The Anti-Semitism of Oscar Wilde

[Karl Radl]

The Anti-Semitism of Oscar Wilde

The English playwright, literary critic and author Oscar Wilde is one of the most famous of all nineteenth century artistic and literary figures. Due to his homosexuality and resultant imprisonment in Reading gaol: Wilde has become something of a martyr figure on the left. They have lionized him as being 'ahead of his time' in respect to his sexual proclivities for which he suffered said gaol time.

Recently I decided that, after having heard a lot of worshipful warbling about Wilde, I would sit down and read all of his works. What I discovered rather surprised me: Wilde makes absolutely no secret of his great dislike of jews.

That rather flies in the face of the standard portrayal of Wilde, who held to liberal/socialist/anarchist beliefs for a good part of his life, as an ideological vanguard figure of the modern left. By contrast it suggests that Wilde was a man more in keeping with the founder of anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin, who described the jews as one of the primary foes that anarchists would face in the creation of a classless society. (1)

For example in Wilde's unfinished work 'A Florentine Tragedy': the main female character Simone states that the jews are usurers who are taught to take a little pain every now and again (i.e. the occasional anti-jewish insult or pogrom) in order that they might profit from it by patiently waiting till they can twist it to their material advantage. (2) This is remarkably like Bakunin's description of the jews as being an 'usurious exploiting sect' and it bears pointing out that Wilde almost certainly read some of Bakunin's works or anarchist tracts based on them.

Therefore it is reasonable to suppose that he agreed with Bakunin's ideas on the jews. This is made clear in his delightfully vicious description of a jewish theatre proprietor named Harry in his famous novel 'The Picture of Dorian Grey'.

To wit:

'About half-past eight I passed by a little third-rate theatre, with great flaring gas-jets and gaudy play-bills. A hideous Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt.' (4)

Wilde enlarges on this description later as follows:

'For some reason or other, the house was crowded that night, and the fat Jew manager who met them at the door was beaming from ear to ear with an oily, tremulous smile. He escorted them to their box with a sort of pompous humility, waving his fat jeweled hands, and talking at the top of his voice. Dorian Grey loathed him more than ever.' (5)

In the above two passages is clearly not complementing the jews as a people as Harry is described as a stereotypical exploiter and capitalist who preys on the poor and the downtrodden (the patrons of his theatre are the poor who are seeking cheap entertainment and craving distraction) to make his money.

Harry's fleecing of the poor is emphasized by the description of him as being fat, having a soiled shirt (i.e. Harry is sweating without doing any exercise hence does not have to toil all day with his hands like his customers) and having an 'enormous diamond' in the centre of said shirt (as well as on his fat fingers) indicating the scale of his wealth as well as his alien origins in comparison to the people he is exploiting (since the diamond industry was, and still is, dominated by jews and is a stereotypically jewish profession). (6)

Wilde also emphasizes Harry's jewishness by giving him the stereotypical physical characteristics of the jews: oily skin and greasy black ringlets.

For good measure Wilde also makes him a stereotypically jewish parvenu in that he scrapes and bows before anyone he perceives as important in order to flatter them to gain social and economic advantage. All while trying to imitate fashion by wearing a stylish and expensive outfit (his loud waistcoat and the enormous diamond on his shirt), but gets this wrong because he is merely imitating Englishmen and simply doesn't understand the understated nuance of true fashion and beauty because he isn't of English origin.

Wilde's portrayal of Harry as a stereotypical jewish capitalist exploiter within the paradigm outlined by Bakunin does not stop there as Wilde suggests that Harry is also in another line of business in addition to being a proprietor of a third-rate theatre.

We read that:

'On the first night I was at the theatre, the horrid old Jew came round to the box after the performance was over, and offered to bring me behind the scenes and introduce me to her. I was furious with him, and told him that Juliet had been dead for hundreds of years, and that her body was lying in a marble tomb in Verona. I think, from his blank look of amazement, that he thought I had taken too much champagne or something.' (7)

However:

'The old Jew was persistent. He seemed determined to bring me behind, so I consented. It was curious my not wanting to know her, wasn't it?' (8)

Harry wouldn't take no for answer though as:

'"The Jew wanted me to tell me her history, but I said it did not interest me."

"You were quite right.There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies."' (9)

Then it comes out why Harry is so insistent that Dorian meet Sibyl Vane (the young woman in question) when we read :

'I want you and Basil to come with me some night and see her act. I have not the slightest fear of the result. You won't be able to refuse to recognize her genius. Then we must get her out of the Jew's hands. She is bound to him for three years – at least for two years and eight months – from the present time. I will have to pay him something, of course.' (10)

In other words Sibyl has been weighed down by unpaid debt and has been enslaved by Harry in order to work it off. She does so by working in his seedy theatre as the lead actress, but Harry's desperation to 'introduce' Dorian to a woman he has power over is a clear signal that she is being prostituted out by him to any person of consequence who is attracted to her.

