Is Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises Anti-Semitic?

[Robert E Lee]

Many critics have claimed that Hemingway's portrayal of Jews through the character of Robert Cohn is anti-Semitic. I agree with them. Cohn schemes and tries to come between Lady Brett and Jake Barnes who love each other. While Jake and his friends drink, Cohn stays sober, devising some cruel plan.

What do you think?

Anyway, I'm a Jew; and I really don't care. People that want to censor literature for having racist elements are hypocrites.

[Tabac]

" People that want to censor literature for having racist elements are hypocrites."


I'm not sure they're necessarily hypocrites, but they certainly don't understand that authors can portray racism without being racist themselves.

[Robert E Lee]

" People that want to censor literature for having racist elements are hypocrites."


I'm not sure they're necessarily hypocrites, but they certainly don't understand that authors can portray racism without being racist themselves.


When an author portrays a minority in a demeaning fashion he is not portraying racism, he is displaying his own racism. But this is arbitrary.

[Tabac]

" People that want to censor literature for having racist elements are hypocrites."


I'm not sure they're necessarily hypocrites, but they certainly don't understand that authors can portray racism without being racist themselves.


When an author portrays a minority in a demeaning fashion he is not portraying racism, he is displaying his own racism. But this is arbitrary.

Yes, you are correct. But I believe you misunderstood what I tried to express. An authors can [even vividly] give characters racist tendencies without believing in those thoughts themselves. To describe the evils or virtues of a character is entirely different from subscribing to them.

[sambones]

Robert Cohn represents the bastard in all of us not just the jews.

[Molokai]

to think that a character in a work of fiction is automatically a sign of the author's racist beliefs is pretty ignorant, frankly.

[kelby_lake]

I liked Cohn. The others were mean to him because they were insecure themselves. I think they used the Jewish thing as an excuse.

[Emil Miller]

[QUOTE=Robert E Lee;3438]Many critics have claimed that Hemingway's portrayal of Jews through the character of Robert Cohn is anti-Semitic. I agree with them. Cohn schemes and tries to come between Lady Brett and Jake Barnes who love each other. While Jake and his friends drink, Cohn stays sober, devising some cruel plan.

What do you think? [QUOTE]


You can find anti-semitism in practically anything, but only if you are looking for it.

[_Shannon_]

When an author portrays a minority in a demeaning fashion he is not portraying racism, he is displaying his own racism. But this is arbitrary.

Have you read Native Son? Is Richard Wright racist? Or is maybe something else going on in that novel?

[kelby_lake]

Many critics have claimed that Hemingway's portrayal of Jews through the character of Robert Cohn is anti-Semitic. I agree with them. Cohn schemes and tries to come between Lady Brett and Jake Barnes who love each other. While Jake and his friends drink, Cohn stays sober, devising some cruel plan.

What do you think?


Cohn doesn't really scheme or devise cruel plans. He simply follows Brett everywhere.

[Brad Coelho]

Cohn was more pathetic than prejudiced. The fact that he is jewish is only a topic of elaboration in the early chapters & is more of a commentary on the shift in perception once he got into Princeton vs. his earlier days. I found his coping mechanisms (particularly w/ boxing, yet refusing to fight outside the ring) to be a more unique aspect of the character study than peripheral reasons for antagonizing him- they were merely vehicles.

[dfloyd]

Hemingway was in Spain and became enamored of an English lady who was his model for Brett. There was a Jew in their party of expatriates who also liked the English lady, and he and Hemingway almost got in a fight over her. Hemingway found out the model for Cohn had slept with the lady before. When Hemingway got back to Paris, he realized this was the stuff novels are made of, so he wrote The Sun. So the book was written with no Jewish prejudice in mind, but was based partially on real life.

This is what made Hemingway say, after the novel was published, that Brett would have had the hard-drinking party girl personality even if Jake had not had his war wound.

This is one of my favorite novels, and I think Hemingway had no anti-semitic views in mind. No more than Mark Twain had black prejudice when he wrote Huckleberry Finn.

[Virgil]

I would say it's mildly anti-semetic. I would say that Hemingway is not prejudiced against jews per se, but he is using jewish sterotypes in a derogatory way. He does this with blacks too.

[mortalterror]

Oh, it's totally anti-semitic. Nobody should read this filth!

[dafydd manton]

Shakespeare wrote about some pretty horrible people, but does that make him racist? Hardly, since many of his anti-heroes were English. The prejudice will be there if you wish it to be. Example. How Green Was My Valley. Most of the "baddies" were Welsh, but then, so were most of the "goodies"? Where did Llewellyn's prejudices lie? Who knows!

