Wagner's Anti-Semitism - Part 5: Beyond the Pale

We all know that there are a vast number of cultures and subcultures in the world. We are all human, of course, but within our “tribes” there are real differences. The fields of anthropology and sociology study both the differences and our shared humanity in these cultures: what is true of all human cultures, and what is unique to each culture. In general, people talk freely about the differences between cultures, even the things that might be considered negative qualities in a culture. I can say what I like and dislike in, for instance, the American or French or Italian culture without much worry that I will be accused of being anti-American, French or Italian.

This is not true of the Jewish culture at this point in time. If one says something negative about the culture now or in the past, it is often dismissed—at least by a very vocal sub-group of Jews and non-Jews alike—as anti-Semitism. And the person who says or writes this negative thing will be under a cloud of suspicion that they are, in fact, anti-Semitic. 

I get the reasons for this. The sensitivity, of course, is related to the long history of anti-Semitic thought and action, with its horrible culmination in the Holocaust. It’s a very rational sensitivity. But I do believe that academic discussion has been chilled by it. This is certainly true amongst those who write about Wagner. If you defend his views in any way, you are an “apologist” at best. Therefore, everyone—those who seek to defend him in any way or those on the attack—tend towards hyperbole about his anti-Semitism, just to distance themselves from the charge of anti-Semitism. This subject will be a more detailed post later, but I wanted to raise it as I am going against that grain in this post, and throughout my blog.

There is a widely held—though by no means universal—academic view that anti-Semitism is unrelated to actual, real Jews, their actions, or their culture. The author of the popular, but deeply flawed, book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen, puts it this way in his book: “All antisemitism is fundamentally ‘abstract,’ in the sense of not being derived from actual qualities of the Jews.” And a few pages later he writes: “...anti-Semitism has fundamentally nothing to do with an antisemite’s knowledge of the real nature of Jews.”¹ The author of Christian Anti-Semitism, William Nicholls, states it this way: “Causeless hatred for Jews came first, and conscious reasons for the hatred were always rationalizations.”²

This view tends to stop any kind of reasonable discussion as to what, if anything, may or may not be true in whole or part in Wagner’s views of Jewish culture (or anyone else’s for that matter.) If anti-Semitism is seen as solely irrational, just a learned hatred and can’t be anything but rationalizing, well then, that kills any sort of historical analysis, doesn’t it? 

The problem with discussing what is true or not true about Jewish culture extends to saying things about that culture that are positive, as well. For instance, Joe Biden was accused of accidentally fueling anti-Semitism in this speech to honor Jewish American History last month. In the talk, Biden praised the “outsized influence per capita” of Jews, which he then went on to list. Johnathan Chait wrote about his speech:

It’s obviously true that Jews have flourished in the United States and, as Biden says, have achieved massively disproportionate representation in fields like science, culture, politics, academia, and so on. Jews regard this fact with a mixture of pride and neurosis. The neurosis is a fear that our success will be seen as a kind of invidious control, that the broader society will at some point say, no, you have too much.

I say, neurosis be damned. Facts are facts, and it is simply impossible to reasonably address modern anti-Semitism without at least knowing about the incredible rise of the Jews post-Englightenment—specifically Ashkenazi Jews—even if just to argue that it had nothing to do with later developments.

There are scholars, of course, who do connect the quick advancement of the Jews with the rise of modern anti-Semitism. Historian Arthur Lindemann, for example, argues in his book Esau’s Tears that “the most obvious material factor to take into consideration in trying to account for the growth of modern anti-Semitism – though not of course its deepest origins – is the rise of the Jews. It is not a fantasy but rather a perfectly real, measurable, and understandable development.”³

I would like to give a quick summary of that rise, before turning to Wagner’s position. While some of this will be repetitive, I am a Wagnerian and that’s what we do! (For those who don’t get the joke, the great comedian Anna Russell’s tour de force Ring lecture here will enlighten you.) 

The Jews lived in Europe without controlling any land for hundreds of years, and this put them in a very precarious position indeed (which led to multiple expulsions). Traditionally, the Jews had some—if obviously limited—protection given that, as George Fredrickson puts it in his book Racism, a Short History, “the existence of Jews must be tolerated because their ultimate conversion was essential to God’s plan for the salvation of the world.”⁴ Post-enlightenment, when religious reasons had lost their sway, the Jews' historical protection no longer existed as it had. The question in Germany became, again summarized by Fredrickson:

How Jews would fit in when cultural and linguistic identity became the basis of citizenship...[and it] could be answered in only one of two ways. Either Jews had to surrender their Jewishness and become good Germans or there would be no place for them. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, a liberal assimilation's perspective was ascendant in German thought, but beneath it lurked a deep intolerance of the Jew who remained distinctive.⁵

You can condemn Germans for having the above view, but then virtually all cultures in all times must be equally condemned. That is certainly true of the United States which—I have already pointed out here—was far worse to our “others” than Germans were to Jews at this point, and that certainly includes Wagner. 

