When Casillo's book came out there was an uproar among angered
Poundians, so it's interesting so see it recommended so strongly now.  I
for one found the book very interesting and informative, but of very
limited value in the end.  For one thing, Casillo fails to historicize
Pound's anti-Semitism, which is a crucial error.  After all, even if we
may think Pound's anti-Semitism was one thing, he certainly gave
expression to it in a variety of ways over the years.  In addition, I
think Casillo treats anti-Semitism itself as if it were the same
throughout history, underestimating the role that Christianity, Islam,
racial pseudoscience, 19th-century pogroms, fascism, the Holocaust, and
the Civil Rights movement in America play in shaping attitudes towards
Jews and Judaism.  The problem, I think, is that Casillo is stuck in an
early-20th-century anthropological-psychoanalytic-mythic mode in
which atemporal, acultural forces inspire the same fears and hatreds
throughout the ages everywhere. Moreover, there is almost no sense in
Casillo of the way in which anti-Semitism or the figure of the Jew has a
literary function, beyond mere thematics.
 
In the end, I'm with the Poundians who don't like Casillo's book, not
merely because he thinks Pound's an anti-Semite (of course he is!) but
because Casillo seems to misunderstand the passage that his title quotes.
Fear makes us construct genealogies of demons--let's not make studies of
Pound's anti-Semitism into just such the project Pound warns against
in this canto.
 
As for the review of the Talmud appearing on the same page as a review of
(I think) A Lume Spento, I'm not so much interested in the particular
passages that might have caught Pound's attention as much as the way in
which the methods and the content of the Talmud was so deeply, if
indirectly, implicated in Pound's writing.
 
Jonathan Gill
Columbia University