• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 798 0

title “The Jew: Disease Incarnate.” The sickness is sexual: “Jewish control is the syphilis of any gentile nation”; Jews are the “gonorrhoeal elements” of international finance. “Usury and sodomy the Church condemned as a pair, to one hell, the same for one reason, namely that they are both against natural increase.” The image here is an extension of the natural metaphor out of which Pound works (as natural increase is sexual, so its enemy is a sexual disease), but I don’t think we will get very far trying to connect this part of Pound’s Jew to Pound’s ideas. Nor does it have much to do with Hermes. It has to do with psychological repression. An aspect of the self forced to remain in the shadow invariably takes on a negative cast not at all inherent in it. It becomes dirty or violent, trivial or huge, diseased or evil. To integrate the shadow with the ego involves holding a sort of dialogue with it in which these negative aspects fall away and the repressed element comes forward in a simplified form, accepted as “no big thing” into the daylight self. So long as the ego refuses commerce with the shadow, however, the shadow will always seem repulsive.

There is a strange fairy tale in the brothers Grimm collection which pulls together all the threads of our story so far— Pound’s generosity toward his fellow artists, his turn toward money and political economy, his devotion to Mussolini, his willfulness, his Jew, and the consequences of repression. The tale is at once a drama of the Jew in the shadow of the European Christian and a parable of Ezra Pound’s life.

The Jew in the Hawthorn Hedge

Once upon a time there was an honest and hardworking servant who worked for a rich miser. The servant was always the first one out of bed in the morning and the last one in bed at night. Whenever there was a hard task no one else wanted to tackle, the servant would take it in hand. He never complained; he was always jolly.

The miser kept the servant around by never paying him his wages. After three years, however, the servant announced that he wanted to see a bit of the world and he asked for his pay. The miser gave him three farthings, one for each year, saying, “That’s a bigger and handsomer wage than you would have received from many a master.” The good servant, who understood little about money, pocketed his capital and went on his way, up hill and down dale, singing and skipping to his heart’s content.

Soon the servant met a little dwarf who asked him for help, saying that he was poor and needy and too old to work. The kindhearted servant took pity on the dwarf and he handed over his three farthings. Then the dwarf said, “Because you’ve been so good to me, I shall grant you three wishes.” “All right,” said the servant, “I’ll wish myself first a blowgun that will hit everything I aim at; secondly, a fiddle which, when I play it, will make everybody dance who hears the sound; and thirdly, if I make a request of anybody, that he may not refuse it.”

The wishes granted, the servant went merrily on his way. Soon he met a Jew who was standing by the road, listening to a bird singing in the top of a tall tree. “Miracle of God!” the Jew cried, “to think that such a small creature should have such an awfully powerful voice! If only it were mine!” Whereupon the servant shot the bird with his newly acquired blowgun. It fell dead into a hawthorn hedge.

“You dirty dog,” said the servant to the Jew, “go and fetch your bird!” “Oh my!” said the Jew. “If the gentleman will drop the ‘dirty,’ the ‘dog’ will come on the run! I’m willing to pick up the bird, for after all, you hit it.” He lay on the ground and began to work his way into the bushes. When he was in the middle of the hawthorns, a spirit of mischief got the better of the good servant: he took up his fiddle and started to play. The Jew began to dance wildly; the thorns tore his coat, combed his goatee, and pricked him all over. The Jew begged the servant to stop but he wouldn’t, thinking, “You’ve skinned plenty of people; now the hawthorn hedge won’t be any kinder to you.” Finally the