What is a fact is that Jews were different: they were foreign, they spoke a different language, they had a different history, and they were disliked or distrusted fairly universally in Germany for a variety of religious and cultural reasons. Therefore, virtually no one wanted them as part of Germany as they were.

It was in this fraught context—post-Enlightenment—that the rise of the Jews in Germany began. According to Peter Pulzer, “[u]p to the end of the eighteenth century, the great majority of Jews of the German states lived lives that were marginal to the economy and the rest of society, engaged in peddling or begging at a near destitute level.”⁶ These poor Jews were the ones seen invariably as backward and vulgar, by non-Jews and the small sub-group of Westernized Jews alike.

Given the “choice,” many Germans Jews quickly made the move away from that past, leaving the country for towns and cities, replacing religious Orthodoxy with a more secular viewpoint, dropping Yiddish and speaking only Hochdeutsch.  Along with it, they distanced themselves from other Jews, particularly Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews). According to Lindemann, “[t]he reactions of the overwhelming majority of western-educated German Jews to Yiddish paralleled and indeed epitomized their attitudes to the Ostjuden. Yiddish was, as one assimilated Jew typically put it, a “barbarous mishmash” and “an insult against all languages which it wrenches and destroys, monstrous in form and shocking in tone.”⁷

Thus, by rejecting their Eastern brethren, these Westernized Jews were attempting to show their assimilation, their essential Germanness. They were keeping the enlightenment bargain, and, therefore, they argued that they deserved full citizenship.

To fast forward, full citizenship came with the birth of the nation-state in 1871. By that point, the German Jews' rise had become stunningly obvious. As reported by Fredrickson:

The opportunities in commerce that opened up in the first half of the century became the launching pad that enabled the next generation to go to the university (admission was not restricted) and achieve success in the ‘free professions’ of law and medicine. Jews also found opportunities in the arts and journalism, while continuing to be prominent in the business world, not only in banking and finance but also in retail trade and light manufacturing. ‘By 1871,’ according to David Sorkin, ‘fully 80% of German Jewry qualified as bourgeois.’”⁸

It was this rise that Wagner was forever bitching about. Essentially, his argument was that Jewish culture was way more together than the German culture, and the Germans could not get it together with Jews in the mix. He argued that Jews would easily dominate the backward German people. His entire program was, of course, to regenerate the German people and culture, so this was a huge threat to his life's work. He believed that the rise of capitalism gave Jews the means of economic and, therefore, cultural ascendancy, in that they were given the reins of capitalism via their domination of banking and financing. Wagner acknowledges—and blames—the Christians who put Jews in this role in the first place as part of a subjugation process, but also argued that, with the rise of capitalism, the Jews, who had both an intelligence and experience and who were the “virtuosi in an art which we bungle,” were now in control, and he believed that those who controlled the money ruled in the modern world.⁹

He further argued that German culture had degenerated and into this void, Jews brought entertainment for profit, which he called “art-commodity-exchange.” His life was devoted to regenerating German art. He hated art for profit; he hated art as mere entertainment. He believed art was sacred, so the Jewish cultural relationship to art was a direct threat to his life work and plan.

I would argue that Wagner's views—whatever you think of his argument—had an internal consistency that was rational. Those who assert that there can be no rationality in anti-Semitism, of course, won’t agree. (Obviously, his views were based on cultural stereotypes, but this post has gone on much too long to take up that issue now. I will do that next time.) Bottom-line: I don’t buy anything Wagner is selling in his argument, but I also don’t think it was morally wrong in and of itself to have his opinions and make his case. I don’t think his arguments are solely a product of irrational prejudice and paranoia.

Cultures are very often in conflict and that is just part of life, part of the human condition. This was a real, not illusory, conflict, with a mix of rational and irrational. I, to give a modern example, am in a real conflict with evangelic Christian culture: I argue against it; I think it is extremely damaging to the sort of society I want to live in; I think they are dead wrong. That said, I do not begrudge a Christian making the case that I am wrong, including saying that my “lifestyle” of being a lesbian is wrong, that my atheism is morally bankrupt, etc. That is what they honestly think, and I believe that anyone should be able to voice their beliefs in a civilized way. 

Given that Wagner lived in a time when almost every German shared his general beliefs about Jewish culture, and given that he devoted his entire life to his beliefs about art and spirituality, I absolutely think both his anti-Semitic beliefs and his public polemics about it were not beyond the pale of that day.

