In a previous report I examined the resilient myth that the Wiener Library defends G. K. Chesterton from the charge of antisemitism. In this posting I raise a more complex question: what was the relationship that existed between the prominent Anglo-Jewish author, Israel Zangwill, and G. K. Chesterton?
Israel Zangwill (1864-1926)
Michael Coren stated in 1989 that Israel Zangwill was a friend of Chesterton, describing them as a “noted literary combination of the time.”[1] Joseph Pearce has likewise reported that Israel Zangwill was someone with whom Chesterton had “remained good friends from the early years of the century until Zangwill’s death in 1926.”[2] One of the pieces of evidence of a friendship, circumstantial at best, is a photograph of Chesterton and Zangwill walking side by side after leaving a parliamentary select committee about the censorship of stage plays on 24 September 1909. The photograph was originally used for the front cover of the Daily Mirror on 25 September 1909. As they were both prominent authors, it is hardly shocking that they would both attend and give evidence at such a gathering. The photograph probably demonstrates little beyond that they shared an interest in government censorship and that they left the meeting at the same time (there is simply no way to tell for sure). According to an entire issue of Gilbert Magazine (2008) that was dedicated to defending Chesterton from the charge of antisemitism, Zangwill and Chesterton “had respect and admiration for one another.”[3] The photograph of them leaving the select committee on censorship was used as the front cover of the issue of Gilbert Magazine.[4] It has also been used in a number of other books and periodicals about Chesterton.
Chesterton and Zangwill after a parliamentary select committee about the censorship of stage plays on 24 September 1909
Prior to 1915, Chesterton had on occasion referred to Zangwill in positive terms, describing him as a “great Jew,” “a very earnest thinker,” and the “nobler sort of Jew.”[5] Likewise, Zangwill wrote a letter in 1914 and another in January 1915 which together suggest that an amicable relationship may have existed for a time (possibly until 1916). In 1914, he wrote to apologise for not being able to attend a public debate with Chesterton and several other people about the veracity of miracles. The letter was friendly though somewhat equivocal in its expressed sympathy for Chesterton’s play.[6] On 25 November 1914, Chesterton was overcome by dizziness whilst presenting to students at Oxford. Later that day he collapsed at home. He was critically ill, and it was feared that he might not survive. Whilst he did not fully recover until Easter, his wife reported on 18 January 1915 that he was showing some signs of recovery.[7] On 19 January, Israel Zangwill wrote a letter to Frances Chesterton, in which he expressed his pleasure at hearing that her husband was on the mend.[8]
Whatever the nature of their relationship, it did not prevent Chesterton from accusing Zangwill in 1917 of being “Pro-German; or at any rate very insufficiently Pro-Ally.” He suggested that “Mr. Zangwill, then, is practically Pro-German, though he probably means at most to be Pro-Jew.”[9] Their so-called friendship also did not prevent Zangwill from describing Chesterton as an antisemite. In The War for the World (1916), Zangwill dismissed the New Witness as the magazine of a “band of Jew-baiters,” whose “anti-Semitism” is rooted in “rancour, ignorance, envy, and mediaeval prejudice.” He suggested that G. K. Chesterton provided the “intellectual side” of the movement, which was, he concluded, “not strong except in names.” He stated that “Mr. G. K. Chesterton has tried to give it some rational basis by the allegation that the Jew’s intellect is so disruptive and sceptical. The Jew is even capable, he says, of urging that in some other planet two and two may perhaps make five.” Zangwill stated that the “conductors” of The New Witness would “do better to call it The False Witness.”[10] In 1920, Zangwill stated: “Yet in Mr. Chesterton’s own organ, The New Witness – the change of whose name to The False Witness I have already recommended – the most paradoxical accusations against the Jew find Christian hospitality.”[11]
In February 1921, in a letter to the editor of the Spectator, Zangwill described the proposal by Chesterton’s close friend, Hilaire Belloc, that Jews living in Great Britain should be characterised as a separate nationality, with special “disabilities and privileges,” as “ridiculously retrograde.”[12] Zangwill criticised Belloc’s scheme of “re-established Ghettos” in other articles, letters and notes in 1922. [13] Zangwill also observed in his letter to the Spectator, quite correctly, that Belloc’s “fellow-fantast, Mr. Chesterton, would revive the Jewish badge and have English Jews dressed as Arabs.”[12] This was a reference to a proposal by G. K. Chesterton in 1913 and again in 1920 that the Jews of England should be required to wear distinctive dress (he suggested the robes of an Arab).[14] According to Chesterton:
