Vanguard News Network
VNN Media
VNN Digital Library
VNN Reader Mail
VNN Broadcasts

Old August 20th, 2016 #1
Karl Radl
The Epitome of Evil
 
Karl Radl's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: The Unseen University of New York
Posts: 3,130
Default Ambrose Bierce and the Jews

Ambrose Bierce and the Jews


The nineteenth century journalist, satirist and author Ambrose Bierce is one of the greats of American literature if a controversial one. Several of his books, such as ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’, spawned a legion of copycats and have remained almost continuously in print since they were first published.

Aside from the usual mix of denunciations of Bierce’s ‘reactionary’ views on women and the memorable statement in his essay ‘Civilization’ that:

‘If you confess the importance of race and pedigree in a horse and a dog; how dare you deny it in a man.’

I wanted to cover Bierce’s ideas on the subject of jews and whether he can be said to be anti-Semitic. We do know that in his lifetime and after he has often been accused of anti-Semitism. (1)

There is little directly in Bierce’s works that deals with the jews other than a laudatory poem of Moses Montefiore (2) and his short essay ‘The Jew’.

While he expressly stated in ‘The Jew’ that he personally deplored ‘prejudice against the jews’. He also is at pains to point out that jews are themselves responsible for much of the historical and current prejudice as well as the actions taken against them, because of the way they have behaved in addition to things they have done or not done.

This places Bierce’s analysis of the jewish issue in the same space occupied by his British contemporary Hilaire Belloc. Belloc’s 1922 book ‘The Jews’ makes almost precisely the same argument as Bierce made several years earlier in ‘The Jew’. This is that while jews have been subjected to unwarranted attacks and prejudice; they also have had a significant role in creating the situations where this is likely to occur via the medium of their behaviour.

Bierce was also unafraid of utilising the jewish people as a foil for his humour when he deemed necessary. Hence his reference in the ‘Hebrew’ entry for ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’; where he defines (I paraphrase) the ‘Hebrew as a male jew who is inherently inferior to the female jew: the Shebrew’.

He was also unafraid to give his frank opinion to a young jewish poet named David Lesser Lezinsky who submitted his work to Bierce in order to get his professional opinion in early 1894. Bierce promptly satirised Lezinsky’s poetry causing the latter to commit suicide shortly after receiving the former’s reply. (3)

It is worth noting that Bierce was quite willing to socialize with jews who he genuinely liked. (4)

Yet as Harap observes in his dealings with individual jews and his private comments on them as a group; Bierce’s personality and comments had a distinctly anti-Semitic edge to them. (5)

This came out in his bitter quarrel with Adolphe de Castro (the pen-name of Rabbi Adolphe Danziger) over Bierce’s wholesale reworking of Danziger’s translation of Richard Voss’ German language novella ‘The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter’.

Where-in Bierce accused Danziger of being an inveterate coward – Bierce was a veteran of the American Civil War – since he refused to do the honourable thing and settle the matter in a duel using pistols, which he attributed to his jewishness. (6)

Danziger in his ‘Portrait of Ambrose Bierce’ later denied that his old adversary was anti-Semitic, but his explanation is somewhat unconvincing given that it occurred after Bierce was dead and also doesn’t address the deliciously vicious comments by Bierce about Danziger’s jewishness. (7)

Nor does Danziger address the private correspondence published some seven years before his biography of Bierce was placed before the reading public.

On April 20th 1911 Bierce wrote to a correspondent that:

‘It may mean that he has a girl—a Jewess descended from Jacob, with an hereditary antipathy to anything like Esau. Carlt was an Esaurian.’ (8)

Indirectly Bierce is pointing out in his view the jews have a hereditary antipathy towards the ‘children of Esau’ (i.e. non-jews). This supports the evidence from his essay ‘The Jew’ in suggesting that Bierce held that jews had a deep-seated animus and hatred for non-jews, which motivated the behaviour and actions which sustained ‘prejudice’ against them.

That Bierce regarded this from the position of superstitious religiosity in the fossil religion of Judaism is clear from his intellectual advocacy of agnosticism. As well as in ‘The Jew’ when he remarks that the intermarriage and assimilation of jews into non-jewish society would only result in the elimination of Judaism and not jews.

However that Bierce regarded jews as a national and a biological group (i.e. the key point of differentiation between being anti-Semitic and anti-Judaism) is also clear from the fact that he referenced his belief that jews are a separate people from their religion in ‘The Jew’, while also strongly advocating for the racialistic intellectual position in his essay ‘Civilization’.

On this basis we can reasonably conclude that while Bierce was certainly not an out-and-out foe of the jews. However he was very much an anti-Semite of sorts in the same vein as someone like Wilhelm Marr in Germany.



References


(1) Roy Morris, Jr., 1995, ‘Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company’, 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 220
(2) Louis Harap, 2003, [1978], ‘The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration’, 2nd Edition, Syracuse University Press: New York, p. 334
(3) Morris, Op. Cit., pp. 220-221
(4) Harap, Op. Cit., pp. 343-344
(5) Ibid, p. 343
(6) Ibid.
(7) Ibid, pp. 343-344
(8) Bertha Pope Clark, 1922, ‘The Letters of Ambrose Bierce’, 1st Edition, The Book Club of San Francisco: San Francisco, p. 174

--------------------------------------------------

This was originally published at the following address: http://bit.ly/2blVfhv
__________________
 
Reply

Share


Thread
Display Modes


All times are GMT -5. The time now is 07:51 AM.
Page generated in 0.19566 seconds.