But here is the rub: He had a mean streak and liked to get revenge when he felt wounded. And this mean streak came out in his writings, in his public life and in his private life. As I have mentioned previously, everyone who has studied his life has come to the conclusion that the major point of Wagner's article “Judaism in Music” was to get revenge on Giacomo Meyerbeer who he was convinced, via a paranoid delusion, had plotted against him, as well as to distance himself from Meyerbeer, whom he had groveled to. Although there is much in this article that could be defended, it is impossible to actually do so because of the meanness that inundates the piece. It is truly hard to quote a sentence that doesn’t have a dig, or several, in it.

Giacamo Meyerbeer, the object of Wagner's scorn

One of Wagner’s key points in the article was to argue that since Jews had a different language and culture, they couldn’t write authentic German music. That argument does not, in itself, seem anti-Semitic. People have argued that only someone from Appalachia can play true hillbilly music and only a Black person can really play the blues or gospel. Other people argue against that. Whatever. I am agnostic on this issue. But, on the face of it, it’s not considered a racist thing to say.

The problem is that Wagner makes his argument in a obnoxious, cruel way. I will re-quote one sentence of his essay as an example:

The first thing that strikes our ear as quite outlandish and unpleasant, in the Jew's speech, is a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle: add thereto an employment of words in a sense quite foreign to our nation's tongue, and an arbitrary twisting of the structure of our phrases—and this mode of speaking acquires at once the character of an intolerably jumbled blabber; so that when we hear this Jewish talk, our attention dwells involuntarily on its repulsive how, rather than on any meaning of its intrinsic what.

(What he was describing here was, of course, an Eastern European Jew speaking Yiddish.)

As I noted above, German Jews were at this time trying to distance themselves from their Eastern brethren. Meyerbeer, Wagner's target, was a German (and French)-speaking Jew and could not be described at all by this description. So, by making that link, he was trying to keep tied together what German Jews were trying to sever. Wagner was making the argument that they shared the same “essence” of Jewishness, which they could not escape, whatever distinctions German Jews wanted to make. He was tweaking Meyerbeer, and all assimilated German Jews, with sentences such as this: “Although the peculiarities of the Jewish mode of speaking and singing come out the most glaringly in the commoner class of Jew, who has remained faithful to his father's stock, and though the cultured son of Jewry takes untold pains to strip them off, nevertheless they show an impertinent obstinence in cleaving to him.” This is a typical Wagner sentence, malevolent in many different ways.

You can spin it—he tried to do so—that he was an objective observer simply telling it like it was. But it just comes out malicious. In this area, there really is only one reaction any decent human being can have: What a jerk! I strongly believe it is legitimate to have contrary viewpoints, but to just be mean, to try to hurt someone and a whole people by being intentionally spiteful—now, that is beyond the pale. That was the dark part of his soul. It is this aspect of his character that I find the most difficult to forgive.

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End notes

In terms of the subtitle of this blog, of course I mean "beyond the pale" figuratively, as it is used in this post as a figure of speech.  But I think the literal meaning of "beyond the pale" has some aptness as well.  If you don't know the literal meaning, see here.

By the way, when Disney put in the Ostjuden caricature of the wolf in the original Three Little Pigs as I mentioned in this post, I think he was being mean in exactly the same way. According to this, “[i]n their book, Cartoon Confidential (Malibu Graphics Pub., 1991) authors Jim Korkis and John Cawley describe how Disney fired back at his tormentors [Jewish movie moguls] every time the opportunity arose. He would purposely inject anti-Semitic scenes in his cartoons, well aware they made Jews squirm.”

1 Goldhagen, Daniel, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 34, 41 The quotes are out of context, but I think it is a fair summary of his thesis.

2 Nicholls, William, Christian Anti-Semitism, page 313 

3 Lindemann,Albert, Esau’s Tears, 536-37.  Of course, this book was attacked by some for being anti-Semitic; see here. 

4 Fredrickson, George, Racism-A Short History, 21

5 Ibid, 71

6 Pulzer, Peter, Jews and the German State, 1848-1933, 69 

7 Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews, 142. What schmucks! For the record, I love Yiddish. I’ve stolen more words from Yiddish than any other language by far. 

8 Op. cit., Frederickson, 78; the David Sorkin quote comes from The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840, page 173.  One should not think that formal legal equality actually led to real equality; just as barriers existed for Blacks in the United States long after formal equality, so too did multiple barriers remain against Jews.

9 Summary of Wagner's views came from these writings: Judaism in Music, What is German, Modern, Know Thyself. All can be downloaded here. The quote comes from Know Thyself.

