G.K Chesterton's 'Father Brown' and the Jews

[R. Bryant]

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was one of the best-known faces in Christian apologetics from the turn of the twentieth century until his death in 1936 (in fact his work is still widely read to this day especially in the Roman Catholic community) and the most famous of his many contributions to fictional literature (then as now) were the 'Father Brown' stories. These follow a fictional Catholic priest surnamed Brown who rather improbably stumbles upon murder mystery after murder mystery.

Now Chesterton has not infrequently been alleged to have been anti-Semitic and while I disagree with labeling him as such; since strictly speaking he was anti-Judaic (i.e. opposed to Judaism) not anti-Semitic, it is undeniable that he held strikingly anti-jewish opinions and often made reference to jews in a negative light in the course of his work.

This can also be seen in his various 'Father Brown' as when we read in 'The Flying Artist' that:

'The most beautiful crime I ever committed,” Flambeau would say in his highly moral old age, “was also, by a singular coincidence, my last. It was committed at Christmas. As an artist I had always attempted to provide crimes suitable to the special season or landscapes in which I found myself, choosing this or that terrace or garden for a catastrophe, as if for a statuary group. Thus squires should be swindled in long rooms panelled with oak; while Jews, on the other hand, should rather find themselves unexpectedly penniless among the lights and screens of the Cafe Riche.'

Now Chesterton here is referring to jews in the light of being swindled out of their money and superficially this is not a negative reference to them. However when we consider that the Cafe Riche was; then as now, a famous place in Cairo associated with subversive and revolutionary politics. (1) Then it becomes clear that Chesterton is using the Cafe Riche to imply that while the jew is being swindled: he is a wealthy creature to start with (i.e. to be worth swindling he has to have money in the first place) as well as being a revolutionary (his association with a cafe associated with revolutionary politics) and an Asiatic (that the cafe is in Egypt and thus the jew is an alien to Europe).

Chesterton enlarges on the rule of the jews as the unscrupulous swindler of non-jews in the story 'The Curse of the Golden Cross' when he writes that:

'The feudal lord raised the money for the horse by selling the gold relic to a goldsmith in the town; but on the first day he mounted the horse the animal reared and threw him in front of the church porch, breaking his neck. Meanwhile the goldsmith, hitherto wealthy and prosperous, was ruined by a series of inexplicable accidents, and fell into the power of a Jew money-lender living in the manor. Eventually the unfortunate goldsmith, faced with nothing but starvation, hanged himself on an apple-tree. The gold cross with all his other goods, his house, shop, and tools, had long ago passed into the possession of the money-lender. Meanwhile, the son and heir of the feudal lord, shocked by the judgement on his blasphemous sire, had become a religious devotee in the dark and stern spirit of those times, and conceived it his duty to persecute all heresy and unbelief among his vassals. Thus the Jew, in his turn, who had been cynically tolerated by the father, was ruthlessly burnt by order of the son; so that he, in his turn, suffered for the possession of the relic; and after these three judgements, it was returned to the bishop’s tomb; since when no eye has seen and no hand has touched it.'

Now while the text ostensibly relates to the curse of the golden cross that is being passed from individual to individual (bringing misfortune to them all) until it is returned to the tomb of the bishop. We can see that Chesterton is here deliberately styling the behaviour of the 'Jew money-lender' as being a great social, economic and religious evil as he is necessarily suggesting that the 'Jew money-lender' will go to any lengths in order to ruin his gentile clients and will extract the last bit of wealth from them when they have been unfortunate enough to fall into his grasp. This then causes the relatives of the victims to descend on the 'Jew money-lender' and burn him at the stake for his crimes.

We can also read this as an analogy of the history of the jews in medieval Europe with their being allowed to operate as money-lenders without any checks and balances leading to numerous abuses (hence Chesterton's comment about the father having turned a 'cynical blind eye' to the behaviour of the 'Jew money-lender' i.e. let him run a-mock so that he may profit by pocketing his share of the profit made by the jew), which then causes the people; lead the relatives of those who formerly tolerated the activities of the jews, to swing from tolerance to hatred leading to the killing of jews in retribution for their crimes against the people.

