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Old May 24th, 2015 #1
Karl Radl
The Epitome of Evil
 
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Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: The Unseen University of New York
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Default Arthur Conan Doyle, Zionism and the Jews

Arthur Conan Doyle, Zionism and the Jews


Arthur Conan Doyle is one of the most famous novelists and short story writers of all time. He is, of course, best known for his fictional consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, but the more literary among my readers may know that he was also responsible for creating another famous character in the form of Professor Challenger.

The thing about Conan Doyle that isn't usually appreciated, unless you happen to have read a biography of him, is that he was a man of intense religiosity, but yet also a kind of eternal optimist, which bordered on the point of religiosity, about the prospect for 'progress'. Conan Doyle began life as a Roman Catholic at the Jesuit college of Stonyhurst, but had had severe religious doubts either before he enrolled in the school (1) or after he had visited the Tower of London during as an excursion during one of the school holidays. (2)

He subsequently broke with Catholicism in Edinburgh in the early 1880s (3) and came to believe in a vague kind of Unitarian deism, (4) which involved his admission into the order of Freemasons at Phoenix Lodge No. 257 in Southsea, Portsmouth. (5) I have discussed this in a previous article, but it is worthwhile pointing out that Conan Doyle did this primarily because he believed (as was common at the time) that the Freemasons had some special store of occult knowledge. (6) It this that Conan Doyle wanted to access and when he discovered the truth (that the doctrines were largely a bunch of mumbo-jumbo and there was pretty much nothing else to it); he completely lost interest. (7)

A similar such situation prevailed in Conan Doyle's interest in spiritualism and other associated occult matters such as the existence of ghosts, fairies/gnomes (aka 'the little people'), mediums, spirit guides, the ideas behind theosophy and so on. This lead him in large part to the intense hatred of Roman Catholicism that he displayed, particularly later in his life, after his formal break from the Church. (8)

This intense hatred of the Catholic Church and his intense interest in spiritualism and, what we may reasonably term, the occult lead (largely accidentally) to Conan Doyle meeting and befriending a jew named Erik Weisz on an ocean liner on his way to New York.

Erik Weisz is better known to history by his stage name: Harry Houdini.

Conan Doyle and Houdini's friendship was odd precisely because they were not the type of men who usually get on with each other, (9) but they appear to have bonded over their shared belief in 'life after death'. (10) That said however the relationship between Houdini and Conan Doyle was an abusive one with the latter the continual victim of the former's malice.

For example Houdini had the famous photographs of the Cottingley Fairies analyzed and declared to be forgeries in 1920 (11) even though the actual photographs weren't actually debunked till the 1970s. (12) Although I am hardly sympathetic to Conan Doyle's arguments for the photos being genuine; (13) Houdini's conduct towards Conan Doyle was hardly that of a friend as it isn't friendly to launch ad hominems against someone in public.

It is a minor miracle, and testimony to his good-natured and well-meaning disposition, that Conan Doyle continued to be good friends with Houdini (14) despite the latter's provocative antagonism to the former on a professional and a personal level.

Another instance of the abuse that the rather good-natured Conan Doyle suffered at the hands of Houdini occurred in 1924 when Houdini attacked Conan Doyle in ad hominem in the interim report of the Scientific American's Committee on mediums. Houdini labelled Conan Doyle as 'imagining he was the Messiah' and stated that Conan Doyle's continued freedom to write and publish was a menace to the sanity and health of the public as he was deliberately misleading them. (15)

This is hardly the behaviour of a friend and is moreover is the kind of nasty character assassination that is usually reserved for the bitterest of enemies.

When you factor in that Houdini took a great deal of joy in debunking the mediums that Conan Doyle sent to him for his attention to 'prove' the spiritualism's contentions, (16) which can be reasonably as an extension of Conan Doyle and Houdini's arguments over the existence of the supernatural. (17) As well as Houdini's tricking Conan Doyle and his wife into believing he himself was a medium (18) and making a fool of them.

It adds up to a rather unflattering picture of Houdini's malicious trickery of Conan Doyle and his systematic character assassination of a man who believed he was his friend. Unfortunately Conan Doyle never seems to have recognized this and spent a great deal of time after Houdini's death in 1926 trying to use mediums to communicate with Houdini's soul in the spirit world. (19)

This picture of Conan Doyle's almost pathological altruism and good-will towards jews is a thread that extended throughout his whole life in dealing with them until (possibly) right at the end of his life. As one of his biographers, Julian Symons, has noted Conan Doyle hated what he perceived as 'injustice' all his life (20) and this was a fact that was mercilessly exploited by jews around him.