Wagner's Anti-Semitism, part 2: Historical Perspective

I wrote on Facebook on Wednesday (Wagner’s 200^th bicentennial) that this post was going to be a rant, but I sort-of unranted it. I’m not good at rants on paper, I guess. But I have dispensed with (most) footnotes for this one (such a wild step for me.) And there remain a couple of obscenities!

I think too much is made of the fact that Wagner was anti-Semitic, particularly given the times he lived in. When I say too much, I don’t mean it shouldn’t be addressed. Of course it should, and I have spent four posts on it, and plan to do several more. What I am talking about is the ludicrous over-reach of modern Wagner scholars. As a topic, it was barely addressed—and this was not a great state of affairs, either—until recent times. But now the floodgates are open, and muddy, foul waters are flowing. For instance, in the 2008 Cambridge Guide to Wagner—which should be a balanced look at his life and works—is inundated with the issue because, as the editor Tom Grey writes in the introduction, “of the indisputable prominence of the topic in Wagner studies and public discussion over the past fifteen or twenty years.” Michael Tanner, a Wagnerian writer who shares my opinion that the subject is both over-pushed and ludicrously analyzed, points out that in this book: “The issue is raised more often than any other single topic. While several chapters are devoted to it and to Wagner’s relationship to the Third Reich, there are six pages devoted to The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin combined.”  This is just out of whack.

Yes, he was anti-Semitic, but so was most of Europe for 2,000 years. As well, most Europeans and Americans who endorsed enlightenment ideals—as Wagner did—didn’t extend those past a sub-group of men. I do, indeed, love and honor those truly enlightened people in the 1800s who actually believed, deeply, in equality for all human beings. But they were a very small minority. Try to come up with some names; it’s very hard. (Leslie suggested Mark Twain, and he certainly was far better than most, but, then, read this regarding the Jews and his essay Concerning the Jews. The fact that Twain is quoted approvingly in neo-Nazi publications shows that even the most liberal of men's words can be twisted.)

Wagner wrote his infamous essay Judaism in Music in 1850. First, let me give you a few out-of-context quotes from it, so you understand the worst sorts of things he said in this essay:

We have to explain to ourselves the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews, so as to vindicate that instinctive dislike which we plainly recognize as stronger and more overpowering than our conscious zeal to rid ourselves thereof.… The Jew—who, as everyone knows, has a God all to himself—in ordinary life strikes us primarily by his outward appearance, which, no matter to what European nationality we belong, has something disagreeably foreign to that nationality: instinctively we wish to have nothing in common with a man who looks like that....In particular does the purely physical aspect of the Jewish mode of speech repel us. Throughout an intercourse of two millennia with European nations, culture has not succeeded in breaking the remarkable stubbornness of the Jewish nature as regards the peculiarities of Semitic pronunciation. The first thing that strikes our ear as quite outlandish and unpleasant, in the Jew's speech, is a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle: add thereto an employment of words in a sense quite foreign to our nation's tongue, and an arbitrary twisting of the structure of our phrases—and this mode of speaking acquires at once the character of an intolerably jumbled blabber; so that when we hear this Jewish talk, our attention dwells involuntarily on its repulsive how, rather than on any meaning of its intrinsic what.

Clearly, as I have mentioned previously, he found Jews repellent. Certainly, that quote seems mean-spirited and really weird, too. I don’t get it on any level and am glad I don’t. However, as implied by Wagner by using the “we” and as confirmed by many scholars of anti-semitism, these were common views of Jews at that time, and many Jews shared these views about themselves in whole or part. It wasn’t an enlightened time, to say the least. Thankfully—and it certainly means that we have advanced in some good ways—we read that and think: What the fuck? So, Wagner’s publication of this was bad. No doubt at all about that.

But now I want to take a quick survey of the times, mid 19^th century, when he wrote the piece. I am concentrating on America, because this blog is focused on an American audience, and this is the history I know intimately. If you are American, you know all this stuff. Skim.

In the United States, slavery was legal. Slaves were the property of slaveholders and could be whipped, raped, and even murdered with legal impunity. Obviously, too, nasty things were said about them as a race. Certainly nastier than what Wagner said about the Jews. There was, of course, an anti-slavery movement but the Great Emancipator himself said, “There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races.” This was said in 1857. In the same year, our Supreme Court confirmed, via the Dred Scott decision, that blacks were not citizens, even freemen. In 1896, the utter racism of America was confirmed in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. As we all know, very bad things continued to be said and done to black people well into the 20^th century, and are still being done to this day. (As an aside, Wagner was very anti-slavery.)

