CHARLES BEREZIN
273
constituted behavior is to deny moral content to that Law, a complaint
similar to the one Pound made in Canto XXII. The Kingdom of God is
a reward for keeping the rules, not the result of any activity involved
in
carrying them out. Chamberlain paraphrases Ezekiel, saying: "No,
Israel is not in the world, to toil and wage war like other peoples, to
work and
to
think, but to be the sanctuary of Jehovah; let it observe
Jehovah's law, and all will be given to it."
The crucial point here is that the end point of the Jew's desires is
not entailed in the means he uses
to
acquire it. The Kingdom of God
on Earth becomes a conquered empire in Chamberlain's view because
the Jews are not capable of working directly for anything; they can
only take a kingdom, they cannot build one of their own . On the one
hand, this conception has given rise to the picture of the Jews as an
unproductive, parasitic people:
If
the Israelites had destroyed the old settled inhabitants, they would
have made a desert of the land and robbed themselves of the prize of
victory. By sparing them and, as it were, grafting themselves upon
them, they grew into their culture. They made themselves at home in
houses which they had not built, in fields and gardens which they
had not laid out and cultivated.
And on the other hand, Chamberlain's view gives rise to the ubiqui–
tous notion among anti-Semites of the Jewish plot:
In humility he shall bow before God, but not in that inner humility
of which Christ speaks-he bows his head before Jehovah because of
the promise that by the fulfillment of this condition he will put his
foot on the neck of all the nations of the world and be Lord and
possessor of the whole earth. This one basis of Jewish religion
includes, therefore, a direct criminal attempt upon all the peoples of
the earth, and the crime cannot be disavowed because hitherto the
power has been lacking to carry it out; for it is the hope itself which
is criminal and poisons the heart of the Jew.
Conspiracy and lack of productivity coincide in Pound's chief com–
plaint against the Jews: usury.
While this analysis might be difficult to reproduce in Pound's own
words, it is not less central to Pound's thought because he was less
specific than Chamberlain about the source of his anti-Semitic senti–
ments . Pound believed that an antiproductive principle was at work in
history. The Jews , who do not work for their reward, became, in his
mind, the chief purveyors of that principle.
