ABSTRACT
Anthony Julius's important book, T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form
(1995), has provoked vigorous if belated discussion, following Tom Paulin's
review of it in the London Review of Books (9 May 1996). I participated in a letter to the LRB, and I should like to expand the points I raised there. As I
remarked, Julius has a real case to make about Eliot's anti-Semitism, though he
frequently overstates it. In his later life Eliot flatly denied that he was
anti-Semitic and professed himself puzzled and saddened by the charge; his admirers, in tum, have denied or minimised it. But the evidence Julius produces is not so easily dismissed. He writes as a Jew, in what he describes as
a deliberately adversarial spirit, drawing up an indictment of a major writer
whom he believes has insulted his people. He is an acute close reader; he is
also a lawyer by profession, and his book brings together a formidable range of critical and forensic skills. He acquits some of Eliot's poems of the anti-Semitism that other readers have detected there, but does so in order to
concentrate more effectively on the works where it is certainly present.