Turning to our Native Americans, the 19^th century saw the utter decimation of the Indian Nation. The Indian-loathing President Jackson oversaw the expulsion of most tribes from the East via the “Trail of Tears” in the 1830s. Here is part of Jackson's address to Congress in 1833 on the subject of Native Americans:

They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.

Commonly, they were called, and thought to be, savages.  The enmity to Indians didn’t end there, of course. Here's a Wikipedia quote: “After the Civil War, all of the Indians were assigned to reservations; the role of the army was to keep them there.”  In 1869, General Sheridan, in charge of keeping Indians in their place, gave voice to the feelings of many: "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” 

Meanwhile, in Europe, pretty much everybody believed that they were superior to non-white cultures, a huge percentage of which had been colonized and the people subjugated to European rule. There was no move away from this trend in the 19^th century. It was extremely commonplace to assume that people from Europe were more civilized, superior in all ways, and better looking to boot—particularly when compared to Jews and blacks. In the latter part of the century, this belief was “proven” via pseudo-scientific papers and books.

And of course, there are women, my people. In that we are necessary, there really couldn’t be the same type of degradation and subjugation as there were with Jews, gays, Blacks, Native Americans and colonized people. However, throughout history—and this was certainly true in Wagner’s time—women were second-class citizens at best. They were often denied basic property and civil rights, education, many professions, and were often the victims of rape and assault—marriage was a near-license for both. Quite awful things were said commonly about women’s abilities and capacities well into the 1970s. I remember a whole lot of them, having not escaped the overwhelming sexism of earlier times.

Then there are my other people, gays (homosexual men got the brunt of the hate then and now, though). In the 1800s, anyone who dared to “come out” who wasn’t extremely wealthy and powerful risked his or her life, livelihood and health. Even a high level of fame and talent didn’t save Oscar Wilde from prison in 1895. Since I grew up at a time when homosexuality was still “the love that dare not speak its name,” I can assure you that through the mid-1970s most people in the US thought gays were disgusting, sick, sad, and degenerate people. To be revealed as gay could lead to jail, institutionalization, loss of job and worse. Oh, and there is the frequently repeated child molester charge. While this has clearly changed of late, there is still a long way to go.

In fact, when I first read Wagner’s anti-Jewish statement I quoted above, I thought one could just change the targeted group to gays, adapt it a bit, and it could have been written in 1960 with most people generally agreeing (but just as in Wagner’s day with his topic, finding it very impolite). So, I did:

We have to explain to ourselves the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Gays, so as to vindicate that instinctive dislike which we plainly recognize as stronger and more overpowering than our conscious zeal to rid ourselves thereof.… The Gay in ordinary life strikes us primarily by his outward appearance, which, no matter to what nationality we belong, has something disagreeably alien to it. Instinctively we wish to have nothing in common with a man who looks like that....In particular does the purely physical aspect of the Gay mode of speech repel us. The first thing that strikes our ear as quite outlandish and unpleasant in the gay's speech is a shrill, lisping, histrionic prattle: when we hear this Gay talk, our attention dwells involuntarily on its repulsive how, rather than on any meaning of its intrinsic what.

Ignoring Wagner’s mode of speech (and weird translation), people absolutely thought those sorts of things about gay men and, once the gay rights movement began and politeness went out the window, quite a lot was written along those lines. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I read things like that. It was rather overwhelming for a period of time, and truly disheartening. The vast majority of people did not want gays to be out of the closet, much less to give us civil rights. But I get that was the times and what they grew up with, what they were “carefully taught” as the song says in South Pacific. I am so happy it has changed. As Michael Kinsley says in this article about the Republican politician Ben Carson:  “Carson may qualify as a homophobe by today’s standards. But then they don’t make homophobes like they used to.” They really don’t, at least in the Western world (and a growing share of the rest of the world)! And I am pleased and relieved about that.

So for those who remember how it was with gay people just 40 years ago, just realize it was like that regarding Jews in Wagner’s time. Do you forgive the homophobes from 1960? I certainly do. So I would argue you should forgive the anti-Semites from the 1800s—a far less enlightened period—too.

Wagner in his Judaism in Music advocates assimilation: Jews undergoing a transformation to rid themselves of their “Jewishness.” That seems very backward today—what’s the matter with Jews staying Jews? Nothing, of course! But during the 19^th century, it was considered the liberal view – virtually nobody was arguing for religious tolerance as we know it today when it came to the Jews. The famous "Jewish Question" was how to deal with this "foreign element" living within Europe. The liberal solution was assimilation; Wagner always publicly supported this solution.¹ He didn’t call for expulsion or ghettoization—as we did to our Native Americans in the same time period. He didn’t call for civil rights to be revoked or not extended to Jews—full civil rights that didn’t exist for women, Blacks (many of whom were still slaves, of course), Native people in the United States then, and for gays still, to this day. He didn’t advocate or do violence to Jews—as Americans allowed, sometimes de facto, often de jure, against blacks and Indians and gays and “wayward” women well into the 20^th century, and, of course, directed at Jews in numerous incidents in the 19^th and 20^th century, obviously culminating in the Holocaust. Needless to say, violence is still directed to all these groups on occasion, but the law no longer turns a blind eye, and that is progress.

