Although David Herbert Lawrence’s (1885-1930) seemingly inexhaustible, diverse and controversial work includes novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations and literary criticism, he is best known for his novels, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, The Rainbow, and, especially, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Renowned as a working-class novelist whose work manifests the reality of English provincial family life, he pushed the limits of what was commonly acceptable in literary fiction, particularly with respect to human sexuality, and his most common themes include the dehumanization effect of industrialization and modernism.
Lawrence became renowned for the lyrical vibrancy of his writing and for his important efforts to describe subjective states of emotion, sensation, and intuition. At the dawn of psychoanalysis, he embraced Freudian psychology; brilliantly described the heretofore wordless world that exists below consciousness; and wrote a landmark case history on the Oedipus complex. Universally recognized as one of the most influential English writers of the twentieth century, he provided crucial insight into the social and cultural history of Anglo-American Modernism.
The obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was one of the most important court cases in the history of the free English press. A heavily censored abridged version of the novel had been published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf in 1928, but when Penguin Books in Britain published the complete and unexpurgated edition in 1960, Penguin was prosecuted for violating the Obscene Publication Act of 1959. However, the law provided that publishers could avoid conviction if they demonstrate that the work evidenced literary merit, and the jury’s “not guilty” verdict on November 2, 1960, established a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit material in the UK.
The scope of Lawrence’s antisemitism was such that some commentators maintain that it was his antisemitism and racial blood ideology that later made his books so popular in Nazi Germany. Among them was Bertrand Russell, who wrote that Lawrence “had developed the whole philosophy of fascism before the politicians had thought of it” and suggested that a straight line could be drawn from Lawrence directly to Auschwitz.
A common theme in much of Lawrence’s antisemitism is his equating democracy with the rule of Jewish financiers and his identifying Jews with driving materialism and the lust for wealth. Perhaps more than any of his other works, Kangaroo (1923) evinces the force of anti-Jewish animus, particularly with respect to their connections with money, as he uses various monikers for big-time Jewish financiers such as “Mr. Hebrew Rothschild,” “Lord Benjamin Israelite,” and “Marquis Tribes von Israel.”
Although Lawrence’s protagonist is Jewish authoritarian leader Benjamin Cooley, there does not seem to be any justification for his specifically choosing a Jew to serve as the charismatic leader of a fascist movement in the novel. Cooley yearns for the support of Richard Somers – who, according to most critics, is for all intents and purposes Lawrence himself – and, as much as Somers hates his subjugation by German militants, he thinks that is far preferable to being under the heel of Jewish financiers. Somers agrees that “Jewish financiers should not have more money than a simple working man” and Lawrence’s character, socialist demagogue Willie Struthers, exhorts the workers to take their fair share “and not leave it to a set of silly playboys and Hebrews, who are not only silly, but worse.”
In The Rainbow, Lydia is the daughter of a Polish landowner who marries a German woman for her money because he was “deeply in debt to the Jews.” In Aaron’s Road, Lawrence makes his landlady Jewish – again, with her Judaism being wholly irrelevant to the plot – and his character Argyle wishes that he could make slaves of all “theorizing Jews” and “Rothschilds.” It is his character’s long Jewish nose, and not the character himself, who smiles at a quip. In The Virgin and the Gipsy, a woman who comes to warm her hands at the gypsy’s campfire is described as having “a rather large nose, probably a Jewess . . . (and with) wide, rather resentful brown eyes of a spoilt Jewess.”
In Women in Love, Lawrence’s character, Birkin, calls cosmopolitan and avant-garde Jewish artist Loerke (who was based on Jewish painter Mark Gertler) – “a little obscene monster of the darkness” and suggests that Loerke must be Jewish because he “lives like a rat, in the river of corruption.” In Mr. Noon, he describes Alfred Kramer as having “a drop too much of Jewish blood in his veins,” and “Mr. Nosey Hebrew” was a generic money-grubbing character in one of his essays.
In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence writes that Connie was serving “a cold spirit of vanity . . . that was corrupt as any low-born Jew, in craving for prostitution to the bitch-goddess, success” and “you only bully with your money, like any Jew.” Connie (or the narrator) says that “when Jesus refused the devil’s money, he left the devil like a Jewish banker.” She berates her own husband, “You only bully with your money, like any Jew or any Schieber.” (“Schieber” was a common term at the time for a profiteer, a man who engages in shady deals rather than performing honest work.)
