Charges of anti-Semitism
Eliot has sometimes been charged with anti-Semitism. Biographer Lyndall Gordon has noted that many in Eliot's milieu successfully eschewed such views.[43]
[edit] Public expressions
The poem "Gerontion" contains a depiction of a landlord referred to only as the "Jew [who] squats on the window sill." Another much-quoted example is the poem, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar", in which a character in the poem implicitly blames the Jews for the decline of Venice ("The rats are underneath the piles/ The Jew is underneath the lot"). In "A Cooking Egg", Eliot writes, "The red-eyed scavengers are creeping/ From Kentish Town and Golder's Green" (Golders Green was a largely Jewish suburb of London).
In a series of lectures given at the University of Virginia in 1933 and later published under the title "After Strange Gods" (1934), Eliot said, regarding a homogeneity of culture (and implying a traditional Christian community), "What is still more important is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable."[44] The philosopher George Boas, who had previously been on friendly terms with Eliot, wrote to him that, "I can at least rid you of the company of one." Eliot did not reply. In later years Eliot disavowed the book, and refused to allow any part to be reprinted.
Eliot also wrote a letter to the Daily Mail in January 1932 which congratulated the paper for a series of laudatory articles on the rise of Mussolini. In The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) he says "…totalitarianism can retain the terms 'freedom' and 'democracy' and give them its own meaning: and its right to them is not so easily disproved as minds inflamed by passion suppose." In the same book, written before World War II, he says of J. F. C. Fuller, who worked for the Policy Directorate in the British Union of Fascists:
Fuller… believes that Britain "must swim with the out-flowing tide of this great political change". From my point of view, General Fuller has as good a title to call himself a "believer in democracy" as anyone else. …I do not think I am unfair to [the report that a ban against married women Civil Servants should be removed because it embodied Nazism], in finding the implication that what is Nazi is wrong, and need not be discussed on its own merits.[45]
[edit] Protests against
One of the first and most famous protests against T. S. Eliot on the subject of anti-Semitism came in the form of a poem from the Anglo-Jewish writer and poet Emanuel Litvinoff,[46] at an inaugural poetry reading for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1951. Only a few years after the Holocaust, Eliot had republished lines originally written in the 1920s about 'money in furs' and the 'protozoic slime' of Bleistein's 'lustreless, protrusive eye' in his Selected Poems of 1948, angering Litvinoff. When the poet got up and announced his poem, entitled 'To T. S. Eliot', the event’s host, Sir Herbert Read, declared 'Oh Good, Tom's just come in’. Litvinoff proceeded in evoking to the packed but silent room his work, which ended with the lines "Let your words/tread lightly on this earth of Europe/lest my people's bones protest". Many members of the audience were outraged; Litvinoff said "hell broke loose" and that no one supported him. One listener, the poet Stephen Spender, claiming to be as Jewish as Litvinoff, stood and called the poem an undeserved attack on Eliot.[46] However, Litvinoff says that Eliot was heard to mutter, 'It's a good poem'.[47]
[edit] Rebuttals
Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia Woolf, who was himself Jewish and a friend of Eliot's, judged that Eliot was probably "slightly anti-Semitic in the sort of vague way which is not uncommon. He would have denied it quite genuinely."[48] Jewish friends such as Stephen Spender, Isaiah Berlin, Sidney Schiff, and Norbert Weiner claimed that they had no basis on which to believe that Eliot was anti-semitic.
In 2003, Professor Ronald Schuchard of Emory University published details of a previously unknown cache of letters from Eliot to Horace Kallen, which reveal that in the early 1940s Eliot was actively helping Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria to re-settle in Britain and America. In letters written after the war, Eliot also voiced support for modern Israel.[49]