Rules for Others to Live By by Richard Greenberg

Author:Richard Greenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-30T17:14:49+00:00

English Writers

I love Agatha Christie’s novels, though I read somewhere that the versions I get have been expurgated of their anti-Semitic content.

Even so, an occasional bit of Jew-hating slips through.

I don’t mind it. I don’t think she meant it, really. I think for her, slagging Jews was like laying a cream tea or curtseying to the queen. It was simply part of her cultural dowry. You didn’t question it.

• • •

G. K. Chesterton, on the other hand, was a real mouth-foamer when it came to the Jews. He was the author of many shapely causeries, as well as of the Father Brown mysteries, which I would enjoy very much were they not punctuated with vicious anti-Semitic jabs at the rate of roughly one every three paragraphs. These did not arise naturally. Chesterton had to go out of his narrative way to get in the comment about that grotesquely hooked nose or the mouth drooling lasciviously over a hillock of gold. He was rather psychotic on the issue. He might have ghost-written The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He was an adept storyteller, but don’t bother trying to get any pleasure out of him. He isn’t worth it.

(Incidentally, you can go online and find a recent essay explaining why Chesterton was not an anti-Semite. It was written by an evangelical Christian and is itself a masterpiece of anti-Semitic rhetoric.)

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