Jonathan Morse wrote:
>
> The Agresti letters will convince you about the racial hatred, but they
> were written from St. Elizabeths and they're the products of a mind pretty
> far gone.  On the other hand, consider the letter that Leon Surette, in
his
> latest post, regards as the beginning of the whole mess: no. 64 in Barry
> Ahearn's _Pound/Zukofsky_, dated May 6 and 7, 1934.
>
 
Jonathan,
I am at this point reluctant to put so much weight on two words from the
Zukofsky letter of May 1934, when Pound's published writing of the period
suggests that his firmly held belief was that cries of "racial hatred" are a
red herring that draw attention away from an underlying economic problem:
 
"Usurers have no race.  How long the whole Jewish people is to be
sacrificial goat for the usurer, I know not...."
(American Notes, 18 April 1935).
 
"But the Jew is the usurer's goat. Whenever a usurer is spotted he scuttles
down under the ghetto and leaves the plain man Jew to take the bullets and
beatings.  All hostilities are grist to the usurer, all racial hates wear
down sales resistance on cannon." (American Notes, 21 Nov 1935).
 
Or his firmly held and strongly expressed opinion that one might criticize
the scriptural foundations of Semitic culture on principled grounds; one
might find the cultural-supremacist position to be no less repugnant than
race hatred, but it is not race hatred:
 
"If anyone in calm mind will compare the Four Classics with the greatly
publicised Hebrew scriptures he will find that the former are a record of
civilised men, the latter the annals of a servile and nomadic tribe that had
not evolved into agricultural order. It is with the greatest and most
tortuous difficulty that the Sunday School has got a moral teaching out of
these sordid accounts of lechery, trickery and isolated acts of courage,
very fine and such as could be paralleled in the annals of Mohawks and
Iroquois." (Mang Tsze, 1938)
 
I will be on the lookout for "a racist base" as I read further in the radio
broadcasts, the Zukofsky letters, and then the Agresti.  It is interesting
to compare "the intramural, the almost intravaginal warmth of hebrew
affections" with Joyce's ULYSSES and then to refer to the critique by
Wyndham Lewis of that novel's depiction of the Jew, Leopold Bloom. I posted
an excerpt of the Lewis piece here not long ago. These are <i>cultural</i>
not <i>racial</i> stereotypes. I suspect that for some of you, this is a
distinction without a difference.
 
Tim Romano
 
 
> You'll recall: Zukofsky, who seems to have suffered from a degree of
> _juedische Selbsthass_, had sent Pound a copy of _Liberation_, a
> publication edited by the American fascist and antisemite William Dudley
> Pelley. The present wasn't received in the spirit in which it was sent,
> though, because Pound believed what Pelley had to say. In this letter, you
> can see the road-to-Damascus experience occurring between one sentence and
> the next.
>
> In the sentence that Leon would probably place on the safe side of the
> abyss, Pound asks, "I spose Mr Pelley will be annoyed wiff me fer askin if
> all bankers iz jooz? just like Moike iz." We're to read that question as
> sardonic, since (as Ahearn notes) the name "Moike" probably refers to the
> Communist writer Mike Gold, author of a fictionalized 1930 autobiography
> called _Jews Without Money_. Pound's tone up to this point has been
heavily
> self-congratulatory about tolerance and some-of-my-best-friends-iz-jooz;
> the letter's first sentence reads, "WAAL, waaal, whood choose deh jews/ an
> teh think I got one a cuttin stone on my roof!!!" Not for the James
> Whitcomb Riley persona of that sentence is the snobbish wit of the poem it
> has in mind, W. N. Ewer's "How odd / Of God / To choose / The Jews." But
> halfway down the page the tone changes.
>
> It begins right after the point about not all bankers being Jews, and it
> comes out as just two little words, this way.
>
> "I spose Mr Pelley will be annoyed wiff me fer askin if all bankers iz
> jooz? just like Moike iz. but still."
>
> And (if Leon is right) off we go from there. By the next day, May 7, Pound
> is lecturing the poverty-stricken Zukofsky:
>
> "Seriously, yew hebes better wake up to econ///why don't the rabinical
> college start delousing the Am/ Univ. system the suppression of history
etc.
>
> "Speakin to you aza anti-semite?
> "If you don't want to be confused with yr/ ancestral race and pogromd . .
.
> it wd/ be well to modernize / cease the intrauterine mode of life/ come
> forth by day etc." [Ellipsis in original]
>
> That word "intrauterine" reflects Canto XXXV, of course --
>
> the intramural, the almost intravaginal warmth of
> hebrew affections
>
> -- so (since XXXV predates this letter) we can assume that Pound's
> avalanche of free associations ending in "etc." was just waiting for the
> right tremor to start its fall. In any case, it would appear that by 1934
> at the latest, the economic component of Pound's antisemitism was only the
> superstructure over a racist base.
>
> Jonathan Morse
> Co-editor, H-Net list H-Antisemitism
>
>