George Grant and the Jews

Among the virtues of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife is its exploration of Jewish identity and anti-Semitism. Larry Holmes, one of Roth’s zanier creations, knows that he is a Jew but leaves Israel asking plaintively: “How can there be Jews without baseball?” Nathan Zuckerman only discovers that he is a somewhat minimalist Jew when faced with the prejudices of his new English mother-in-law in “Christendom.” “Can’t there be a Jewish variety of Englishman?” he asks impatiently. Roth here provides two definitions of Jew. One is a self-definition: the collective version covers a diversity of individuals and groups who call themselves Jews, sometimes for religious reasons, sometimes for secular reasons, or both. The other is conjured up in the paranoid imaginations of non-Jews, some of whom might even claim that Jews are among their best friends. This is the stereotype that ranges from such drawing-room sociology as “Jews are great violinists” to “Jews are shrewd financiers” (Shylocks?), and includes exaggerated physical characteristics, supports formal and informal discriminatory practices and, at worst, accepts the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion or denies the Holocaust. As Roth writes, anti-Semites, “people with their dream of the perfect, undiluted, unpolluted, unsmelly ‘we,’” insist that Jews are unassimilable and secretly harbour only limited loyalties to their host societies. Jean-Paul Sartre, Lionel Trilling and Amos Elon have all insisted that the only definition of a Jew is the one imposed by non-Jews. That is perhaps too simple, but it does go to the heart of anti-Semitism.

Some writers have argued that before World War Two anti-Semitism, or what Gertrude Himmelfarb called “the innocent antisemitism of the clubman,” was “both too common and too passive to be scandalous.” Even George Orwell claimed in 1948 that before the Nazi regime in Germany there existed a garden-variety anti-Semitism that, although not justified, was simply a species of widespread ethno-centrism. That apparently allowed T.S. Eliot to argue in a 1933 public lecture that societies required religious and cultural homogeneity, making “any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” Something like this opinion was shared by many Europeans and North Americans before World War Two. Hitler and the Holocaust, it has been said, gave anti-Semitism a bad name. But even pre-war “club-man” anti-Semitism would have been viewed far less complacently by Jews than either Himmelfarb or Orwell recognized, since it underpinned discrimination, quotas and exclusion.

In the last 30 years, Canadian Jewish history and anti-Semitism have been quite thoroughly documented, mainly by young Jewish scholars who, along with other minorities, have finally broken into an academic profession once dominated by Anglo-Saxons who simply never asked the pertinent questions. None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933–1948, by Irving Abella and Harold Troper, opened up the previously almost-taboo topic of anti-Semitism. It described and analyzed the roadblocks that the Mackenzie King government, strongly seconded by Vincent Massey, Canada’s high commissioner in London, placed in the way of German Jewish refugees attempting to enter Canada. After the war, when the horrors of the Nazi death camps became public, the King government remained deaf to pleas to admit Jewish (and other) displaced persons hoping to escape poverty and starvation until sometime late in 1947. Most Canadians, at least passively, supported these policies. It is a shameful tale brilliantly and soberly related.

Another outstanding work is Gerald Tulchinsky’s two-volume history of the Jews in Canada: Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community and Branching Out: The Transformation of the Canadian Jewish Community. He also contributed a superb essay to a collection entitled Anti-Semitism in Canada, edited by Alan Davis, where for the first time the full anti-Semitic dimensions of that prominent Toronto intellectual Goldwin Smith were exposed. Finally, a considerable number of books and articles discuss anti-Semitism in francophone Quebec, including Esther Delisle’s Le Traître et le Juif, a critique of the nationalist icon Abbé Lionel Groulx that caused angry controversy a decade ago.

Alan Mendelson’s Exiles from Nowhere: The Jews and the Canadian Elite, a study of anti-Semitism in what he exaggeratedly calls “the Canadian elite,” may arouse a similar debate. The book’s principal target is the religious philosopher George Grant, who, by virtue of his 1960s bestseller, Lament for a Nation, once occupied a Groulx-like status among English-Canadian nationalists of both the right and the left. Mendelson’s purpose is to set Grant in his ancestral context, suggesting that anti-Semitism is part of that family romance. He occasionally considers other figures, not all of whom seem relevant: the anti-Semitic Goldwin Smith was mostly a critic of the Grants and Parkins, while Henri Bourassa seems utterly out of place in this book about English Canada. Much of the discussion in the first half of the book simply repeats what Abella and Troper, Tulchinsky and others have previously documented. The originality of the study lies in its concentration on George Grant, the author’s one-time colleague at McMaster University.

