Dear Mr. Borawski,
 
Don't you see that the quotations you've chosen do ANYTHING BUT
support your point that EP's antisemitism was "economic in origin"?
 
Pound generalizes about The Jew and makes him *equivalent* to
The Usurer.  Why doesn't he just hate usurers (as a class, or
as individuals) rather than identifying a specific ethnic group
with that class?  All these intellectuals of the time
that you refer to had the sort of social upbringings that enabled
them quite easily to scapegoat the abstract Jew.  Yes, some
Jews have been and no doubt continue to be usurers (whatever
that means nowadays with 20% interest on most credit cards!),
but your "intellectuals of the time," imbibing antisemitism
with their mother's milk, found it no problem to make the
logical error of tarring the whole hated group with the brush
that should properly have been reserved for culpable individuals.
(And it is still a big question whether Pound's medieval,
moralistic idea of Usura has any real applicability to twentieth-
century economic practices!)
 
==Dan Pearlman
 
At 08:52 PM 10/15/98 -0500, you wrote:
>I'm glad someone finally got the point in that E.P.'s semitism was
economic based!
>
>Evidence for this exists in many places.  In 'Guide to Kulchar' we find:
>"The red herring is scoundral's device and usurer's stand by...Race
predjudice is red herring.  The tool of the man defeated intellectually,
and of the cheap politician...It is nonsense for the Anglo-Saxon to revile
the Jew for beating him at his own game."   In the essay "What is Money
For" E.P. soap boxes for a while on usury and then claims that 'Jewspapers'
are trying to obscure the issue, claiming that "I wish to distinguish
between predjudice against the Jew as such and the suggestion that the Jew
should face his own problem.  DOES he in his individual case wish to
observe the law of Moses?  Does he propose to continue to rob other men by
usuary mechanism while wishing to be considered a 'neighbor'"?
>
>Despicable as anti-Semitism is, Pound was no more misguided than any other
intellectual of the period.  It WAS economic in origin.  In "Murder by
Capital" we read: "Hatred can be bred in the mind, it need not of necessity
rise from the 'heart'.  Head born hatred is possibly the most virulent.
Leaving aside my present belief that economic order is possible and that
the way to a commonly decent economic order is known.  What has capital
done that I should hate Andy Mellon as a symbol or as a reality"?
>
>Nisi bona intentio, mens moritur.
>(Without good intention, the mind dies)
>
>Richard of St. Victor
>
>
>
>Philip Michael Borawski
>University Of Texas @ Dallas
>[log in to unmask]
>http://home1.gte.net/philmb
>
Dan Pearlman                    Office: Department of English
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