In The Captain’s Doll, a 1923 novella, Lawrence’s protagonist, Captain Alexander Hepburn, leaves post-World War I Germany for Austria after the suspicious death of his wife. Traveling with a young countess for whom he has amorous intentions, they stay at a hotel full of tourists, including “Jews of the wrong sort and the wrong shape,” an observation that is entirely gratuitous and has no relevance to the storyline.
Lawrence also regularly used antisemitic language in his private correspondence. In one letter, he writes that the Jew has “a little pebble at the middle of him, instead of an alive core.” In another, he notes that the Jewish style is “so uglily moral, condemning other people . . . Spring doesn’t only come for the moral Jew-boys – for them perhaps least.” And, in response to the birth of Lady Cynthia Asquith’s son, Simon, Lawrence grumbled about names with “a Judaic sound . . . Loathsome Judaea.”
He called his “friend,” psychologist Barbara Low, “a Jewish magpie. He advised Mabel Dodge Luhan (nee Sterne) not to turn her property into a dude ranch for “Jews and Jew-Gaws.” In a 1921 correspondence, he writes to her that Leo Stein – an American art collector and critic who was Gertrude Stein’s brother – is “a shitten Jew . . . a nasty, nosy, corrupt Jew.” In another letter, he sneers at publishers Edward Goldston and Marks as “those little Jew booksellers making all that money out of us.” In a post-World War I trip to Germany, he sees “moneyhogs in motorcars, mostly Jews,” who were the profiteers of the post-war collapse. He derisively refers to William Heinemann as his “Jew Ship” after Heinemann dared to return his poems in 1912.
In his first letter to writer Waldo Frank, Lawrence asked if Frank was Jewish and writes that “the material world dominates them [the Jews] with a base kind of fetish domination. Yet, they know the truth all the while. Yet, they cringe their buttocks to the fetish of Mammon; peeping over their shoulders to see the truth is watching them, observing their betrayal.” In a letter to Frederick Carter, he complains that “the more one gets used to [St. John]” – whom he characterizes sarcastically as one of the “moral Jew boys” – “the more Jewish he smells,” and he refers to the “special Jewish-Jewry symbolism and aim of the apocalypse.”
With reference to an anthology of American writing for 1927-1928, Lawrence writes that it is “pretty awful – and of course it is a Jewish selection.” And in a poem, Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, he cites America’s “dark, unfathomed will that is not unJewish.” In 1920, he acknowledged that he owed gratitude – up to a point – to the Jews who dared to handle his “dangerous books” when no one else would, but he felt compelled to nonetheless make clear that “I don’t really like Jews.”
Although Samuel Solomonovich (1880-1955), aka Koteliansky, aka “Kot,” was a close friend of Lawrence, he characterized him as a “Judas” because Kot was Jewish. Born in the Ukraine in 1880, Kot’s uncle was killed by the Cossacks in Russia before Kot emigrated to England in 1911, and many critics argue that Kot’s history was the basis for Lawrence’s description of a pogrom in The Rainbow.
Lawrence advised Kot to cease being a Jew and he excused broad historical societal antisemitism, attributing it to the Jews’ “personal conceit”: “This is the slave trick of the Jews – they use the great Jewish consciousness as a trick for Jewish conceit. This is abominable . . . a Jew cringes before men, and takes G-d as a Christian takes whiskey, for his own self-indulgence.” He discussed “why humanity has hated Jews” and concluded that Jews used religion for their own personal and private gratification.
In the July 15, 1925, correspondence exhibited here, Lawrence writes to “Seltzer” from Del Monte Ranch, Questa, New Mexico that he will have a talk with him when he comes to New York in the autumn en route to England.
Thomas Seltzer (1875-1943) was a Jewish translator, editor and book publisher who parlayed his language skills, including his native Russian and Yiddish, into work as a journalist and editor and who later established his own publishing venture, Thomas Seltzer, Inc. (1919). Universally credited with bringing Lawrence’s works to the American public, his work also brought him into contact with such authors as Henry James and Theodore Dreiser.