[Alexander III]

Honestly, So what if a writer is racist, or sexist or homophobic or a man whore or an alcoholic/drug addict or a rapist ; they are humans, they have flaws like all of us, I see it weird holding them up on some moral pedestal. Humans have flaws, great humans have great flaws.

As Fitzgerald once said "Give me a hero and Il write you a tragedy"

[JBI]

Meh, only on the surface, the antisemitism on the part of the characters is just an objective correlative displaying a sort of lost insecurity and vulgarity amongst this generation of rather shallow individuals. After all this talk of liberated female nonsense surrounding Brett, in the end she is just a shallow, rather empty character like the rest of them. I do not think you are particularly supposed to like any characters in the book, only relate to them, as their shallow lives resemble a sort of shallow reality.

[My2cents]

Although skillfully lying is the novelist's business, lying about one's most inner most emotions is liable is to come across as an obvious, clumsy bluff. Hemingway played his hand well in The Sun Also Rises even if it showed him to be anti-semitic.

[kelby_lake]

Honestly, So what if a writer is racist, or sexist or homophobic or a man whore or an alcoholic/drug addict or a rapist ; they are humans, they have flaws like all of us, I see it weird holding them up on some moral pedestal. Humans have flaws, great humans have great flaws.

As Fitzgerald once said "Give me a hero and Il write you a tragedy"

I agree with you on not turning fiction into some sort of moral guidance but considering the ignorance that comes with homophobia and racism, I doubt writers who seriously hold those views are going to come up with anything so amazing that we can look past it.

We shouldn't put them on any pedestal, moral or otherwise.

[arrytus]

WHAT? This is a roman a clef, not some grand fictional ingenuity. If you want to modify his antisemitism as modest, or liken it to a flaw of which we all have, or as perspective which dissipated with age then that's your prerogative and which I only 'modestly' agree with. His use of the word Jew [which as a word is derogatory: it is not polite to call someone a Jew- that is, to use it in the singular- but to say that they are Jewish; at least where I'm from. Although once more this is from experience; where I grew up the word 'Jew' was used as an insult, even if you were Jewish.] is obviously condescending and used nearly as a moniker. To describe someone by their race, creed, etc alone is prejuidice and when you also think of the opinions held by some of his com/ex-patriot pals at the time the evidence is more in favor antisemitism than fictional creation.

For those who want to pull Shakespeare in let me remind that there is a reason Shakespeare makes Shylock one of his greatest villains and foils, as did Marlowe for Barabas; it's because it was easily believable, that many people believed the Jews were evil. The Jews had been kicked out of England by Edward only a few centuries prior. The diasporas at the time from France and Spain to Portugal during the Inquisition were well underway.

EDIT: I recall reading the only thing which didn't happen in the book was that when he went fishing there was no fish and the stream was filled with garbage.

[Alexander III]

I agree with you on not turning fiction into some sort of moral guidance but considering the ignorance that comes with homophobia and racism, I doubt writers who seriously hold those views are going to come up with anything so amazing that we can look past it.

We shouldn't put them on any pedestal, moral or otherwise.

Actually you would be surprised.

Ezra pound one of the finest poets of the last century was a racists, mostly towards jews but also to others such as blacks.

Byron and Verlaine were misogynists (the latter would beat his wife and set her hair on fire rather often, though Im sure she deserved it...)

Conrad certainly thought Africans to be of little intellect compared to europeans

D'Annunzio was a racists despising both jews and blacks

Rimbaud was racist against africans ( in his letters he frequently repeats his frustration at the stupidity and laziness of the blacks, and he states that whites should rule Africa as the blacks are to stupid to rule themselves)

St. Augustine was homophobic

And there are plenty more examples to be listed

[arrytus]

Actually you would be surprised.

Ezra pound one of the finest poets of the last century was a racists, mostly towards jews but also to others such as blacks.

Byron and Verlaine were misogynists (the latter would beat his wife and set her hair on fire rather often, though Im sure she deserved it...)

Conrad certainly thought Africans to be of little intellect compared to europeans

D'Annunzio was a racists despising both jews and blacks

Rimbaud was racist against africans ( in his letters he frequently repeats his frustration at the stupidity and laziness of the blacks, and he states that whites should rule Africa as the blacks are to stupid to rule themselves)

St. Augustine was homophobic

And there are plenty more examples to be listed

+1

It seems rather obvious that a good man is rather the exception. In fact it might be easier- that is to say, the list will be far shorter- to list books in which the author espouses the minority's perspective. Say, in Burgess' The Malayan Trilogy or perhaps lesser so Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet.

I think a darn fine read as a sociological/anthropological introduction- one which blew my mind when I first found it at a booksale- is Claude Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind.