264
PARTISAN REVIEW
of
The Dearborn Independent
claim not to be against the Jewish
people:
The Jewish Question is not in the number of Jews who here reside,
not in the American's jealousy of the Jew's success, certainly not in
any objection
to
the Jew's entirely unobjectionable Mosaic religion;
it is in something else, and that something else is the facl of Jewish
influence on the life of the country where Jews dwell. ...
It
is not the
Jewish people, bUl
the Jewish idea,
and the people only as vehicles of
the idea, that is the poinl at issue.
Critics who would defend Pound against the charge of anti–
Semitism by pointing out Pound's distinction between "big jews" and
"poor yitts" make an error when they consider anti-Semitism as merely
a prejudice. Someone who is prejudiced against black people may
assume that all black people are alike, but it rarely occurs
to
the·bigoted
imagination that all blacks are secretly conspiring together against
whites-as the anti-Semite assumes that Jews are secretly conspiring
against Gentiles. This added intensity enters anti-Semitism because it
is a rationalized doctrine that defends a set of interests, rather than
simply irrational feelings. Henry Ford identifies these interests for us:
"The Jewish philosophy of money is not to 'make money' but to 'get
money.' The distinction between these two is fundamental. That
explains Jews being 'financiers' instead of 'captains of industry.'"
Pound also makes a fundamental distinction between financiers and
industrialists and pits them against one another. He assigns virtue
to
the "producers" and evil to the Jewish position, the usurious
financiers:
But the monopolies, the sanctions, the restrictions imposed by the
guilds were, at least, monopolies of
producers.
The various monopo–
lies which culminate in the monopoly of money itself, key to all
other monopolies, were, and are monopolies of
exploiters.
The situation is complicated when the same man has his hand in
both the production and the finance. Henry Ford found himself
forced into this situalion in order
to
defend himself against Wall
Street.
Pound's conception of artists as "producers" may have contrib–
uted to his acceptance of the doctrine of anti-Semitism as a defense of
"producers," but there can be no doubt that he accepted the doctrine
whole and propounded it whole. Nevins and Hill, Ford's biographers,
defend Ford from the charge of malicious intent by pointing out his
naivete and ignorance. But no one has claimed that his words were any
the less harmful for that. Clark Emery, however, makes exactly this