Two obvious of examples of this exploitation occur in Conan Doyle's life.

The first is his relationship with Zionism and more particularly the jewish novelist and prominent Zionist leader: Israel Zangwill. Conan Doyle had met Zangwill through their mutual contributions to Jerome K. Jerome's magazine 'The Idler' (21), which operated from 1892 to 1911, and Conan Doyle had (with some reason I would opine) come to regard Zangwill as one of the most talented of the littérateurs of his day. (22)

Zangwill then promptly began to lure the famous author into Zionist causes and invited him to sit on the London Committee of the General Jewish Colonising Organisation; an invitation that Conan Doyle readily accepted. (23)

It is worth remembering that at this time the jews were agitating for the view that they were a 'small helpless people' who were being abused and murdered by 'evil despots' (particularly in the Russian Empire) and as such needed the assistance of well-meaning people everyone to assist them to acquire their own state.

That this was the hook that Zangwill used to lure Conan Doyle into pro-Zionist activity is very evident from the text of Conan Doyle's letter to Zangwill on 5th November 1905, which references the Russian pogroms of that year (in response to the jewish-dominated revolution of 1905).

I quote:

'I have thought much of your scheme for the resettlement of the refugee Jews – of course I entirely sympathize with it. It seems monstrous and inhuman that on all the face of God's earth there should be no resting place for these unhappy people, who driven out of one land are refused admission to all others.' (24)

Notice that Conan Doyle's language is very much focused on the fact that the jews of Russia have been treated 'unjustly' by both the Russian Empire and also other countries. It is then clear as such that Conan Doyle is not endorsing the sort of jewish racial nationalism that Zionism started to become around this time (cf. Ze'ev Jabotinsky's arrival in the Zionist movement two years before in 1903), but rather Zionism as a solution to the jewish question as was commonly argued before the Balfour agreement in 1917 and the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

Conan Doyle next words are even more revealing in that he states:

'I would do anything I could to help them to a permanent home.' (25)

However he specifically names Zangwill's preferred homeland in East Africa, of which the most notable example was the Kenya scheme, rather than Palestine as being where he wants the jews to create their state (26) and wishes Zangwill every success in his endeavours. (27)

In understanding this it is important to note that Conan Doyle also financially supported a working class anti-Semitic organization in East London called 'The British Brothers League'; (28) who were active at the same time as Conan Doyle was on said Zionist committee. (29)

I will expand upon this issue in detail in a separate article, but suffice to say that this can only be understood by viewing Conan Doyle, much like his friend Winston Churchill, (30) as a believer that aiding Zionist jews to create their own state helped further British interests. In Conan Doyle's case the logic was simply that British interests were not served by taking in the refugee jews from Russia into the British population and that instead creating a jewish state in a sparsely populated part of the British Empire like East Africa would fulfill both imperial interests and those of what he perceived to be 'justice'.

As such then we can see that Conan Doyle's Zionism was rather different to the Zionism of today and it is extremely unlikely he would have appreciated or supported what Zionism has transformed into.

However Zangwill did never-the-less manage to successfully exploit Conan Doyle's sense of justice to help his cause, while also playing on Conan Doyle's love of sport to suggest how 'vigorous' the jews of that time were.

This can be seen in Zangwill's regaling Conan Doyle with stories about the prowess of jewish boxers in London, which Conan Doyle interpreted as 'self-defense training' against injustice. (31) These stories even found their way into Conan Doyle's stories as can be seen by the reference to the boxing prowess of one 'Herman Cohen' in his 1899 short story 'The Croxley Master'.

In essence Zangwill set out to deliberately inveigle Conan Doyle, as a celebrity author, into the cause of Zionism by playing to his strong sense of justice and also his personal interest in sport to make the jews look like a far more attractive proposition to back than they in fact were.

The second example of jewish exploitation of Conan Doyle is related to the trial of Oscar Slater.