That Chesterton is using this analogy to advance his intellectual position on the cyclic nature of anti-jewish violence (with which I agree) is demonstrated by his comments later on in 'The Curse of the Golden Cross'. To wit:

'‘No, of course,’ said Father Brown. ‘If it had been Tutankhamen and a set of dried-up Africans preserved, Heaven knows why, at the other end of the world; if it had been Babylonia or China; if it had been some race as remote and mysterious as the Man in the Moon, your newspapers would have told you all about it, down to the last discovery of a tooth-brush or a collar-stud. But the men who built your own parish churches, and gave the names to your own towns and trades, and the very roads you walk on — it has never occurred to you to know anything about them. I don’t claim to know a lot myself; but I know enough to see that story is stuff and nonsense from beginning to end. It was illegal for a money-lender to distrain on a man’s shop and tools. It’s exceedingly unlikely that the Guild would not have saved a man from such utter ruin, especially if he were ruined by a Jew. Those people had vices and tragedies of their own; they sometimes tortured and burned people. But that idea of a man, without God or hope in the world, crawling away to die because nobody cared whether he lived — that isn’t a medieval idea. That’s a product of our economic science and progress. The Jew wouldn’t have been a vassal of the feudal lord. The Jews normally had a special position as servants of the King. Above all, the Jew couldn’t possibly have been burned for his religion.’

‘The paradoxes are multiplying,’ observed Tarrant; ’but surely, you won’t deny that Jews were persecuted in the Middle Ages?’

‘It would be nearer the truth,’ said Father Brown, ’to say they were the only people who weren’t persecuted in the Middle Ages. If you want to satirize medievalism, you could make a good case by saying that some poor Christian might be burned alive for ‘making a mistake about the Homoousion, while a rich Jew might walk down the street openly sneering at Christ and the Mother of God. Well, that’s what the story is like. It was never a story of the Middle Ages; it was never even a legend about the Middle Ages. It was made up by somebody whose notions came from novels and newspapers, and probably made up on the spur of the moment.’'

In other words Chesterton held; as I have pointed out above, that anti-jewish violence was of a cyclic nature and intimately related to jewish behaviour: where tolerance caused the jews to become over-confident enough to abuse and insult the Europeans they lived around in the erroneous belief that they were protected/untouchable.

This lead in turn to a violent counterpoint when jewish abuses and insults became intolerable causing the jews; in the wake of mass anti-jewish violence, to become chastened for a time and begin to rebuild what they had lost after they had overextended themselves until they become increasingly confident, insulting and abusive once again.

Indeed Chesterton held that the jews even conceive of their god; Yahweh, as being a kind of spiritual bogeyman who really doesn't mean anything to them other than as a kind of superstitious graven image.

We can see this when he writes; in 'The Miracle of Moon Crescent', as follows:

'‘Nothing supernatural,’ continued Alboin, ‘just the great natural fact behind all the supernatural fancies. What did the Jews want with a God except to breathe into man’s nostrils the breath of life? We do the breathing into our own nostrils out in Oklahoma. What’s the meaning of the very word Spirit? It’s just the Greek for breathing exercises. Life, progress, prophecy; it’s all breath.’'

In the above passage Chesterton is describing how the jewish god; Yahweh, essentially means nothing to the jewish people since they aren't actually interested in worshiping him (i.e. 'what did the jews want with a god?'), but; as we read in 'The Red Moon of Meru', they are interested in worshiping images as a form of irrational superstition:

'“If you were to be utterly, unfathomably, silent, do you think you might hear a cry from the other end of the world? The cry of a worshipper alone in those mountains, where the original image sits, itself like a mountain. Some say that even Jews and Moslems might worship that image; because it was never made by man. Hark! Do you hear the cry with which he lifts his head and sees in that socket of stone, that has been hollow for ages, the one red and angry moon that is the eye of the mountain?”'

When we read that 'even Jews and Moslems might worship that image', because it 'was never made by man' Chesterton is suggesting to his readers that Muslims and jews are a superstitious alien people who will worship anything that they perceive was not made by men (and thus; in their small minds, by a god) and are as such very different from Christians who; as Chesterton frequently holds throughout his corpus, are more intelligent and discerning in their nature and relationship with the divine.

