THE METAMORPHOSES OF A ‘FABLE CONVENUE’

THE fact that I am devoting a chapter to the question whether Jews have imagination, namely whether they have the creativity to produce works of art, may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the corpus of literary and artistic work created by Jews, which encompasses works of art and literature of all types and reveals a vast and copious creative imagination. In the nineteenth century, a different image prevailed.

In Disraeli's novel Lothair (1870), a conversation takes place, in which one of the characters repeats Ernest Renan's theory: ‘Aryan principles … are calculated to maintain the health and beauty of a first-rate race. In a greater or lesser degree, these conditions obtained from the age of Pericles to the age of Hadrian in pure Aryan communities, but Semitism began then to prevail and ultimately triumphed. Semitism has destroyed art; it taught man to despise his own body.’ The hero of the novel responds to these words by saying that surely the Italian painters, who produced great works of art, were inspired by Semitism. His interlocutor rejects that line of defence by replying that Semitism gave these painters subjects, ‘but the Renaissance gave them Aryan art, and it gave that art to a purely Aryan race. But Semitism rallied in the shape of the Reformation and swept it away.’ Lord Leighton pungently expressed a similar view: ‘Polytheism is the arch-friend, as monotheism is the arch-enemy, of beauty.’ Gladstone, we recall, repeated this conventional opinion when he stated that the Jews lacked the capacity for art, science, philosophy, commerce, government, and so on.