Mendelson is right to emphasize that an understanding of Grant’s mature outlook requires recognition, as A.R.M. Lower put it, that he “had as much family behind him as it is possible to have in this country.” Although Grant rejected this approach, disdaining “history” generally, nothing can hide the reality that almost everywhere he turned he got a leg up from one relative or another. His ancestors included a principal of Queen’s University (G.M. Grant), two headmasters of Upper Canada College (Sir George Parkin and W.L. Grant), the organizing secretary of the Rhodes Scholarships (Sir George Parkin) and an uncle who became the first Canadian governor general, among other posh jobs (Vincent Massey). Several female relatives married well. Who else had an aunt (Alice Massey née Parkin) who could ask Prime Minister King to arrange a passage home for him from England during World War Two? Who else could whine to his mother (Maude Grant née Parkin) when Governor General Massey failed to put him on the guest list or even phone him when he visited Halifax in 1948? (She made certain it didn’t happen again!) What other beginning professor had an uncle (Vincent Massey) who could invite him to write an essay for his famous royal commission? While never wealthy, the clan’s social network stretched far and wide. Grant disdainfully asserted that his family was “part of the liberal establishment”; yet if accurate, may have made it more useful to him! As B.K. Sandwell famously quipped, “Toronto has no classes— / Only the Masseys and the masses.”

From Grant’s student days until his death, his intellectual potential and evident brilliance were undeniable. But he was often obscure, contradictory and given to hyperbole, regularly pronouncing some philosopher, novelist, musician, university or country as “the greatest.” His thought was rooted in his deeply held religious belief, an idiosyncratic combination of Platonism, a born-again Christian experience and Simone Weil’s mysticism. His trenchant criticism of “modernity” dominated by “scientific reason” or techne was a mélange of ideas drawn from Jacques Ellul, Leo Strauss, Martin Heidegger and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Understanding how these ideas and beliefs meshed often leaves readers, including specialists, with more questions than answers. The Red Tory label, invented to describe Grant’s political thought, is so malleable as to defy definition. Janet Ajzenstat, his student, maintained that his Canada, past and present, was “almost entirely fabricated from his imagination and his personal preferences.” He had a virtually paranoid belief that the “liberal establishment” wanted to suppress his opinions. His scholarship was slight; none of the big books he planned was ever completed, including the one on “technique” for which he was awarded a prestigious Killam Fellowship.

Mendelson’s interest in Grant focuses on his attitude to Jews and Judaism. This approach largely ignores the question of how his attitude to Jews relates to his overall thought and especially to his brand of nationalism. Eli Mandel’s fine early study, “George Grant: Language, Nation, the Silence of God,” underlined the Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism of Grant’s idea of Canada. Until now almost nothing critical or systematic has been written about Grant and the so-called “Jewish question.” William Christian’s affectionate biography describes his hero as having “a great personal fondness for Jews.”

Alan Mendelson has a different take. He begins with the claim that Grant, as early as his Queen’s undergraduate days, revealed “the antisemitism he had imbibed with his mother’s milk,” although he offers no evidence that Maude Grant was anti-Semitic. (Did all Parkin-Grants carry the fatal gene?) She did object to George’s decision to ask Sholome Michael Gelber, a close school friend, to act as godfather to his first child. If that was anti-Semitic the polluted milk had apparently worn off, since George rejected his mother’s advice. (Ironically, Maude Grant’s position bears a resemblance to traditional Jewish attitudes toward inter-faith marriage.) There are also two undergraduate letters in which Grant complains about the rudeness of Jews and how he was treated “dishonestly by a bunch of Jews,” after he had “stuck up for” them. These Jewish failings, he writes, made anti-Semitism understandable. But he hastily adds that “I am being beastly as I have Sholome to think of.” These ambiguous remarks evoke crude stereotypes, but do they really help explain Grant’s “lack of commitment to the Allied cause” when war came?

