Passages from Poems, 1920:
from “Gerontion”:
My house is a decayed house
And the Jew squats in the window-sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I am an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.
from “Burbank with a Baedeker; Bleistein with a Cigar”:
But this or such was Bleistein’s way:
A saggy bending of the knees
And elbows, with the palms turned out,
Chicago Semite Viennese.
A lustreless protrusive eye
Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canaletto.
The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once.
The rats are underneath the piles.
The Jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs. . .
from “Dirge” (later excised from The Waste Land)
Full fathom five your Bleistein lies
Under the flatfish and the squids.
Graves’ Disease in a dead jew’s eyes!
When the crabs have eat the lids.
Lower than the wharf rats dive
Though he suffer a sea-change
Still expensive rich and strange.
Some prose passages:
In a letter to Eleanor Hinkley, March 1915, Eliot (age 26) writes of the “clever Jew undergraduate mind at Harvard,” one that is characterized by “wide but disorderly reading, intense but confused thinking, and utter absence of background and balance and proportion.”
Perhaps the most infamous prose passage comes from his Virginia Lecture of 1933, later published as After Strange Gods (1934):
“The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable. There must be a proper balance between urban and rural, industrial and agricultural development. And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.”
The Jewish Response:
Emanuel Litvinoff and “To T.S. Eliot” (ca.1950):
I am not one accepted in your parish.
Bleistein is my relative and I share
the protozoic slime of Shylock, a page
in Sturmer, and, underneath the cities,
a billet somewhat lower than the rats
[...]
So shall I say it is not eminence chills
but the snigger from behind the covers of history,
the sly words and the cold heart
and footprints made with blood upon a continent?
Let your words
tread lightly on this earth of Europe
lest my people’s bones protest.
George Steiner in an April 1971 letter to Listener: “The obstinate puzzle is that Eliot’s uglier touches tend to occur at the heart of very good poetry (which is not the case of Pound).”
Anthony Julius, T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1995): 1) Eliot wrote anti-Semitic poetry and prose, which makes him an anti-Semite; 2) Eliot’s anti-Semitic poetry is original and imaginative, and therefore cannot be dismissed as an inconsequential blemish in his oeuvre.
Gabriel Josipovici in a 1996 Jewish Chronicle review: “[Jews like Anthony Julius] do themselves (us) a disservice when they undertake this sort of task. . .I would urge [Julius] and other Jews obsessed with unearthing anti-Semitism to turn the spotlight on themselves occasionally and ask whether their activities are motivated solely by the impeccable scientific desire to bring out the truth.”