My problem is that Wagner is singled out as particularly despicable for his public pronouncements about Jews when, as I hope I have clearly pointed out, worse things were being said about various groups—and most crucially—much worse things were being done to these groups throughout the world in the 19^th century, and more than half-way into the 20^th century.

Wagner’s anti-semitism is invariably described by these synonyms: repellent, revolting, repugnant, odious, malignant, vitriolic, insidious, vile, virulent, etc. For instance, a friend sent me this article written on Wedneday (coinciding with his 200^th birth). It begins: “There is little doubt that the great German composer Richard Wagner was one of the most virulent anti-Semites in modern history.” Really??

If that is the case, what of Hitler and the Third Reich? They advocated—and did—every one of the things that I listed above that Wagner did not: civil rights revocation, expulsion, violence, and murder. I think the definition for what constitutes “virulent anti-Semitism” must be aligned to that reality. To throw every anti-Semite in that cesspool is not justified; it is not justified with Wagner. Even a truly despicable anti-Semite like Henry Ford—whose views and political action against Jews were far more severe, direct and influential than Wagner’s—doesn’t deserve to be categorized with Hitler and the Third Reich. But he does deserve to be compared to Wagner, and Wagner comes out much better in that matching, might I add. I think it is fine to use those words to describe Wagner’s anti-Semitism, as long as there is a clear statement that it was not at all akin to Hitler’s anti-Semitism. The trouble is—and this is why I am upset—that is not done, which is why most people have a completely skewed view of who Wagner really was and what he thought.

It’s actually a wonderful thing that people have a hard time even understanding how Wagner could have written what he wrote. But if we allow Wagner to be dismissed for his anti-Semitic beliefs, than we pretty well should dismiss the vast majority of our ancestors. Only the rare few would look good to our more, thankfully, enlightened era.


End Note

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1 I will admit that I am simplifying Wagner’s position for this post. I will be taking it up in more detail in the future. While what I said about Wagner’s public position is literally true, the fact is that privately he said things that were much less enlightened, as recorded in some letters to friends and in the diaries of Cosima Wagner. However, the German public at the time and through World War II wouldn’t have known what he said.  It wasn’t until the 1970s that this material was becoming widely known and reached a large audience. Cosima’s dairies, for instance, weren’t released until 1978.  I don’t think it detracts from my central argument. I mean, I don’t believe the “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” sentiment. But I do believe it is far worse to be enslaved, beaten, raped, denied civil rights, forced to hide, murdered, etc. than to have mean things said about a group.

Wagner's Anti-Semitism, Part 1

Summary and links to the series of Wagner character posts:

I believe that Richard Wagner has been the victim of character assassination, which was started in his era but has come to full fruition in our own. While certainly Wagner does have character flaws, he is accused—casually, ubiquitously, and with no or little supporting evidence—of a whole host of faults, most of them exaggerated, and rarely counterbalanced with any sense of his goodness beyond musical genius. The result is that his true personality and character have been buried under an avalanche of mud. My introduction to that topic is here. I give a short introduction to his personality and character so that you can better understand the various charges here. I cover these traits: megalomania here; sexist, womanizer and wife-stealer – part 1 here, part 2 here; his problems with money and, consequently, friendship is here; the issue of his morality, hypocrisy and lying here. The first part of how his reputation got into the mess it is can be found here and the second here. The series concludes here with some thoughts about biography and a selected bibliography.

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There is no doubt in this modern age, particularly post-holocaust, that the most troubling aspect of Wagner’s character revolves around his anti-Semitism. There are many ways in which to view it, and much has been written on it.¹ I have thought, and read, about this issue more than any other, and I will be writing a number of posts to try to articulate my position and view it from a variety of lenses. I suspect these sections will get reworked and reordered as I write and reflect back on the posts as they emerge.

Since I am in the midst of my “character study” of Wagner, to write about the Jewish issue now would interrupt that effort. But I obviously need to acknowledge for these character posts that Wagner was, in fact, anti-Semitic. Even in this area, though, people exaggerate the claims about his anti-Semitism and assert things about his views that are simply untrue. I will write about all that later, but for now I want to make some broad points, many of which I will return to in more detail and with more—I hope—finesse.