Grant’s thoughts and actions during the early years of World War Two, when he was at Oxford, are explored in detail by Mendelson. The Rhodes Scholar was a pacifist who sympathized with the notorious, pro-appeasement Cliveden set who cultivated Vincent Massey, the Canadian high commissioner and his wife, Grant’s aunt. Mendelson argues that Grant’s stance gave no thought to the fate of Jews in Germany, and that he seemed more concerned about German than Jewish children. That Grant was wishfully unrealistic in his estimation of Hitler’s brutal intentions is now obvious, but can it be attributed to “pro-German sympathies”? How much did Grant actually understand about the growing horror that was Hitler’s Germany? Any answer is dauntingly complex. Mendelson’s evidence is slight and he seems innocent of the library shelf of books on what “bystanders” outside Germany knew about Nazi treatment of the Jews before and during the war. (1) Hindsight is a trickster’s tool. Mendelson’s trick is to ignore the similarity between Grant’s belief that appeasement would succeed in averting war and the hopes of a large number of Canadians before September 1939 and a majority of Americans until December 7, 1941.

A comparison between Grant and Frank Pickersgill, another Canadian student in Britain and Europe, is instructive. Frank was the younger brother of Jack Pickersgill and a close friend of Grant’s sister Alison, who worked for MI5 before marrying George Ignatieff. In 1934, as a backpacking undergraduate, he had admired the Nazi regime. In September 1938, again visiting Europe, he radically revised his view, now convinced that Munich would not appease Hitler’s appetite. Yet his engrossing published letters never suggest that persecution of the Jews played any part in his shifting judgement of the Nazis. When the inevitable war came, he believed that it “would be suicidal for Canada to participate.” A confirmed francophile, he rejected a safe job in Ottawa, instead volunteering as a secret agent for the Special Operations Executive. Dropped into occupied France, Frank Pickersgill was immediately captured, tortured and then murdered by the SS at Buchenwald. Grant, his nerves shot after a stint as an air raid warden, returned to Canada where, with the help of the family network, he found employment in adult education for the duration. Both the differences and the similarities between Grant and Pickersgill warn against easy simplifications.

Mendelson next turns to four of Grant’s intellectual and religious mentors. He notes that Arnold Toynbee, like Grant’s Presbyterian grandfather, Principal G.M. Grant, viewed Judaism as a fossilized religion superseded by Christianity. George Grant, like many Christians, agreed. This judgement is naturally offensive to Jews and others. But is it anti-Semitism or just the hubris found in more than one religion? “Both Jews and Christians,” Mendelson admits, “have attempted to resolve the conundrum of supersessionism.”

Martin Heidegger, a Nazi supporter and university chancellor in Hitler’s early days, refused to renounce his past publicly. In private, Grant criticized Heidegger, but only guardedly in public because, as he declared in 1977, “the deepest account of modernity is found in the writings of Heidegger. He is a genius on this subject, however fearful one may be of his political and moral stance.” Grant, like Hannah Arendt, believed that Heidegger’s Nazi associations and his philosophy could be compartmentalized. Mendelson, like Karl Jaspers, demurs, finding Grant soft on Nazis and oblivious to the horrendous tragedy of the Holocaust.

Grant adopted a more egregious attitude to his “darling bastard,” the utterly vicious anti-Semite, Céline (“the only political slogan that matters [is] Votes for the Aryans, Urns for the Jews”). In a superb essay published a decade ago, Edward Andrew demonstrated that his uncle George’s attempt to distinguish the Frenchman’s racist ranting from his literary talent was unconvincing and contradicted Grant’s own professed Platonic principle that philosophy took precedence over poetry. Céline’s novels, Andrew explained, not only mouth the same anti-Semitic filth as the earlier scurrilous pamphlets (which Grant perhaps misread?), but they are worse, having been written after the Holocaust was public knowledge. Although Mendelson adds nothing important to Andrew’s indictment, this is the most damning chapter in his book.

The discussion of Simone Weil is something of a puzzle. Grant considered Weil a “saint” and accepted her views, particularly “the repugnance one must feel for certain emphases in the O.T. [Old Testament], namely the Exclusivity in Judaism.” Mendelson contends that her rejection of Judaism was based on a misrepresentation of the history and religion of her ancestors. His case against Weil and Grant carries weight, this being his field of expertise. But does it prove anything beyond the obvious? Grant, as he often stated, believed that Christianity, not Judaism, was the true, superior religion. To secular readers or liberal Christians, that may seem intolerantly triumphalist. But is it anti-Semitic? Grant, after all, rejected most versions of Christianity, including Catholicism, too.

