Dale Ahlquist responds

The American Chesterton Society blog is reporting that the Society’s president has drafted a formal reply to Adam Gopnik’s recent and trashy article about our man in the New Yorker. Whether the New Yorker will deign to print it is another matter entirely, but we can take some comfort in the fact that it has been written.

My own response will come later, once I’ve had the time to go over Gopnik’s article again. I certainly don’t plan on submitting it to the New Yorker, of course, but a shorter Outraged Letter might be sent to them anyhow.

UPDATE: The full text of Dale’s response, as posted in the comments on the Commonweal blog’s post about this subject:

To the Editor of the New Yorker:

Mr. Gopnik has besmirched the good name of the good Gilbert Keith Chesterton, even while sandwiching his comments between thick slices of praise. Maybe it’s just revenge. After all, Chesterton said, “New York reminded me of hell. Pleasantly, of course.”

For those of us who love Chesterton, we are always distressed to see him subjected to any vile charge. But we’ve gotten a little tired of the charge of anti-Semitism. He’s been absolved of that one too many times for us to count – from the tribute by Rabbi Stephen Wise to the official statements of the Weiner Library (the archives of anti-Semitism and holocaust history in London). Mr. Gopnik has added a new technique to making the charge stick – declaring that Chesterton’s admirers should not defend Chesterton against the horrible accusation. Hm. That is certainly one way to end the debate. I would meekly suggest that a better way would be for people to stop repeating charges that have already been dropped.

But we are still going to take Mr. Gopnik’s article as a sign of hope. Fifteen or twenty years ago, Chesterton was simply dismissed by the literary establishment as an anti-Semite and not taken seriously. Now he is at least being taken seriously before being dismissed as an anti-Semite. As the Chesterton revival kicks into high gear, we expect the trend to continue to the point where Chesterton is simply taken seriously without the obligation to mention anything about how Chesterton judges the Jews or how the Jews judge Chesterton.

In the meantime, we regret the unfortunate turn in Mr. Gopnik’s otherwise brilliant essay. There is something a little too desperate, too anxious in his attempt to prove that Chesterton is anti-Semitic. He is dancing as fast as he can to explain away Chesterton’s Zionism and his outspoken stance against Hitler for oppressing the Jews. (“I will die defending the last Jew in Europe.” What does it take to convince some people?)

Among the worn out arguments Mr. Gopnik uses is: Chesterton should not treat the Jews as if they are different because…well…they’re different. But far more troubling is his argument that Chesterton, the Catholic convert, has this pervasive nastiness woven into the very fabric of his philosophy. Whether consciously or not, Mr. Gopnik has broadened his implication to include the whole Catholic Church. Perhaps some future literary critic will be discussing Mr. Gopnik’s anti-Catholicism rather than Chesterton’s anti-Semitism. He can only hope that he will one day be considered so noteworthy a controversialist.

For now, however, the most important consideration should be of the following passage from Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man:

“…the world owes God to the Jews… [T]hrough all their wanderings… they did indeed carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle…The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of Israel. [W]hile the whole world melted into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe…”

Doesn’t exactly sound like the writings of an anti-Semite. Sounds more like someone who has a deep respect for the Jews. Also sounds like a pretty good argument for localism. Chesterton has thrown Mr. Gopnik’s main point into serious jeopardy. Either Chesterton is right to defend localism, which is what preserved the Jews, or localism is a menace and the Jews should have melted into their surroundings three thousand years ago. Mr. Gopnik cannot have it both ways.

Your servant,

Dale Ahlquist
President, American Chesterton Society

And the G.K. Chesterton Institute’s statement on the anti-Semitism question:

The question of G.K. Chesterton’s ‘anti-semitism’ has been thoroughly discussed in many biographies and journals. Chesterton certainly made anti-Jewish remarks, which today’s G.K. Chesterton Institute has no wish to condone or defend. These remarks, however, need to be undertood in their social and historical context, not in order to whitewash Chesterton, but to see how they do not invalidate his entire intellectual or spiritual legacy.

Above all they need to be read in the light of important statements he made repudiating anti-semitism towards the end of his life (he died in 1936, i.e. before the Second World War). As Kevin L. Morris writes in his C.T.S. booklet G.K. Chesterton (1994), Chesterton’s prejudice was largely political in nature, bound up with his opposition to plutocracy and the ’sleaze’ of his day, in which several prominent Jewish figures were implicated at the time:

‘far from being a racist, he ridiculed racism, had Jewish friends, admired individual Jews, valued the Jewish faith, wanted the Jews to have the dignity of a Jewish nation-state, and, with the rise of Nazi Germany, denounced the persecution of the Jews.’ ‘I am quite ready to believe now,’ he said, ‘that Belloc and I will die defending the last Jew in Europe’.

In the biography Gilbert (Jonathan Cape, 1989, pp. 209-11), Michael Coren noted Chesterton’s profound literary and personal friendship with the Jewish writer Israel Zangwill (not, by the way, his only such friendship), his cordial meetings with Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, and the important statement by the Wiener Library (London’s archive on anti-semitism and Holocaust history) that Chesterton was never seriously anti-semitic: ‘he was not an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on.’

For its part, the G.K. Chesterton Institute wishes to build on the positive legacy of Chesterton and the writers associated with him, purifying that legacy of the mistakes of judgment that afflict imperfect and inconsistent men and women embroiled in the controversies and ethos of their day. Anti-semitism is incompatible with the Christian religion, a religion that G.K. Chesterton did more than most to defend, explain and represent in a life and writings that many Jews have loved as well as Christians.

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