“But let there be one single-clause bill; one simple and sweeping law about Jews, and no other. Be it enacted, by the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and the Commons in Parliament assembled, that every Jew must be dressed like an Arab. Let him sit on the Woolsack, but let him sit there dressed as an Arab. Let him preach in St. Paul’s Cathedral, but let him preach there dressed as an Arab. It is not my point at present to dwell on the pleasing if flippant fancy of how much this would transform the political scene; of the dapper figure of Sir Herbert Samuel swathed as a Bedouin, or Sir Alfred Mond gaining a yet greater grandeur from the gorgeous and trailing robes of the East. If my image is quaint my intention is quite serious; and the point of it is not personal to any particular Jew. The point applies to any Jew, and to our own recovery of healthier relations with him. The point is that we should know where we are; and he would know where he is, which is in a foreign land.”[15]
Whilst these letters and articles do not disprove the argument that Zangwill and Chesterton had an amicable relationship, at least for a time, they do suggest that Zangwill did not believe that Chesterton was guiltless of antisemitism. If Zangwill considered Chesterton a friend after 1915, let alone a pro-Jewish friend, he had a strange way of showing it. At the very least they problematize the argument that Chesterton could not have been antisemitic on the grounds that Zangwill was his friend, as from 1916 onwards Zangwill clearly came to perceive and describe Chesterton as an antisemite.
I would love to hear from anyone that has found any other evidence of a friendship or enmity between Zangwill and Chesterton (please click here to contact me).
Notes for the claim that Chesterton and the Anglo Jewish author Israel Zangwill were friends
[2] Joseph Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), p.446.
[3] Sean P. Dailey, “Tremendous Trifles,” Gilbert Magazine 12, no. 2&3 (November/December 2008), p.4. Gilbert Magazine is the periodical of the American Chesterton Society.
[5] See G. K. Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1911), xi; Letter from G. K. Chesterton to the Editor, Jewish Chronicle, 16 June 1911, p.39; G. K. Chesterton, Our Notebook, Illustrated London News, 28 February 1914, p.322.
[6] According to Zangwill, Chesterton was “putting back the clock of philosophy even while he [was] putting forward the clock of drama. My satisfaction with the success of his play would thus be marred were it not that people enjoy it without understanding what Mr. Chesterton is driving at.” The letter is cited in G. K. Chesterton, Joseph McCabe, Hilaire Belloc, et al., Do Miracles Happen? (London: Christian Commonwealth, [1914]), p.23. The letter is also quoted by Joseph Pearce in Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), p.205.
[7] See Joseph Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), pp.213-220 and Dudley Barker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (London: Constable, 1973), pp.226-230.
[8] Letter from Israel Zangwill to Frances Chesterton, 19 January 1915, ADD MS 73454, fol. 44, G. K. Chesterton Papers, British Library, London.
[9] G. K. Chesterton, “Mr. Zangwill on Patriotism,” At the Sign of the World’s End, New Witness, 18 October 1917, pp.586-587.
[11] Israel Zangwill, “The Jewish Bogey (July 1920),” in Maurice Simon, ed., Speeches, Articles and Letters of Israel Zangwill (London: Soncino Press, 1937), p.103.
[12] Letter from Israel Zangwill to the Editor, “Problems of Zionism,” Spectator, 26 February 1921, p.263. In this letter, he went on to state that the so-called Jewish problem does “not concern Mr. Belloc, and I would respectfully suggest to him to mind his own business.” See also “Mr. Zangwill and Zionism,” Jewish Guardian, 4 March 1921, p.1.
[13] In May 1922, Zangwill referred to Belloc on a couple of occasions whilst criticising a non-territorial “spiritual” Zionism. He stated in the Jewish Guardian that “what the victims of anti-Semitism (the unassorted or downtrodden of our race) require is not a spiritual Zion, which ‘is no more a solution of the Jewish problem than Mr. Belloc’s fantastic scheme of re-established ghettos,’ but a ‘solid, surveyable territory.’” See “The Degradation of Zionism,” Jewish Guardian, 12 May 1922, p.8. He made similar remarks in a letter to the editor of the Times newspaper on 8 May 1922. He also wrote twenty-five pages of unpublished notes and criticisms of Belloc’s book, The Jews (1922).