The final chapter deals, somewhat incompletely, with “Grant’s Encounter with Jewish Intellectuals.” Leo Strauss was immensely important to Grant’s understanding of both classical thought and modernism. In 1960, Grant wrote that “the philosopher I admire the most in North America is Leo Strauss at Chicago. He is a practising Jew and I would have no hesitation in saying that he is a better philosopher than any practising Christian I know on this continent.” Grant later revised his judgement, contending that Strauss’s attitude to “biblical religion,” especially Christianity, was unacceptable. Mendelson remarks that Grant’s rejection of Strauss was “religiously motivated.” Agreed, but Grant’s disagreement with Jacques Ellul, a Christian, had a similar “motive.” So what conclusion can be drawn?

The discussion of Leonard Cohen is flimsy, almost contrived. Grant and Cohen never met, but the novelist’s priapic Beautiful Losers upset the professor of religion, who believed that it displayed a “deep ‘ambiguity, almost hatred, of Christianity’.” Mendelson easily refutes this misinterpretation. Grant’s dogmatic Christianity drove him to an extreme, groundless accusation. Misreadings of Beautiful Losers are not uncommon, but Grant’s apparent carelessness, here as with Céline, raises a troubling question: did he sometimes find only what he wanted to find? Maybe the answer lies in Leonard Cohen’s witty poem (written for Mendelson in 2001), rejecting Grant’s complaint. Its concluding lines capture Grant as only a poet could do:

The final Jewish intellectual Mendelson considers is the novelist Matt Cohen, whose marvellous autobiography, Typing: A Life in 26 Keys, and a few letters include a shrewd assessment of Grant. As a student radical at the University of Toronto, Cohen was profoundly impressed by Lament for a Nation and Grant’s other writings about the repressiveness of “modern technological society.” His exchanges with the McMaster professor resulted in a surprising job offer in the Department of Religion, although Cohen admitted his lack of qualifications. Soon he discovered that Grant’s assertive Christianity led to a smothering relationship that threatened his Jewish identity. So he resigned and, to our great benefit, followed his ambition to write fiction. The parting was friendly: Cohen accepted Grant’s generous offer of his Nova Scotia cabin as a writing retreat. Still, he judged Grant “a bundle of contradictions,” a person whose religious dogmatism and admiration for Céline and Heidegger “resulted in utterances which, if not ‘gutter anti-semitism,’ certainly could sound like it.” Grant, “the cult leader who demanded perfect faith and perfect fidelity,” destroyed a promising relationship with an unconventional secular Jew.

But why does Mendelson call only witnesses whose relationships with Grant ended in a parting of the ways? A more thorough scholar would have recognized that Grant’s circle included the psychologist Abe Black, a close friend; Gad Horowitz, inventor of the Red Tory label; Louis Greenspan, student and later colleague; Abe Rotstein, who spoke of Grant’s great moral authority; and Howard Brotz, a sociologist who encouraged Grant to visit Leo Strauss with him. None of these figures, who might have been witnesses for the defence in a balanced account, are called to the stand.

Mendelson offers one final example of Grant’s occasionally paranoid obiter dicta: an angry outburst about Jewish control of the Canadian media. This from a man who had been something of a media darling, appearing frequently on CBC radio and TV and in both the popular press and the little magazines. His conspiratorial fantasy conjures up the rhetoric of the nationalist right in the 1930s, ironically, echoing a 1933 speech by young André Laurendeau, a person Grant (and Mendelson) inaccurately described as a fascist. Grant’s rant would be risible if it were not so obviously delusional.

So what’s the verdict? Mendelson’s Grant evolves from hereditary (biological?), mother’s milk anti-Semitism to “genteel antiemitism.” Such fuzzy terms lack intellectual clarity. In Racism: A Short History, George Fredrickson draws a distinction between culturally constructed difference and innate, essentialized difference that is subtle but crucial. The first may provoke xenophobia and bigotry, the second racism. Cultural/religious ethnocentrism allows for assimilation, conversion and integration. Racist anti-Semitism demands separation, exclusion and, at worst, elimination. Neither is pretty; one is potentially lethal. The flimsy evidence presented in Exiles from Nowhere reveals a George Grant whose attitude to Jews and Judaism was occasionally marred by cultural/religious ethnocentrism, but not by racist anti-Semitism, which is never genteel.

Notes