CHARLES BEREZIN
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interests of the "poor yitts." The "vendetta" becomes a racial character–
istic. Meyer Anselm takes on the "vendetta" because of his " bigness,"
not as the result of a moral choice.
Some critics, notably Hugh Kenner and Clark Emery, feel that
Pound absolved himself from the charge of anti-Semitism by making
distinctions between "big jews" and "poor yitts" or by making
statements like: "Usurers have no race. How long the whole Jewish
people is to be sacrificial goat for the usurer, I know not." Hugh
Kenner, in
The Pound Era,
remarked:
"It
is a pity Pound's distinction
between the financiers and the rest of Jewry was not allowed
to
be
emphasized while he was still in the habit of making it. Correctly or
not, it attempted a diagnosis, and one tending rather to decrease than to
encourage anti-Semitism."
It
is hard
to
say whether Kenner 's statement
is more remarkable for its paranoia or its naivete. Who, we might ask,
prevented the distinction from being emphasized?
If
the distinction was
merely a habit that Pound fell into and out of, how important could it
have been in the first place? And since when is a diagnostician not
responsible for his incorrect diagnosis? And, lastly, how does Pound's
distinction discourage anti-Semitism since it merely excuses the poor
Jews from the usurious tendencies of the Jews as a whole?
But one need not condemn "the whole Jewish people" to qualify
as an anti-Semite. The literature of anti-Semitism is filled with just
such distinctions as Pound makes. It is useful
in
this context to
compare Pound's statements with those of his contemporaries. Pound
was hardly unique during the period between the world wars in
featuring anti-Semitism in an analysis of social and economic ills.
Understanding anti-Semitism as a cultural phenomenon rather than as
isolated incidents of prejudice will help provide a context for Pound's
work and though t.
Another American anti-Semite
to
whom Pound bore a more than
superficial resemblance was Henry Ford. Pound always spoke of Ford
with praise, and in Canto LXXIV, a copy of Ford's autobiography
appears on the bookshelf of the virtuous mayor of Worgl along with
Dante and Heine. Between 1920 and 1922, Henry Ford's weekly
magazine,
The Dearborn Independent,
published a series of anti–
Semitic articles . Ford's biographers characterized this series, saying:
"Its general thesis was that the international Jew, a secret leadership of
the race, was bent on disrupting all Gentile life by war, revolt, and
disorder, and thus finally gaining world control of politics, commerce,
and finance." The "secret leadership of the race" resembles Pound's
feelings about "big jews" and Meyer Anselm. Like Pound, the editors