Slater, who was born Oscar Leschziner, was a jew who had fled to United Kingdom to avoid military service in the German army. In May 1909 Slater was sentenced to death for the murder of an 82 year old Scottish widow named Marion Gilchrist in Glasgow, but due to a public petition of 200,000 signatures Slater's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

Following the publication by of the 'Trial of Oscar Slater' by the lawyer William Roughhead in 1910, which argued that Slater had been subject to a miscarriage of justice. Jewish acquaintances and friends of Conan Doyle's immediately wrote to him playing on his sense of justice and imploring him to intervene for Slater in the public arena. (32)

The result was Conan Doyle's 1912 work 'The Case of Oscar Slater', which was partly responsible for helping keep the public furor alive that eventually lead to Slater's release in July 1928. It appears that Conan Doyle later regretted his entry into the affair as Slater was exactly the kind of man that he despised. (33)

Indeed Conan Doyle wrote to Slater personally in 1928 following the latter's public agitation for a larger amount of compensation, he had already received £6,000 (enough to purchase 6-7 average houses at the time), and was trying to get Doyle to aid him in his shenanigans.

In this letter Conan Doyle stated in no uncertain terms to Slater that:

'If you are indeed quite responsible for your actions, then you are the most ungrateful as well as the most foolish person whom I have ever known.' (34)

In other words Conan Doyle realized he had been duped and that the 'justice' he had fought for may well have been, in fact, 'injustice'.

Thus we can see from these two examples where Conan Doyle's amiable (and essentially gullible) nature was successfully exploited by jews to their material and political advantage.

Yet in 1929 when Conan Doyle's 'German' friends, who were almost all jewish, began trying to convince him to take their children in so they could be away from Germany and the rise to political prominence of the NSDAP in the elections of that year. (35)

Conan Doyle seems to have refused their entreaties, but I cannot find reference to any particular reason (despite his almost clinical Germanophobia) (36), but it may have been because he finally become wise to the jews who had continually exploited and tricked him into doing their bidding and supporting their socio-political causes for over thirty years of his life.

I'd certainly like to think, and ardently hope that, this was the case.


References


(1) Michael Coren, 1995, 'Conan Doyle', 1st Edition, Bloomsbury: London, p. 14
(2) Charles Higham, 1976, 'The Adventures of Conan Doyle: The Life of the Creator of Sherlock Holmes', 1st Edition, Hamish Hamilton: London, pp. 39-40
(3) Ibid, p. 49
(4) Coren, Op. Cit., pp. 27-28
(5) Ibid, pp. 73-74; Andrew Lycett, 2007, 'Conan Doyle: The Man who created Sherlock Holmes', 1st Edition, Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London, p. 129
(6) See http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...eemasonry.html
(7) Lycett, Op. Cit., p. 129
(8) Ibid, pp. 412-413; 430
(9) Higham, Op. Cit., p. 262
(10) Coren, Op. Cit., p. 178
(11) Higham, Op. Cit., p. 265
(12) On this see: http://hoaxes.org/photo_database/ima...ingley_fairies
(13) For these see Arthur Conan Doyle, 1922, 'The Coming of the Fairies', 1st Edition, George Doran: New York
(14) Higham, Op. Cit., pp. 276-277
(15) Lycett, Op. Cit., p. 402
(16) Daniel Stashower, 2000, 'Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle', 1st Editon, Penguin: London, p. 365
(17) Higham, Op. Cit., pp. 284-285
(18) Ibid, pp. 288-289
(19) Ibid, pp. 321-322
(20) Julian Symons, 1979, 'Portrait of an Artist: Conan Doyle', 1st Edition, Andre Deutsch: London, p. 79
(21) Stashower, Op. Cit., p. 135
(22) Harold Orel (Ed.), 1991, 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Interviews and Recollections', 1st Edition, MacMillan: Basingstoke, p. 111
(23) Lycett, Op. Cit., p. 278
(24) Quoted in Coren, Op. Cit., p. 72
(25) Quoted in Ibid.
(26) Ibid.
(27) Ibid, p. 73
(28) Lycett, Op. Cit., p. 278
(29) See: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/p...s/britain4.htm
(30) Lycett, Op. Cit., pp. 262-263
(31) Coren, Op. Cit., p. 89
(32) Ibid, pp. 129-130
(33) Symons, Op. Cit., p. 79
(34) Quoted in Ibid, p. 82
(35) Coren, Op. Cit., p. 197
(36) Implied in Stashower, Op. Cit., pp. 297-316

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