ABSTRACT
Eliot’s antisemitism has been a subject of much discussion.63 Hard-core devotees continue to deny that he was antisemitic at all. Others admit, and even exaggerate, his antisemitism, but regard it as of no significance, a mere pathological aberration of an otherwise great writer. The Times obituarist of Ezra Pound, for example, referred to Eliot’s ‘almost insane physical nausea’ about Jews, contrasting this unfavourably with Pound’s ‘anti-Jewishness’ which was ‘simplistic and ideological’.64 A close study of Eliot’s antisemitism, however, shows that it was even more ideological than Pound’s, being derived from the cultural and religious tradition of Christendom, as mediated, in particular, by the romantic medievalism of Henry Adams and Charles Maurras. We shall see, moreover, that antisemitism is a natural concomitant of the sacrificial view of life which was Eliot’s inspiration from the time of his earliest writings.