To start off, let me just give a very brief background of Wagner’s milieu. In mid-19^th century Germany, most people—no matter if they were friend or foe of Jews’ civil rights and integration into society—had views that in our present age would be considered stereotypical and anti-Semitic, to wit: that Jews were vulgar and shady characters who were adept at making money through unsavory means, plus they were foreign and, as their culture was perceived at the time, undesirable in the society.  That said, a large number—perhaps a majority—felt these perceived traits of their culture developed due to the legal barriers erected against the Jews and would go away or greatly diminish with the advancement of Jewish civil rights and assimilation into the larger culture. Thus, it was a tolerant period, as a historian of the period, Jacob Katz, reports, “rooted in the more or less emphatic hope that the Jewish minority, in its economic, social, cultural, and perhaps even religious particularity, would in the course of time disappear.”²

Wagner held the ubiquitous stereotypes about the Jews, which was unremarkable given the zeitgeist. What was different—and considered rather shocking and impolite at the time—was that he disseminated these views via his writings, most particularly Das Judenthum in der Musik. ³ It was published anonymously in 1850 and reprinted under his name in 1869.  In this essay, in a nutshell, he makes these arguments about the Jews: first, he claimed that since Jews were a foreign element within Germany that they, therefore, could not write authentic and deeply passionate German music; secondly, that Jews made a business out of art, degrading it; thirdly, that Jews gave Germans—he assumed all would agree—the creeps because they were, in fact, creepy. It was the last point that people most strenuously objected to then and now. He concluded his essay with the pro-assimilation position, which was in-line with the times, but his airing of his animus to Jews was decidedly not.

Pre-holocaust, his writings about Jews views were treated as, essentially, not in good taste and part of his general character of being unable to hold his tongue about anything. At that point, it was still relatively socially acceptable to be anti-Semitic, so the urge to write about it critically didn’t exist as it does now. However, post-holocaust, there has been a profusion of literature on the subject, particularly in the last several decades. According to Wagner scholar Thomas Grey, the focus of scholarly inquiry now “has to do with the consequences of these facts, either for our understanding of the operas or for any possible consensus regarding Wagner’s implication in the murderous anti-Semitic polices of the Nazi regime that came into power fifty years after this death.”⁴

Beyond the serious, but often biased, academic inquiries into the role of Wagner in inspiring or otherwise abetting the Nazi movement that emerged about 50 years after his death, Wagner has been demonized and mythologized within Israel—and to a lesser extent, the rest of the West—and used as lightening rod for the anger against Nazi Germany.  In her book, The Ring of Myths: Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis, the Israeli historian Na’ama Sheffi explores the process of the rerouting of the righteous Jewish anger towards Germany through the scapegoating of Wagner. She explores how this process helped smooth the path for Israel to create political and economic ties with West Germany in the 60s. Consequently, as Terry Kinney summarized in this review of Sheffi's book:  

By the 1980s and 1990s the Wagner controversy had reached such a level that Wagner had been completely disassociated from his historical context. Indeed, proponents of Wagner performances frequently had to remind their readers that Wagner was not actually alive during the Nazi era, such was the level of knowledge concerning the real Richard Wagner.

As quoted in the Amazon summary, “Sheffi concludes that the choice of Wagner as the target for all their abhorrence of Nazism and the Holocaust ‘both sins against the man and obscures the significance of the Holocaust’.”⁵

To point towards Wagner as an architect of the holocaust seriously misdirects the locus of historical culpability. My belief is that, historically and morally, the responsibility should be directed to Christianity and Christians. They created the ocean of anti-Semitism, with Wagner simply a small tributary contributing to the major, and overwhelming, volume.

Of course, Christians did not begin anti-Jewish thought and action.  As modern anti-Semitism was built on Christian anti-Semitism,  Christian animosity was built on existing pagan animosity, so the blame for the Holocaust can reach even farther back in history. In any case, Christian anti-Jewish sentiment is embedded into the New Testament, which seems clearly to me to be an anti-Semitic text. Many passages within it put forward the Jewish stereotypes that still exist today, particularly about Jews and their greed for money.  As well, the imfamous line from Matthew 27:24–25 in which the crowd says at Jesus' cruxification “his blood be upon us, and on our children,” was widely interpreted as a curse on the Jews.⁶ 