As a result of daring to publish several highly controversial writers, including particularly Lawrence, Seltzer was vilified by segments of the public and attacked by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (1922). Refusing to back down, he challenged the attempted government censorship in court; although victorious in the seminal People v. Seltzer, he was again charged with publishing “unclean” books (1923) – with Lawrence’s Women in Love the impetus for the charges – and fighting these censorship charges eventually led him to bankruptcy. In a wonderful historical quirk, Seltzer married Adele Szold (1906), the sister of Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah. Adele was a well-respected translator best known for translating Maurice Liber’s Rashi.
Relations between Seltzer, and Robert Mountsier, Lawrence’s American agent, are particularly relevant to Lawrence’s attitudes towards Jews. In letters to Mountsier, Lawrence would fulminate against the Jews – including a reference to Seltzer where he wrote “Oh dear, curse all Jews . . . I am a hebrewphobe (sic). . . I hate Jews; I need to learn to be wary of them all” – and then turn around and denounce Mountsier’s well-known antisemitism to his Jewish friends. For example, in a November 1921 correspondence to Kot, Lawrence wrote that Mountsier “is one of those irritating people who have generalised detestations: his particular ones being Jews, Germans, and Bolshevists. So unoriginal.”
Mountsier and Seltzer did not get along and, in Christmas 1922, Lawrence brought them together, along with Adele, at the Del Monte Ranch (see exhibit). Tensions continued and, early in 1923, Lawrence dismissed Mountsier, affirming his loyalty to Seltzer but, nonetheless, he apparently continued to communicate with Mountsier. Notwithstanding his initial support for Seltzer, he seems to recant in a September 1924 letter to Mountsier: “We are having the struggle with Seltzer that you warned me about. You were right and I was wrong about him.” When he moved from Seltzer to Knopf (“a Jew again”), Lawrence’s response to Seltzer’s disappointment was that “Jews are all Judases, and that’s how Judas always talks of other people’s treachery.”
Apologists have engaged in all kinds of contortions to try to explain away Lawrence’s antisemitism. First, the usual “everybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it” defense; Jews in his time were stereotypically portrayed in the media as alien materialists, to the point that the English dictionary included a definition of Jews as “a grasping extortionate money-lender or usurer” and “crafty dealer.” He was only reflecting the prevailing social ethic and, moreover, other leading writers were even worse. A second common rationalization for the Jew-hatred of various writers is that they were imaginatively creating fictional antisemitic characters, which does not mean that the authors are antisemitic. A third oft-used argument is that “some of the author’s best friends are Jews.” (In fact, Lawrence did have several Jewish friends and publishers, but even they were not exempt from his overt antisemitism.)
As to Lawrence in particular, some commentators ascribe his antisemitism to his psychological Oedipal problem that led to his attempted overthrow of the psychological oedipal-god, “Jehovah.” Others note that he was a race-obsessed writer who hated everyone and bore enmity for many other groups, not just for Jews. In fact, he admitted to being a misanthrope in a 1918 letter: “I feel such profound hatred myself, of the human race, I almost know what it is to be a Jew” (i.e., Jews dislike mankind and avoid human society). Still other critics rationalize the antisemitism in Lawrence’s work as merely a reflection of his general emphasis on “otherness.”
Finally, as some critics argue, while “cherry-picking” quotes from the works of great writers is ordinarily insufficient to establish an antisemitic animus, the antisemitism in Lawrence’s case is so inherent and pervasive in his work, his correspondence and his personal life, that no other conclusion is possible.
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Lawrence’s interest in Zionism began through his friendship with David Eder (1865-1936), one of the great and fascinating characters largely forgotten by history. A pioneering psychoanalyst, he was credited by Freud as the first practicing psychoanalyst in England. A passionate Zionist, he led early efforts to organize a Jewish battalion for the British forces during World War I – his purpose was to hopefully increase Jewish influence on the British – and post-war, he turned his full attention to establishing a Jewish homeland in Eretz Yisrael. From 1918 to 1922 he was the point man of the International Territorial Organization on the Zionist Commission established by the British to deal with the Jewish population, in which capacity he worked closely with Weizmann and put pressure on the British to abide by the Balfour Declaration and to increase pro-Jewish immigration policies, and from 1921 to 1927 he served as an elected representative of the Zionist Executive in Eretz Yisrael. Lawrence was a friend and great admirer of Eder’s, who some critics argue was the model for the character Kangaroo in Lawrence’s novel of the same name.
