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- close to other Victorian sages, especially his friend John Ruskin, who
also lamented the loss of old values. He is also a precursor of the
twentieth-century English socialist, R. H. Tawney, who spoke of "the
greedy materialists who rule mankind at present.... "
But if Carlyle's fierce antimaterialism seems mostly bluster, there is a
disturbing aspect to it: his antimaterialism goes hand in hand with anti–
Semitism. According to Carlyle, the fact that England was home to
many rich Jews was a sign that the nation had become mired in
materialism. As Fred Kaplan, a recent biographer, points out: "In his
most sarcastic, pessimistic moments, he [Carlyle] thought it appropriate
that Disraeli should be prime minister of this new England ... because
he believed England itself was coming to resemble the standardized image
of the materialistic ... Jew."
Carlyle's association of Jews with materialism became a common–
place of late nineteenth-century thought, especially in France and Ger–
many. In fact, the term anti-Semitism was coined in Germany in the
1870s, where Jews were increasingly regarded as a people who used their
economic power, as one commentator says, "to corrupt, exploit, and
destroy the German people and its traditions." In France , the Dreyfus
case yoked the notion of materialism with treachery. Jewish materialism
made Jews untrustworthy; they were all like Judas Iscariot. As
Civilita
Cattolica,
the official organ of the Jesuit order in Rome, said in 1898:
"The Jew was created by God to serve as a spy wherever treason is in
preparation." Jews were sinister as well as treacherous. A character in
Hermann Broch's
The Anarchist
(which is set in 1903), says: "They're ev–
erywhere these Jews; they have all the money and no woman is safe from
them, they're just like bulls."
In 1895 Henry Adams, who was strongly influenced by conservative
French thought, wrote to his friend John Hay that "after all, the Jew
question is really the most serious of our problems . It is capitalist
methods run to their logical result." Adams was a shrewd investor and
lived very nicely off corporate capitalism, but antimaterialist capitalists
were not uncommon in Europe and the United States . "I am myself
more than ever at odds with my time," Henry Adams had confessed to
his brother Brooks in 1894. "I detest it ... with all its infernal Jewry."
But he was very much one with his time, because it was fashionable to
speak of the Jews as a people whose materialistic bent made them the
enemy of old values.
It was one thing to dislike supposedly materialistic Jews and vaguely
wish, as the Jesuit writer would have it, that they "be excluded from the