While Christians have this or that excuse—all lame to my reading—for what the New Testament seems to say, they can have no excuse for what they did, or encouraged, or ignored, for 2000 years, stemming directly from their sacred text. The Jews were granted tolerance—that is, they weren’t killed systematically—because, as Katz summarized, “of the hope that they would convert and step forward as witnesses of the Christian truth, by the latest at the End of Days.” ⁷ David Vital, in his book A People Apart, the Jews in Europe 1789-1939, states the case clearly: “The lesson of Exile in Europe was that as much by the sword as the word the masters of Christendom had sought to bring about if not the death of Jewry, at any rate its decimation; and, failing that, they had sought to ensure that Jews lived out their lives in the greatest possible moral and material squalor and degradation.”⁸ 

The Catholic Church, of course, was the central persecutor of the Jews for most of the time. The reformation brought no improvement. In fact, Martin Luther was a truly fanatical and despicable anti-Semite. To take a piece from Wikipedia: “Luther advocated setting synagogues on fire, destroying Jewish prayerbook, forbidding rabbis from preaching, seizing Jews’ property and money, and smashing up their homes, so that these “poisonous envenomed worms” would be forced into labour or expelled “for all time.” In Robert Michael's view, Luther's words, “We are at fault in not slaying them” amounted to a sanction for murder.⁹

I agree wholeheartedly with Hyam Maccoby who considered “Hitler the ‘the boil’ in which the poisons of ‘Christian society’ came to a head.” ¹⁰ 

Now, to my mind, Christians have not in any significant or real way taken responsibility for their dominant role in the persecution of Jews throughout the last two millennium, which clearly was the central source of animus that Hilter manipulated to attempt his ultimate destruction of the Jews.  Typical is this Catholic's attempt to shift the central blame to neo-pagan sources.

Look, I do believe that Wagner had some, though limited, culpability for setting the stage that led to the rise of the Nazi’s. When I have finished these posts the extent of his culpability should be clear.  But, to give him any fundamental blame is just asinine, particularly in the context of the overwhelming anti-Semitism—among many other calamities—of Western Civilization.

More on some of those calamities—like slavery, genocide or the subjugation of Native peoples, the Inquistion—down the line (but I need to finish the character section!) But let me leave with this, which pretty much accords with my thoughts:

Question to Gandhi on a trip to London: “What do you think of Western Civilization?”

His answer: “I think it would be a good idea.”

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End Notes

1 For this section, I am drawing on these sources regarding Wagner’s anti-semitism. I consider them fair and intellectually honest—though not necessarily correct in their conclusions or emphasis, which is notoriously difficult with someone like Wagner, who said and did so many contradictory things. Searching for the true Wagner is truly challenging, but these authors were diligent in their quest for balance. Katz, The Darker Side of Genius; Magee, The Tristan Chord, Appendix 343-380 and Aspects of Wagner, pages 19-28; Grey,  The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, pages 203-218; Brener, Richard Wagner and the Jews; from Deathridge, Muller, Wapnewski, the Wagner Handbook, the article "The Question of Anti-Semitism" by Dieter Borchmeyer, Millington, the Wagner Compendium, pages 161-164. If you read German, I have read very good things about Dieter David Scholz's Richard Wagners Antiseitismus. 

2 Katz, 5

3 Full text of the article is here. Warning though: the translator Ellis is considered to be horrible and makes the job of understanding what Wagner means much more difficult than it should be.  Here is a post from the blog Think Classical  that makes that point very well. This blogger’s interpretation of Wagner's article—he translated it himself and it is much clearer and less offensive—is here.  This translation problem is compounded by the fact that Wagner is normally an obtuse writer. Bryan Magee says of his lack of skill—on page 4 of Aspects of Wagner—“One forms the conviction that the prose was improvised, poured out without forethought or discipline—that when Wagner embarked on each individual sentence he had no idea how it was going to end. Many passages are intolerably boring. Some do not mean anything at all. It always calls for sustained effort from the reader to pick out meaning in the cloud of words. Often one has to go on reading for several pages before beginning to descry what, like a solid figure emerging from a mist, it is he is saying.” He is so unclear that people have come to diametrically opposed opinions about what his words actually mean. That said, the ending of Wagner's article, quoted out of context, has been intentionally misinterpreted in horrific ways that are clearly wrong if you actually read the article.
4 Grey, The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, page 203

5 I don’t have the book here in Hawaii, so this quote from the book description will have to do.   

6 Here and here are some sources if you want to read more.

7 Katz, page 6.  Katz also wrote From Prejudice to Destruction 1700-1933  if you want to read a full survey of the rise of the so-called "modern" anti-semitism.

8 Vital, 108

⁹ From Wikipedia.  Defenders of Martin Luther point to his tolerance for Jews in his younger years, but his tolerance ended when Jews—those stubborn cusses—didn't convert to his reform version of Christianity.  This is hardly a defense in my view.

¹⁰ As quoted in Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of Evil, 320