Anti-Semitism is a light sleeper. Look at Agatha Christie

I agree that antisemitism is a light sleeper.  It suffuses the British Left to this day. See  here (scroll down) and here and here and here and here and here.  But I don't think there is anything significant in the antisemitism of Agatha Christie.  She was simply a person of her time.  And the whole world (more or less) was antisemitic before WWII.  Do I have to refer to FDR sending Jewish refugees from Hitler back to Germany?  Christie didn't know any better.  The modern-day Left should

It should also be remarked that not all antisemitism is the same.  At the height of the British Empire there were laws in Britain restricting what Jews could do.  And Britons generally at that time thought that the British were clearly a superior race.  Yet the British Conservative party elected as their leader a man most unapologetic about his "Hebrew" origins -- Disraeli.  And Disraeli had a most distinguished subsequent career as British Prime Minister.  As Bismarck said:  "Der alte Jude.  Das ist der Mann". ("The old Jew.  That's the man").

So compare antisemitism among conservatives with the antisemitism of the socialist Hitler. Anybody who can't see a huge difference isn't thinking.  It's the hate that makes the difference and hate is what makes you a Leftist -- JR

In reflections on Perspectives: The Mystery of Agatha Christie – in which David Suchet, the most popular of all Hercule Poirots, looked at her famous disappearance in 1926 – Matthew Sweet wonders why Christie’s work is so unexamined.  She was always pretty political in her way. As a child I was perplexed by the intrusion into her later books of her burning resentment of high taxes.  And because my parents deplored anti-Semitism, I noticed jarring anti-Jewish references in some of those she published pre-war.

Christie’s anti-Semitism was not eradicated by the horrors of the Holocaust, though it no longer disfigured her books. Sweet recalls Christopher Hitchens describing dinner chez Christie in the 1960s, when "the anti-Jewish flavour of the talk was not to be ignored or overlooked, or put down to heavy humour or generational prejudice. It was vividly unpleasant."

She was, of course, by no means alone.  I’ve been reading the canon of that fine crime-writer, Cyril Hare, a judge whose Tragedy at Law is both a superb puzzle and a marvellous guide to the almost unbelievable pomposity of an untrammelled bench. It’s the casual anti-Semitism in dialogue that gets one, eg, the throw-away description of someone as a "sub-Aryan". Yet Christie and Hare were decent, civilised, well-read people who abhorred cruelty.

I’ve three thoughts on this. Firstly, looking at the anti-Semitism that so often  lurks under the guise of anti-Zionism, we should remember Conor Cruise-O’Brien’s description of anti-Semitism as “a light sleeper”.  The language may have changed, but the instincts remain.

Secondly, is it because of the contempt of the intelligentsia for crime writers that so little attention has been paid to the politics of so important and influential a writer as Christie?
And, thirdly, the call for retrospective censorship is always stupid: there’s no better way to understand the fears and prejudices of any period than by reading its unexpurgated fiction.

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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).