How Does One Right a Wrong?

Present a More “Balanced” History of Humanity?

Harriet Brent Jacobs

Here’s my question: Were I to be lecturing about Shakespeare or George Eliot, am I duty-bound to immediately “balance” it out by mentioning the massacre and then the expulsion of Jews from the UK in 1290? Must I point out, along the way that Jews were not permitted back in the UK for nearly four centuries? And that Oliver Cromwell only found a way of allowing Jews to return because their wealth and financial skills would benefit the Crown? After ten minutes of my focusing on Shakespeare or George or Virginia (who was herself a bit antisemitic), must I also describe how cramped the Jewish quarters always were in East London and in Manchester, including in Jewish cemeteries?

The 20th-century French journalist Albert Londres published a poetic and haunting book titled The Wandering Jew Has Arrived. Here he is on the Jews of England in 1929:

“Jews have never had a lot of room. Nations ration them land. Those Whitechapel children were jammed on top of one another like the dead in their distant cemeteries, whose tombstones jostle together so frighteningly…Whatever their numbers, when alive, they all had to find room in the ghetto and, when dead, they all had to lie in the cemetery. Neither one nor the other was ever enlarged. It was already an achievement to have been granted a parcel of Christian soil…If anyone were to suggest that they leave England, return to the East—that is, immigrate to Palestine—they would answer: ‘We are English!’ Yet, in their imaginations, the ancient Hebrew soil is always soft under their feet.”

Tuvia Tenenbom, in his work The Taming of the Jew (2020), writes about antisemitism/anti-Zionism/Jew hatred in the UK in the 21st century. He finds it everywhere among the Jews, Christians, Muslims, atheists, Lords, Ladies, Laborites, etc. He does not have to pursue his subject. It finds him. For example:

“Palestinian flags fly all over Ireland. No one really knows why but they feel strongly that it is ‘right.’ In London, OXFAM sells a book for 100 pounds about ‘the history of Palestine and its turbulent formation in 1948.’ Palestinian demonstrators in Glasgow oppose Scotland playing against an Israeli team. Also in Glasgow, there is a ‘synagogue that doesn’t look like a synagogue but like a high security prison.’”

When Tenenbom interviews British Jews or interviews British non-Jews about Jews, here’s what happens:

Once Tenenbom asks them about Brexit or about Jew-hatred in the Labor Party or about Israel and Palestine or about life in the UK for the Jews, totally loquacious interviewees suddenly begin to stutter, claim ignorance, stop in mid-sentence, insist on going off the record, deny reality, engage in irrational rants, or simply walk away.

So too if I’m writing about Balzac, Zola, Colette, or Proust, must I, in the same breath, remind everyone about the Dreyfus case or about how France rounded up its Jews and sent them to Drancy, from where they were then deported to Auschwitz and murdered? If I’m talking about Stendhal (I did my college thesis on him) or about Flaubert (he is Emma), must I diminish their contribution by giving equal weight to this historical tragedy?

If I’m lecturing in Austria about Freud or Herzl or Alma Mahler—that courtesan of courtesans—am I obliged to also focus on the long history of Austrian Jew hatred and on how quickly the Austrians embraced Hitler? And how both individual Austrians and the Austrian government stole Jewish property and precious artwork? And then refused to return anything except if a lawsuit demanding that they do so actually prevailed?

If I were teaching in Italy (or promoting a book, things that I’ve so happily done), must I bring in Ancient Rome’s destruction and plunder of the Second Jewish Temple, clearly visible in modern-day Rome, right there, portrayed on the Arch of Titus, or must I bring up the fact that Italy eventually walled its Jews up in a ghetto each and every night—at least in Venice, and that even Venice gave up its Jews to Hitler? And that the brilliant Italian writer and chemist, Primo Levi, who was born and who lived in Turin, was sent to Auschwitz?

My point, as you’ve probably already guessed, is this: Why must Americans be reminded of the awful/terrible/inexcusable/tragic history of Black slavery as they view paintings of the American Presidents, scenes of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, or the World Wars? Why so little a similarly obsessive focus on the disappearance of the history of women, the poor, the immigrants, the servants in America? And yes, of course, the history of what happened to Native Americans deserves to be told, but it is also a complex history. We have either romanticized or demonized Native Americans in films, which have also depicted only very cruel Christians who tried to convert them and drive the “Indian” out of them in special schools. We need more than that to truly understand who the Native Americans were and what happened to them both at the hands of Christian Europeans and in their own endless tribal wars.

Yes, the whole truth and nothing but the truth must be told but I fear not in the bitter and obsessive way that is currently in fashion. For example, in a recent and most excellent documentary about Thomas Jefferson, the various interviewees were elegant and accomplished Black American female academics, who sounded as if they, themselves, had been enslaved. What has unleashed or empowered such elite Black American women to discuss slavery in such a personal and emotional way? They are not talking about ongoing anti-Black racism but about slavery, which was abolished in 1863 and then again in 1865. These academics were not alive back then and neither were their grandparents or great-grandparents.

However, are these female academics any different from other American elites, “nepo babies” one and all, who express an intense, almost a pathological identification with the “oppressed” on earth, particularly the allegedly most persecuted of all—the Arab Palestinians?

Is elite education to blame? Or is it social media and the internet? Is it the Hollywood films that portray the lives and unimaginable cruelty of some slave owners? I am familiar with many slave narratives and know that slave women were repeatedly raped, forced to give birth to children, many of whom were sold away. I am not sure whether Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemmings was at all like this, but it is the focus of many documentaries and works of fiction and non-fiction.

So yes, I think that presenting Europe as a vast graveyard of my people and of so many others in their almost non-stop wars is appropriate. But not necessarily at the same time that I’m talking about the most talented and most influential figures that Europe has birthed.

P.S. I was really moved by those readers who feared I might be “leaving” you all because of the piece I published yesterday. Oh, so not true.