Harry is the quintessential jewish capitalistic exploiter as suggested by Bakunin in that he uses the non-jew for profit by any means necessary (including enslaving them via the medium of debt [suggesting that Harry is also a moneylender] and then forcing them into prostitution), while engaging members of his people as key members of staff in his operation. (11)

That Wilde saw the jews as enemies of the English working man is also seen when in his spiritual essay 'De Profundis': he remarks that jews in the days of Jesus Christ were the exact counterpart of the modern bourgeois philistine. They are portrayed as the enemy of true spirituality, art, beauty and more fundamentally the people. They are the enemies who both Bakunin and Wilde posited were to be toppled by the medium of class war.

In essence what Wilde is telling us here is that for him: the jews were the original bourgeois enemies of the people and as such need to be fought tooth and nail.

This is further confirmed when he refers, in his play 'Salome' (which is a thinly-veined retelling of the story of John the Baptist), to the jews as 'howling wild beasts' who tear each other apart over the details of religious rituals. This is compounded by Wilde's statement that the jews only religiously believe in things that they cannot see. Since that is the only way they can continue to attack each other and anyone else with impunity without having to meet the material reality of their beliefs.

The jews in 'Salome' are a reflection of the capitalist and superficially religious bourgeoisie that both Bakunin and Wilde condemned. Indeed when you read 'Salome' it is difficult not to read in it a nod to Bakunin's famous unfinished critique of religion: 'God and the State'. Since Bakunin, like Wilde, ascribes the jews and their superficial religious habits (which are a veiled justification for their exploitative practices) are the origin of much that presents itself as the morality of the bourgeoisie.

Therefore we can see that Wilde espoused the critical understanding of the jewish question in relation to capitalism and the exploitation of the working class that Bakunin argued for his various comments on the subject.

That said this militant anti-jewish attitude was not only derived from an acquaintance with works critical of the jews and Judaism, but from personal experience as well is made clear by Wilde's letters.

For example he writes to a friend from Rome in 1900 that:

'Five months under a Jewish physician at Paris not merely did not heal me, but made me worse.' (12)

In other words: Wilde is here linking the jewish origin of the doctor with his incompetence in treating his illness, which in turn made him worse not better over five long months of presumably insisting that his patient would get 'better soon' if he kept paying the fees the jewish doctor was charging anyway.

Wilde's opinion of jewish doctors is also evident in 'The Picture of Dorian Grey' when he writes that a jewish doctor was responsible for infusing the blood of others into a man in order to make him utterly evil. (13)

Wilde's most virulent statement on the jewish question is from a letter he wrote to a friend. He states:

'So Tartuffe goes out of my life ---

Of course the fact of his being a Jew, on his father's side, explains everything.

I hope on the day of St. Hugh of Lincoln there will be a general massacre – but I don't know [when] that day occurs. Do you?' (14)

The reference to 'St. Hugh of Lincoln' is to the ritual murder by jews of an English boy in Lincoln on 27th July 1255 AD and the resultant trial that followed saw eighteen jews hanged by the authorities. Wilde here is in essence stating that he would like to see a mass execution of the jews in memory of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln.

It doesn't get much more anti-Semitic than that: does it?

Therefore it is reasonable to suggest that the leftist attempt to portray Wilde as if he were a modern socialist misses a key aspect of his thought: Wilde hated jews, saw them as the principal exploiters of the English people and also wanted to see the jews subject to (at least one) mass execution.

References

(1) On Bakunin's ideas on jews see: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...-and-jews.html
(2) See http://www.planetmonk.com/wilde/pdfs/florentine.pdf (p. 12)
(3) Mikhail Bakunin, 1907, 'Oeuvres', Vol. 5, 5th Edition, P. V. Stock: Paris, pp. 243-244
(4) Oscar Wilde, 2009, [1890], 'The Picture of Dorian Grey', 1st Edition, World Library Publications: Franklin Park, p. 46
(5) Ibid, p. 69
(6) Bernard Wasserstein, 2012, 'On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War', 1st Edition, Profile: London, pp. 100-101
(7) Wilde, 'The Picture of Dorian Grey', Op. Cit., pp. 50-51
(8) Ibid, pp. 51-52
(9) Ibid, p. 52
(10) Ibid, p. 54
(11) Ibid, p. 48
(12) Anon., n.d., 'A Collection of Manuscripts, Letters & Books of Oscar Wilde', 1st Edition, Dulau: London, p. 76
(13) Wilde, 'The Picture of Dorian Grey', Op. Cit., pp. 150-151
(14) Anon., Op. Cit., p. 46

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This was originally published at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...car-wilde.html

[EDLIE Stampton]

Oscar Wilde was Irish by the way.
Not English.

[Karl Radl]

Originally Posted by EDLIE Stampton

Oscar Wilde was Irish by the way.
Not English.

Was he? *shrugs*

I tend to think of him as being English for some reason.

Thanks for the correction.

[EDLIE Stampton]

Originally Posted by Karl Radl

Thanks for the correction.

No problem.
It started getting to me when the boxer Barry McGuigan was doing the business.
They called him the best British fighter ever.
He is an Ulster man from the Republic of Ireland.
Not to confusing when you look at the real history.

Barry McGuigan - Highlights The Clones Cyclone - YouTube

Barry McGuigan - Highlights The Clones Cyclone - YouTube

[Sean Gruber]

Suddenly, I like the old poof.