With great trepidation, I feel compelled to add to this important age-old
discussion about Pound's anti-Semitism.  I'm not a scholar, but if
justification is necessary I have adored Pound's poetry for twenty odd
years, read it and read it again; and read as well the many biographies and
exegeses on him and his work and his aesthetic/historic/linguistic influence
on our century.  None of this reading has changed what remains - his poetry,
and the perhaps unsurpassed beauty and enormity of his accomplishments in
this century.
 
But, again not as a scholar, and without the benefits that scholarly
exchange can provide, I've read and studied, and read and studied again, the
Old and New Testament, the Tao, I Ching, and other demonstrations of what we
can accomplish.
 
But at the end of the day, no careful analysis or archeological digging
seems necessary or probative.  We're all inconsistent, and so was he, but
there is enough in his writings for any studious junior high school student
to know that he expressed anti-Semitic views, gave speeches in support of
the Fascist regime, and this at a time when 8 million Jews, homosexuals,
gypsies, and other impurities were gassed or shot in customized vans:
genocide.
 
A gay person, as we know, was barbarically killed in Wyoming this past week,
because he was gay.  The fact is that he was murdered.  From what we know,
he was murdered solely because he was gay.  Maybe, for someone, these
murderers' psyches are relevant . . . to something.  But what I can't
understand is the attempt to look for doctrinal, subtle explanations for
Pound's anti-Semitism.  It was there.  I genuinely understand the
intellectual drive to find some kind of more profound or historically
significant explanation for this terrible flaw in his general attitude and
understanding of Jews.  But it is an injustice, I believe, to Jews, as it
is, ironically, to Pound, to look underneath the obvious.  We all know what
he said; we all know what happened; we all can see in our hearts the
barbarism of hating (or killing) people for what they believe.  What more is
there to understand or analyze?  To paraphrase crudely, take him for what he
was, a man.  In short, there's no subtlety here.  We are each free to draw
our own conclusions; but why this attempt to proffer arcane explanations for
what he said about Jews?  Hatred is hatred, now and then.  What more needs
to be known or understood?
 
-----Original Message-----
From:   Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jonathan P. Gill
Sent:   Friday, October 16, 1998 9:50 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Re: Talmud, anyone?
 
Daniel and Everyone:
 
I haven't replied on this issue because I wanted to give everyone a chance
to respond.
 
It is true that Pound usually used the Talmud as a shorthand for Jewish
textuality in general, but I wouldn't underestimate the power of that
gesture.
 
As for Pound's actual contacts with the text, I have no evidence he ever
read it, and no evidence he ever even read anything reliable about it.
Nonetheless, it's important to remember that the Talmud was widely
available around the turn of the century in America for the first time in
a number of translations and adaptations.  One Philadelphia publishing
house even brought out Pound's beloved Longfellow and the Talmud in the
same series.
 
As for England, the Talmud was widely available in London bookstores, and
even considered something fashionable in the more general context of
oriental literature--not to be ignored, given Pound's growing interest in
the Chinese and Japanese texts that we were collected in volumes with the
Talmud.
 
More to the point, one of the first British reviews of Pound's work (in
The Bookman, I think) is on the same page as a review of an edition of the
Talmud!
 
Zukofsky pointed out Rodkinson's edition of the Talmud to Pound in a
letter from th 1930s (if memory serves), and (again, if memory serves)
Pound's response indicated that he had not and would not read it.
 
Incidentally, the Ezra of the Bible was considered an "author" of the
Talmud--Pound knew this.
 
So no, no smoking gun.  Still, such an extended engagement, with such
passion, over so many decades, with a book he never read?  I think that;s
plenty significant.  It puts me in mind of Pound comment to Hemingway's
remark about Turgenev that he had "never read the Rooshians."
 
This is all off the cuff, so necessarily incomplete and lacking in
detail--but I hope it's helpful.
 
Jonathan Gill~
Columbia University
 
P.S. By the way, I recently came across an article quoting the OED's entry
on "bullshit."  Guess who is cited as the modern use of "bullshit" as a
verb!  Hint: check the Pisan Cantos.