This alien nature of the jews to Western civilization is something that Chesterton brings out in the Father Brown story 'The Purple Wig' when he describes the following situation:

'Mr Edward Nutt, the industrious editor of the Daily Reformer, sat at his desk, opening letters and marking proofs to the merry tune of a typewriter, worked by a vigorous young lady.

He was a stoutish, fair man, in his shirt-sleeves; his movements were resolute, his mouth firm and his tones final; but his round, rather babyish blue eyes had a bewildered and even wistful look that rather contradicted all this. Nor indeed was the expression altogether misleading. It might truly be said of him, as for many journalists in authority, that his most familiar emotion was one of continuous fear; fear of libel actions, fear of lost advertisements, fear of misprints, fear of the sack.

His life was a series of distracted compromises between the proprietor of the paper (and of him), who was a senile soap-boiler with three ineradicable mistakes in his mind, and the very able staff he had collected to run the paper; some of whom were brilliant and experienced men and (what was even worse) sincere enthusiasts for the political policy of the paper.

A letter from one of these lay immediately before him, and rapid and resolute as he was, he seemed almost to hesitate before opening it. He took up a strip of proof instead, ran down it with a blue eye, and a blue pencil, altered the word “adultery” to the word “impropriety,” and the word “Jew” to the word “Alien,” rang a bell and sent it flying upstairs.'

While this passage is clearly meant as an overt satire of liberal newspapers and their prigish, prudish and politically correct editors: the example that Chesterton utilizes; with the liberal editor Mr. Nutt changing the specific term 'Jews' to the more general 'Aliens' in order to not 'offend' the jews or seem anti-jewish, indicates; like the earlier reference to the jews being swindled outside the Cafe Riche, that to Chesterton the jew is an alien and that when the newspaper editors of the period talked of 'aliens' then they actually meant jews, but the nature of the jew (as an Asiatic not a European as was popularly understood at that time) itself was alien: hence producing the pregnant pun about liberal newspaper editors, their language and jews in this passage (the literary device that was most beloved by Chesterton to make a point).

This alien nature of the jew is in turn responsible for his revolutionary associations and political behaviour; as we earlier saw in relation to the Cafe Riche in Cairo, and is represented by Chesterton in 'The Crime of the Communist' as follows:

'‘I fancy he’s destroying papers; or perhaps ransacking these men’s rooms to see they haven’t left us a letter. Or it may have something to do with our friend Wadham. Where does he come in? That is really very simple and a sort of joke too. Mr Wadham is experimenting in poisons for the next war; and has something of which a whiff of flame will stiffen a man dead. Of course, he had nothing to do with killing these men; but he did conceal his chemical secret for a very simple reason. One of them was a Puritan Yankee and the other a cosmopolitan Jew; and those two types are often fanatical Pacifists. They would have called it planning murder and probably refused to help the College. But Baker was a friend of Wadham and it was easy for him to dip matches in the new material.’'

This reference might require a slight explanation for the reader and this can be quickly given by understanding that Chesterton was a fanatical British patriot; in fact he was a significant part of the propaganda campaign to get the United States to declare war on Germany during the First World War, and regarded pacifism; like many at the time, as de facto treason and suggestive of subversive/revolutionary views.

Thus when he refers to the 'cosmopolitan Jew' (which is an insult not a compliment in Chesterton's vocabulary) as being a 'fanatical Pacifist': he means that the pacifistic views of the 'cosmopolitan Jew' are the key to understanding that said party is actually a subversive/revolutionary who hasn't a patriotic bone in their body (but has a great many treasonous ones).

In other words Chesterton represented the jews; in his 'Father Brown' stories, as being a rich, ruthless, superstitious and politically subversive group of people who were completely alien to Europe.

Or put yet another way: Chesterton wanted to boot the jews out of European civilization back to where they came from: the Middle East.


