The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [149]
Homer tells us that Zeus gave Hermes “an office … to establish deeds of barter amongst men throughout the fruitful earth,” and he has done his job well. He may be the twentieth century’s healthiest Greek god. He is present wherever things move quickly without regard to specific moral content, in all electronic communication, for example, or in the mails, in computers and in the stock exchange (especially in international money markets).
Hermes will exchange gifts, but he is quite different from any god of the gift because his connections are made without concern for lasting affection. He isn’t opposed to durable bonds, he just doesn’t care. In a strict gift-consciousness, then, or in any consciousness with a high moral tone, Hermes will be forced into the background. If your god says, “Thou shalt not steal,” Hermes will not leave (he’s too tricky), but he will have to disguise himself. He’ll turn his collar around and sell Bibles over the radio.
There are obvious connections between the mythology of Hermes and the European myth of the Jew. When the double law of Moses fell into disrepute, Christians identified themselves with the first half of the law, the call to brotherhood, and remembered the Jews primarily for the second half, the permission to usure. When a “limit to generosity” was dropped from the collective attitude, it reappeared in the collective shadow as a tricky Jew, skilled in trade and not part of the group. Furthermore, ever since the Diaspora the Jew has been seen as the uprooted one, the wanderer and the stranger. Jews in Europe were taken to be alocal, able to live in a place without becoming identified with it. Jews have always been attacked, therefore, in times of local nationalism.*
Ezra Pound’s image of the Jew is basically an elaboration of this mythology. First of all, for Pound the Jew was an international force, bearing allegiance to no particular country and therefore destructive to all. Pound tells the English, for example, that they used to have a fine empire, “but you let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your Empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew. Your allies in your victimized holdings are the bunya, that is, the money lender.”
Second, as this quote already makes clear, for Pound the Jew is the usurer, not simply skilled in finance but a sneak thief who bleeds the nation. The “kike god” is monopoly, and “the first great HOAX” of these evil people “was substitution of kike god … for universal god.” The main trick of Jewish bankers is to secretly steal the banking powers away from local governments. “After Lincoln’s death the real power in the United States passed from the hands of the official government into those of the Rothschilds and others of their evil combine.”
Third, for Pound the Jew is in charge of communication. Not only are the newspapers actually “Jewspapers,” but “the Morgenthau-Lehman gang control 99% of all means of communication inside the United States and … they can drown out and buy out nearly all opposition …” Jews fill the press and the radio waves with lies for their own selfish gain: “An artificial ignorance is diffused, artificially created by the usurocratic press …,” and so on.
Finally, as you can see, Pound’s Jew has remarkable powers. He secretly controls huge nations, he controls ideas and intellectual life, he controls the money and he controls “99% of all means of communication.” Surely we are in the presence of a god! And though Hermes himself is not marked by the greed that Pound finds in this character, all the rest is pure Hermes—the Protector of Thieves and God of Commerce, the Messenger of the Gods and the Lord of the Roads.
The character Pound seeks to describe has one final trait: he is diseased (or disease-transmitting). Pound once wrote a newspaper article with the simple