Religious Histories and Discourses 
I am sure you are well aware of how good a man Chesterton was; how he stuck up for the poor, the one man standing against the evil of Eugenics, many other examples-intrusion of the state into ordinary people’s lives.
Then this warm, loving man, full of innate wisdom and charity hears the word JEW and something happens; he becomes wild in his statements, rash, he doesn’t care what he says about them, what harm he will do (that is your implied cririticsm of him) because he has a secret hatred of these people. That anything he has to say on the Jewish isuue has no legitimacy because he hated jews irrationally.
The truth is, like Belloc, he had legitimate concerns about how Jewish practice affected Christian culture-especially rerards buisness, politics. But we never get onto that because we are simply called anti-Semitic. I wish for once that people who throw the word ‘antisemitic’ around would address what Belloc and Chesterton had to say.
Thanks for letting me post here.
Thanks James for your comment. I would like to offer a few thoughts in response.
Firstly, it is possible – indeed I would say normal – for people to have a mixture of praiseworthy and less admirable traits. In the case of G. K. Chesterton, his advocation of the poor and his rejection of eugenics and race-theory were to his credit. In fact, in my book on Chesterton’s stereotypes, I note his rejection of eugenics, and state that “Chesterton’s savage attacks upon race theory were to his credit, as was his hostility towards Nazi antisemitism.” Despite that, he frequently repeated in his fictional literature and his journalism deprecating stereotypes of Jewish greed and usury, bolshevism, cowardice, disloyalty and secrecy. I would say that his belittling stereotypes and caricatures about Jews were one of his less admirable traits.
Secondly, I’m sure Chesterton was in general, as you say, a loving man. I don’t think for a moment that he went “wild” or frothed at the mouth as he repeated his stereotypes and caricatures of Jews (and other groups – it wasn’t just Jews he stereotyped – for example, he also stereotyped “gypsies”). Unfortunately, it is not only “wild” and unloving people who have prejudices and accept and repeat stereotypes. Hostile myths and stereotypes about Jews and Catholics were pervasive and widespread in England during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and still circulate) – and I’m sure many of those who accepted the prejudices and stereotypes were also in general warm and loving men and women. As Jean-Paul Sartre observed in “Anti-Semite and Jew” (1948), “anti-Semitic opinion appears to us to be a molecule that can enter into combination with other molecules of any origin whatsoever without undergoing any alteration. A man may be a good father and a good husband, a conscientious citizen, highly cultivated, philanthropic, and in addition an anti-Semite. He may like fishing and the pleasures of love, may be tolerant in matters of religion, full of generous notions … and in addition detest the Jews.” That does not make their anti-Jewish (or anti-Catholic) stereotypes and prejudice any more acceptable or valid. It only demonstrates that most people are neither completely bad nor completely good.
You refer to Chesterton’s “legitimate concerns about how Jewish practice affected Christian culture-especially regards business, politics”. I am not entirely sure what you mean. You say “we never get onto that because we are simply called anti-Semitic.” The “we” suggests that whatever these so-called “legitimate concerns” are, you share them. I wonder what it is exactly that you think of when you refer to these so-called “legitimate concerns” about “Jewish practice”. I may be wrong, but I am guessing that your main concerns relate to some-sort of manifestations of finance. What evidence do you have that the manifestations that you have in mind – whatever they may – are Jewish “practices” rather than simply the “practices” of people in general (whether they be Protestants, Catholics, Jews, atheists, agnostics, and mixtures of these and others)?
Finally, the thing about myths and stereotypes – whether the stereotypes are about Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Roma, atheists or any other group you care to mention – is that they usually construct reality rather than reflect it. Of course it will always be possible to find half a dozen examples to back up a stereotype of any group if you go looking for them. That only proves that all groups are equally fallible and thus representative of humanity.
If, as you acknolwedge he attacked race theory ‘savagley’ why would he spend his time attacking the Jewish RACE?