References
(1) http://www.economist.com/node/21541715

Semitic Controversies

[L.G. Morgan]

G.K. Chesterton's 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' on the Jews

Karl Radl

As I recently covered in relation to the famous Catholic writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton's 'Father Brown' series of novels: Chesterton took a severe disliking to jews and regarded them as a dangerous, subversive and usurious element within European civilization. (1)

I would like to briefly expand that analysis to another one of his famous novels: 'The Man Who Knew Too Much', which has been the subject of much comment and many adaptations over the years.

In it we find the following passage:

'“Do you think England is so little as all that?” said Fisher, with a warmth in his cold voice, “that it can't hold a man across a few thousand miles. You lectured me with a lot of ideal patriotism, my young friend; but it's practical patriotism now for you and me, and with no lies to help it. You talked as if everything always went right with us all over the world, in triumphant crescendo culminating in Hastings. I tell you everything has gone wrong with us here, except Hastings. He was the one name we had left to conjure with and that mustn't go as well, no, by God! It's bad enough that a gang of infernal Jews should plant us here, where there's no earthly English interest to serve, and all hell beating up against us, simply because Nosey Zimmern has lent money to half the Cabinet. It's bad enough that an old pawnbroker from Baghdad should make us fight his battles; we can't fight with our right hand cut off.”' (2)

Chesterton then continues in the same vein shortly afterwards:

'But if you think I am going to let the Union Jack go down and down eternally, like the bottomless well, down into the blackness of the bottomless pit, down in defeat and derision, amid the jeers of the very Jews who have sucked us dry – no I won't, and that's flat; not if the Chancellor were blackmailed by twenty millionaires with their gutter rags, not if the Prime Minister married twenty Yankee Jewesses, not if Woodville and Carstairs had shares in twenty swindling mines.' (3)

Now in the above two excerpts we can see that the two main characters (who are brothers incidentally) are describing their predicament in their having been forced into seclusion on an island because they have angered a powerful jew named Nosey Zimmern. Zimmern has half the British cabinet in his control, because they owe him money and thus they will jump to his command.

Zimmern's interests are not those of Britain and indeed he hails from Baghdad, which Chesterton is using; as he did Cairo's famous Cafe Riche in the 'Father Brown' novels, to emphasize the alien nature of the jews to Europe and also associate this alien nature with Zimmern not working in British interests since he is not British.

Further Chesterton also offers us alternative scenarios in relation to the exercise of jewish power similar to Zimmern's in that jews 'who have sucked Britain dry' are blackmailing the Chancellor of the Exchequer with their wealth, while the other method common to the exercise of this jewish power is to marry jewesses to powerful well-connected families and thus; moved by the needs of marital fidelity, they are placed in the pocket of the jews.

Chesterton elaborates just who in the British establishment these jewesses target later on the novel when he writes:

'Hawker, the old squire, had been a loose, unsatisfactory sort of person, had been on bad terms with his first wife (who died, as some said, of neglect), and had then married a flashy South American Jewess with a fortune.' (4)

Clarifying a few pages later that:

'Squire Hawker played both the bigamist and the bandit. His first wife was not dead when he married the Jewess; she was imprisoned on this island.' (5)

In these passages we can see that Chesterton is arguing that it is the profligate elements of the British aristocracy and gentry that the jewish families are targeting for marital unions and while these husbands aren't suitable to be husbands. Their name and social position makes the sacrifice worth it: in order to gain entrée into high society and thus 'arrive' in the social sense giving them more influence with the governmental powers that be through said social connections.

The attraction for the profligate aristocracy and gentry is in the large dowry and inheritance these jewesses come with thus offering them rescue from their creditors for life.

Thus the arrangement is two fold: the jews get social connections and influence, while the aristocrat/squire gets money.

In other words Chesterton here; like in his 'Father Brown' novels, is asserting that the jews are bribing their way into power in the British Empire via loaning money at interest to those in power and marrying their daughters to penurious members of the upper classes.


References

(1) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.co ... -jews.html
(2) Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1922, 'The Man Who Knew Too Much', 1st Edition, Harper: New York, p. 66
(3) Ibid. p. 67
(4) Ibid. p. 112
(5) Ibid. p. 126