Lawrence initially rebuked Eder for leaving England and for identifying with the Jewish cause; as he wrote in 1917, “Barbara [Eder’s sister-in-law] says you are thinking of going to Palestine with the Jewish Contingent . . . Why do you go with the Jews? They will only be a millstone round your neck. Best cease to be a Jew, and let Jewry disappear.”
Ironically, while advising Eder not to go to Eretz Yisrael, he himself was seriously contemplating just such an idea. From his youth, Lawrence desired to establish an ideal utopian society, which he called “Rananim” after he heard Kot sing the Hebrew song Rananim Sadekim Badenoi (the actual verse is from Psalms 33:1, Ranninu Tzadikim B’Hashem – “The righteous shall rejoice in G-d”). A lifetime obsession that was never fulfilled because his friends declined to join him, he envisioned the creation of a little community where he would be surrounded by his friends – including specifically David and Edith Eder – and the “the happy few” and where “a few people together should bring to pass a new earth and a new heaven” completely detached from the rest of the world.
One of the places that he considered for establishing Rananim was in Eretz Yisrael. In a 1918 letter to Kot, he wrote “Eder is going with a Commission in a fortnight to prospect Palestine for Zion. I wish they’d give me Palestine – I’d Zionize it into a Rananim. Zion might be so good – save for the Zionists.” After Eder went to Eretz Yisrael in 1919, Lawrence’s enthusiasm for establishing Rananim there became even more passionate: “I feel now I must get out . . . I want to know about Palestine, if there is any hope in it for us. I still keep to my old hope that we may go away, a few of us, and live really independently . . . I like best to imagine my Andes. But if the Andes are impractical, and if Palestine is practical, then I’ll go to Palestine.” In another letter to Kot, he wrote “I have promised to go out to Palestine in September, leaving Frieda [his wife] in Germany. In Palestine I am to view the land and write a Zioniad. What do you think of it?”
In a pleading and passionate letter to Eder, he wrote “Oh, do take me to Palestine, and I will love you forever. Let me come and spy out the land with you – it would rejoice my heart into the heavens. And I will write you such a beautiful little book, The Entry of the Blessed into Palestine. Can’t I come and do the writing up? Because as a possibility, I have a hot little interest in Palestine.” Nonetheless, Lawrence felt compelled to add a dose of his familiar antisemitism: “But I have a horror of the dreadful hosts of people, `with noses,’ as your sister said.”
The commentators generally agree that Elder almost certainly had backed away from the prospect of having a “Zioniad” written by someone so unsympathetic to Jewish interests and so interested in a state so unrecognizably Jewish. Yet, Lawrence did not give up; even two years later, he apparently still yearned for Eretz Yisrael, as reflected in his March 1921 letter: “Barbara says you are off to Palestine again. I still think it must be better than England . . . I suppose you wouldn’t like me to come to Palestine for a couple of months, and do a Sketch Book of Zion. I’m sure I could make a very good one: and I have nothing much to do till June.”
Even while writing this, Lawrence understood that no invitation would be coming from Eder; as he wrote to Mountsier later that month: “A friend [clearly referring to Eder] half invited me to go to Palestine to do a book. Don’t suppose anything will come of it.” By 1928, he had abandoned all thoughts of going to Eretz Yisrael; as he wrote in his 1928 essay, Hymns in a Man’s Life, “the word Galilee has a wonderful sound. The Lake of Galilee! I don’t want to know where it is. I never want to go to Palestine.” His antisemitism may have been exacerbated by his wife, Frieda, who many critics say was an even worse antisemite. In a letter to Frieda’s mother, he wrote about the “semitic and cruel” environment in the Middle East and the “murderous will and iron of idea and ideal” that began with the Jews. In any event, Lawrence never went to Eretz Yisrael and his dream of establishing Rananim there failed.
