Bruce Jackson first told your editor a compact version of his Steiner story a few months ago after he read a critique of a collection of Steiner’s pieces originally published 20 years ago in First. I passed on his tale to a friend who responded: “The Steiner story’s a good one. But besides the bigotry–the main takeaway–it shows him, and not for the first time, to be…addled:
Who are all these Chinese chess masters? Are Jews particularly over-represented at the highest levels of chess? Armenians, like Petrossian and Kasparov, may be that. The most famous (partly) Jewish chess master, Bobby Fischer, was also one of the most viciously anti-Semitic public figures of Steiner’s lifetime. And chamber music? Felix Mendelssohn, maybe the greatest Jewish composer, wrote mostly chamber music. But the chamber literature is not primarily written by Jews. Steiner must be thinking, if he is, of performers. But that accords with the XIX-XX Centuries’ stereotype that Jews have a genius for the interpretation/performance of original works by Gentiles. The composition is beyond their abilities. The glide is easy enough from derivative to parasitic. And for those who want to get there, vermin and virus are not far off.
This kind of tribalist bean-counting is colossally dumb.
And the claims of genetic purity? Andrei Sinyavski had a funny bit about his fellow prisoners, the non-politicals: according to them, just about everyone in Russian history–Tolstoi, for one!–was really a Jew. Members of the NSDAP scurried to get themselves certified as suitably Aryan, and there was a lot of fraud. There is an undercurrent of anxiety over Jewish/Muhammadan tincture in Spanish history. Let’s not even get into the question of intermarriage in the U.S.
Slight tangent: There’s some film studies professor in Scotland, wrote about Kubrick. He had a line, Anal sex is Jewish sex. He’s Jewish himself (but what was he trying to say?). Of course, researchers for the NOI glommed on to it, and Final Call trumpeted it. Now there’s a line of work: bow ties, thick glasses, and concentration furrows/scowls frozen in place, all gently illuminated by the light of a computer terminal.