TS Eliot’s antisemitism no reason to reject his work

TS Eliot is remembered as both a modernist giant and an antisemite. But his relationship with Jews was more complex than a simple label, shaped by prejudice, personal ties, and a legacy that still unsettles readers today.

This is according to Aviva Dautch, the executive director of Jewish Renaissance magazine and the first scholar-in-residence for Oxford University’s Vera Fine Grodzinski Jewish Women’s Voices Programme, who spoke at Limmud Johannesburg on 17 August.

Dautch emphasised that Eliot was antisemitic, however, she said that we shouldn’t rule him out, as the context in which he lived and wrote reveals more to the story, and it can deepen our understanding of his poetry.

Eliot ran in many circles rife with antisemitism, especially when he was in Paris studying. However, when he was in London and spent time with the Bloomsbury Group, Eliot started to see what it was like to be an outsider as he was an American and worked at a bank.

“There is a class difference between Bloomsbury and Eliot,” said Dautch, “He’s obviously ignorant of England, and imagines that it’s essential to be highly polite, conventional, decorous, and meticulous. He’s wearing three-piece suits. The Bloomsbury Group is becoming the modernist of its age. He’s trying to fit in. And, you know, that thing when you don’t quite fit, you try harder.

“That antisemitic thinking doesn’t go away, but while he has that in the back of his head, he also has this idea of, ‘I’m a foreigner now; I’m a stranger; I’m a Jew. I’m beginning to understand what that experience is like,’” she said.

Because of this, Eliot searches for another literary salon to join, and manages to find one run by a Jewish couple, Sydney and Vera Schiff, who host the poor, the Irish, and foreigners.

“This Jewish couple will introduce Eliot to the people who begin to make his career to the point where Bloomsbury brings him back into its world and accepts him,” she said, “Meanwhile, he keeps writing to his mother. And it’s really with his mother’s milk that he got his early antisemitism.”

However, Sydney and Elliot had a meeting of minds. The Schiffs invited him into their home, helped fund him, and introduced him to patrons.

Said Dautch, “One of them is Lady Rothermere. They tell her that he would be a great editor of a new literary magazine. In terms of levels of charity, it’s a much more Jewish way of operating – you give people the power to help themselves.”

Through this, Eliot becomes the editor of Criterion magazine, which in its first issue has solely Jewish contributors. “I can’t find any other publisher from this period whose magazine is entirely Jewish,” said Dautch.

However, Eliot’s pre-war poetry shows a possibly different side to his view of Jews before working with the Schiffs. He writes, “The rats are underneath the piles. The Jew is underneath the lot. Money in furs.”

Similarly, his correspondence with publishers and lawyers tells a different story as he uses antisemitic tropes. “To the corporate lawyer, he complains about Jews as capitalists. To the ultra-conservative critic, he complains about Jews as Bolsheviks,” she said. “The poetry, I would hope, is probably the purest articulation of what he feels. Maybe it’s also, to some extent, pleasing an audience. But I don’t think you write the way he writes without drawing something from inside you.”

Many defend Eliot’s antisemitism by saying that he wasn’t as bad an antisemite as his friend and fellow poet, Ezra Pound. But that doesn’t take away from his antisemitic actions, Dautch said. “Does that mean there isn’t antisemitism? Of course not. But he doesn’t broadcast publicly supporting Hitler.”

Said Dautch, “He begins to learn what has happened in Europe. And it changes him. In fact, a couple of people sent him manuscripts, which are early accounts of people’s memoirs or diaries because he’s the big publisher of the time. So it’s not just that he’s seeing it on screens like everyone else, he’s beginning to read accounts earlier than many other people. So he knows what’s happened, and he’s profoundly affected by it.”

Dautch said Eliot published some of the most notable war poets of his time, including Jewish poet Isaac Rosenberg.

“The important thing for me now isn’t who Elliot is, but not to throw the greatness of his work away,” Dautch said. “It’s for him not just to be read by people who go, ‘His antisemitism doesn’t matter,’ but actually to have Jews read him and view him through a Jewish lens.”