That word stereotype. You seem to suggesst that ALL derogatory criticism of any races are ‘stereotypes’. Chesterton said there was no doubt that here was a sensuality to the Frence people he found distateful. And that is still held to be true by the world.. It is expressed in the literature, art. Is French sensuality a ‘stereotype’?
What people never mention is that he starts all his dicussion on the Jews with assertion that they were (or are) in a false position. An eastern race/culture in the west. Pretending to be western. That problem. That’s why he made the statment about dressing up as Arabs. Of course after the Holocaust this looks terrible. But it is always taken out of context.
In the ‘Problem of Zionism’ as you will know he writes of his exasperation that a leading Jewish politician Herbert Samuels was made the first local governer in Palastine. That he would be unbiased in the execution of his duties? That his race/religion didn’t matter?
I would like to to sak you what you think of his analysis of Jewish orthodox dress. The fact that he argues it is is a mismatch of European styles over the centuries. Showing the misunderstanding of an eastern race in the West. I think that is very powerful.
Until the Jewish body really looks at itself honestly, there will never be peace. Both belloc and Chesterton wanted above the pretence to to stop. Thanks for letting me post here
Thanks for your post. Chesterton often rejected race “theory”, which is to say biological pseudo-scientific theories about racial superiority. It is however possible to reject the pseudo-science of race theory and yet still have prejudices (whether religious, cultural, or otherwise), as Chesterton demonstrates.
I do not claim that “stereotypes” are synonymous with “derogatory criticism”. For example, the statement that the English love tea is a stereotype, but hardly a derogatory one. I have heard it said that “the Jews” are “smart” or “intelligent”. That is also a stereotype, as Jews are no more and no less intelligent as individuals than any other people, though it is ostensibly a positive stereotype, though sometimes it is argued that they are too smart, even scheming, so even positive stereotypes are dangerous. The point is that stereotypes take so-called traits, whether positive, negative or neutral, such as tea-loving, intelligence, sensuality, greed or cowardice, and exaggerate and generalise them to a people as a whole. I would argue that all stereotyping is lazy if not dangerous, and that all people should be treated, engaged with, and respected as individuals irrespective of their religious or cultural affiliations (or lack thereof), and it is thus best to avoid even the positive and neutral stereotypes. It is also worth noting that not all “derogatory criticism” is stereotyping. If I am derogatorily critical about one named person, I may or may not be being unfair or untruthful, but I am not stereotyping unless I generalise that criticism to everyone else in a particular group. So yes, it is possible to stereotype without being derogatory, and to be derogatory without stereotyping, However, quite often stereotypes and derogatory prejudice do overlap. In the case of Chesterton, he did engage in stereotypes of “the Jew” that were derogatory (for example, he argued that “the Jews” are greedy, materialistic, cowardly and unpatriotic).
In response to your final point, there is no such thing as “the” Jewish Orthodox clothing because there are many varieties of Jewish “Orthodoxy” (just like there are many varieties of “traditional” Christianity). I am guessing that you have Haredi Jews in mind when you refer to “Jewish orthodox dress”, but Haredi Jews are only one type of Jewish community. In fact, many if not most Orthodox Jews in Europe wear what you refer to as the “European style” of clothing, and would only be recognised on the street by their kippah (hat). Most non-Orthodox Jews (e.g. secular Jews, Liberal Jews, Reform Jews) wear “European” clothing and only occasionally if at all wear a kippah. Of course, “European” dress also comes in many varieties and is difficult to pin down, such as smart suits, jeans and t-shirts, gothic clothing, etc etc. So I question and doubt the relevance and the “powerfulness” of Chesterton’s analysis of Jewish dress in relation to what you refer to as a so-called “misunderstanding of an eastern race in the West.” Finally, there is no such thing as “the Jewish body”, just as there is no such thing as “the Christian body” or “the Atheist body” or “the English body”. Jews are individuals, and as individuals hold a myriad of differing views, beliefs, thoughts and ideas. It makes as little sense to say “the Jewish body” should look at itself honestly as it would to say that “the Christian body” should look at itself honestly, or “the English body” should look at itself honestly, or “the Atheist body” should look at itself honestly. All we can hope for is that all individuals of all stripes and affiliations look at themselves and others honestly and without pretence or prejudice (a good recommendation for all people in general).