Letters | 21 November 2009

Eliot’s anti-Semitism

Sir: I yield to none in my love of T.S. Eliot’s work, and have even managed to defend to myself the iffy passages about Jews in his poetry. But the letters that Craig Raine quotes in his review (Books, 14 November) are so blatantly, even honestly, anti-Semitic that they leave no room for doubt; except, it seems, at Faber & Faber. Mr Raine’s attempts to argue the anti-Semitism away present a hilarious and painful spectacle. For example, Eliot writes that Jews are inclined to Bolshevism — a classic Nazi belief. Mr Raine asserts, desperately, that this is a tribute to Jewish iconoclasm. It isn’t; it’s racism. The question is, why does Mr Raine go through such contortions to protect his hero when the evidence is so plain? Eliot was a great man with a rotten prejudice. We may not like it, but we have to admit it, as he does, or risk its shadow falling on us.