The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World by Dane Kennedy

Author:Dane Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2014-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

Burton's late-blooming antagonism toward Jews is a subject that requires serious attention in any consideration of his life and thought.46 Anti-Semitism is a kind of racism, so it is hardly surprising that someone who objectified and essentialized Africans would do the same to Jews. What is perhaps more surprising is that Burton's anti-Semitism should come so late in life. This is not to suggest that Burton was untouched by the anti-Semitic sentiments that suffused European Christian society during his youth and early manhood. Its rhetorical echoes could be heard, for example, in his accusation that Hindu "Shylocks" in Sindh exploited the local peasantry. Yet there is no evidence that Burton was an overt anti-Semite before his Damascus debacle. On the contrary, we have good reason to believe that he shared his wife's romantic philo-Semitism, which Disraeli's novel Tancred did so much to inspire. One of the few explicit remarks Burton made about Jews before the 187os appears in his book on Brazil, where he notes the pervasive anti-Semitism in that country, then adds a surprising personal comment: "Had I a choice of race, there is none to which I would belong more willingly than the Jewish-of course the white family."47 Though the qualifying clause in this favorable comment alerts us to the racialist assumptions that allowed him at a later date to adopt an anti-Semitic posture, there was nothing in his reference to Jews as a "race"-a common characterization by Victorians of various persuasions, not least Jews themselves-that required such a move. Furthermore, for much of his career he showed less interest in Jews as a people than he did in Judaism as a religion.

Only after Damascus did Burton turn his attention from Judaism to Jews, a shift in focus that signaled his active engagement in anti-Semitic thought. It is clear that the resentment he felt toward the Jews of Damascus and their allies in England for seeking his recall gave him a motive for this turn, but we should resist the conclusion that it was the sole cause of his anti-Semitism." Jews, after all, were not the only peoples with whom he clashed in Damascus, yet they were the only ones toward whom he acquired an animus as a people. Moreover, his anti-Semitism seems to have reached its peak only after he had assumed his consular duties at Trieste. This suggests that his attitudes toward Jews also need to be framed in the context of the rise of political anti-Semitism in central and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. As it happens, Trieste at this time offered its own special inducements to those susceptible to anti-Semitic appeals.

When Burton arrived there in 1872, Trieste was a bustling port city, providing the largely landlocked Hapsburg empire with its main outlet to the sea. Most of its population was Italian, but it had significant numbers of Albanians, Greeks, Turks, and others as well. Most notably, Jews were a highly visible presence in the city. Indeed, "people in Vienna considered Trieste a Jewish city.

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