a kind of recording consciousness. Even Thoreau’s cranky niggling can seem like lovable eccentricity. When I put the question, “Which of the two would you rather room with?” to students who’ve read them both extensively, their first impulse is to choose Thoreau, although, on second thought, they grant that Emerson would have been easier to get along with. Thoreau scholars also face a version of this problem. Many of us, myself included, were first drawn to Thoreau in years past by his ringing idealistic denunciations of the social and political status quo (“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the only place for a just man is also a prison,” etc.) In addition to their sheer charismatic vehemence, such pronouncements may ignite a feeling of special kinship in those who also feel themselves on the margins of society, as aspiring academics often do. The autobiographical persona in Thoreau’s writing evokes the sense of being invited into a select circle of intimacy above or apart from the ordinary herd, such as what e. e. cummings conjures up in the preface to an edition of his collected poems: These poems “are written for you and for me and are not for mostpeople [sic].” Only later does one realize that Thoreau might have scorned most who write articles and books about him as obtuse pedants. But that awakening may also have the salutary effect of making a scrupulous Thoreauvian less addicted to his or her pet theories about who the real Thoreau was, and more wary of making “authoritative” claims about the essence of his personhood or writing. That said, the defining arenas of Thoreau’s disobedient thinking are unmistakable. Individual conscience is a higher authority than statute law or moral consensus. True wildness can be found at the edges of your hometown. Scientific investigation of natural phenomenon is formulaic without sensuous immersion in the field. Religious orthodoxies of one’s time or any time are tribalistic distortions of the animating energies whose epicenter lies, if anywhere, in untutored intuition or the natural world, not human institutions. What gives these and other Thoreauvian heterodoxies their special bite is not so much how he lived but how he wrote. Many have practiced a more rigorous voluntary simplicity than Thoreau did during his two-plus years at Walden, often for far longer stretches of time and in places far more wild. Many have suffered for conscience’s sake far longer and far more agonizingly than his one-night incarceration for tax refusal. But no such heroes of nonconformity managed to write the likes of Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” which since Thoreau’s death have become classics of world literature and have helped inspire many more thoroughgoing acts of conscientious withdrawal, political resistance, and environmental activism. In order to make sense of how these—and other—Thoreau works have had such impact, a good place to start is Thoreau’s talent for arresting assertions, often directed as much to himself as to others, that set you back, make you think, urge you on. Such as: “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already”; “If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior”; “For the most part, we are not what we are, but in a false position”; or “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” This, however, is only a starting point for a deeper understanding of the motions of this disobedient thinker’s mind. For that, there’s no substitute for a careful examination of the works themselves. That’s what I’ve striven to do in Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently. Feature image by Chris Liu-Beers via Unsplash. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
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