Was John Buchan an anti-Semite?
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John Buchan (1875-1940) at work
Several weeks ago I ran across a curious Instagram post about a favorite novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan. In the course of summarizing and praising the novel, the poster added a trigger warning: “The word ‘Jew’ appears ten times in this book.” An oddly specific and ambiguous note. At any rate, I forgot about it about until a few days ago, for reasons I’ll lay out below.
This morning Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s The Rest is History released the last episode in its excellent four-part podcast series on British Fascism. These were magnificent episodes, some of the most enjoyable and informative I’ve listened to. I know a lot more about Weimar and Nazi Germany and the United States in the interwar period than I do about Britain, so it was nice to have my understanding of Oswald Mosley, the British Union of Fascists, and even the Mitford sisters—who frequently and unexpectedly intrude into my reading from that period—so thoroughly and enjoyably expanded.
But there was one coincidental detail presented repeatedly in the historical context for the series that I objected to. As the show set the stage for the emergence of British Fascism and the rise of Mosley and Nazi hangers-on like Unity Mitford, Sandbrook invoked John Buchan’s fiction twice—along with Agatha Christie, GK Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Sapper, the creator of Bulldog Drummond—as examples of British culture’s pervasive atmosphere of anti-Semitic paranoia. In the second episode, he recapped this point, namedropping Buchan again, treating him as a byword for this kind of vulgar conspiracism. The third episode repeated this a final time, but with greater detail and a pretty grim supporting quotation.
Reflecting on a BBC radio interview she gave in 2015, John Buchan scholar Kate Macdonald noted that “far too often, talking about Buchan means talking about The Thirty-Nine Steps, and anti-Semitism, and then the conversation stops.” Thus with The Rest is History.
To be fair, Buchan isn’t the subject of the series, but the accusation that Buchan and his work were anti-Semitic is common enough and unfair enough that it warrants looking into.
As I mentioned, in the third episode Sandbrook quotes from The Thirty-Nine Steps to illustrate the kind of garden-variety anti-Semitic prejudice that notionally fed the rise of fascism. Sandbrook quotes a character called Scudder, an American investigative journalist, who believes he has uncovered a plot by a shadowy group to use an assassination to foment war between Germany and Russia. Sandbrook only quotes one or two lines but here’s more of the conversation for context. The first-person narrator is Richard Hannay:
When I asked why, he said that the anarchist lot thought it would give them their chance. Everything would be in the melting-pot, and they looked to see a new world emerge. The capitalists would rake in the shekels, and make fortunes by buying up wreckage. Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland. Besides, the Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated Russia worse than hell.
“Do you wonder?” [Scudder] cried. “For three hundred years they have been persecuted, and this is the return match for the pogroms. The Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him. Take any big Teutonic business concern. If you have dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von und zu Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English. But he cuts no ice. If your business is big, you get behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the manners of a hog. He is the German business man that gives your English papers the shakes. But if you’re on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now, and he has his knife in the Empire of the Tsar, because his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse location on the Volga.”
This passage is the one most often trotted out as evidence of Buchan’s anti-Semitism, and understandably so. It certainly seems damning, unless you remember that Scudder is a fictional character—and unless you keep reading.
Because Hannay is skeptical from the start. Immediately after the above passage, he wryly observes that, for all their plotting, Scudder’s conspirators don’t seem very successful: “I could not help saying that his Jew-anarchists seemed to have got left behind a little.” Hannay suspects that Scudder is “spinning me a yarn” but takes a liking to him in spite of it and offers the frightened man shelter. When Scudder is killed and Hannay goes on the run to avoid being framed for the murder, Hannay takes Scudder’s diary. Reading it confirms not Scudder’s suspicions, but Hannay’s: “The little man had told me a pack of lies. All his yarns about the Balkans and the Jew-Anarchists and the Foreign Office Conference were eyewash.”
And just in case we missed it, Sir Walter Bullivant, a British intelligence chief and Hannay’s savior and future boss, drives the point home again later:
If only I had more confidence in Scudder’s judgement. The trouble about him was that he was too romantic. He had the artistic temperament, and wanted a story to be better than God meant it to be. He had a lot of odd biases, too. Jews, for example, made him see red. Jews and the high finance.
The plot, as it turns out, has been orchestrated by German military intelligence. In fact, Hannay will contend with German spies in the two novels that followed his debut, Greenmantle and Mr Standfast, in both of which the menace is explicitly Prussian.
So much for this example—and for judging a book by counting words. Context and authorial intent matter. But if it were just a matter of quoting The Thirty-Nine Steps’s deranged journalist out of context, why does the accusation persist?
In John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier, biographer Andrew Lownie notes that Buchan’s fiction is “certainly scattered with disparaging comments about Jews.” Ursula Buchan, in her excellent Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps, is more specific: “the charge of anti-Semitism . . . surfaces from time to time, mainly as a result of about a dozen unfavourable comments by fictional characters, mostly to be found in the Hannay books.”
The fact that these comments almost always come from the mouths of fictional characters—often Americans—is important. Beyond these, which shouldn’t be construed as Buchan’s own opinions, there are a few stereotyped Jewish characters and slangy references. Something expensive might have “a Jewish price,” for instance. As unfortunate as these are, they are merely trading in the stock elements of the fiction of that time, just as Chinese laundry workers, black Pullman porters, and Irish beat cops show up in comparable American fiction. But even judging by that standard, Lownie argues that “Buchan was no worse and a great deal better than many of his contemporaries such as Dorothy L Sayers and Sapper.” He also points out, as does Roger Kimball in an excellent 2003 essay at The New Criterion, that the stereotypes and negative comments disappear from Buchan’s fiction as the Nazis rise in prominence—a detail suggestive of Buchan’s searching moral self-reflections.
For of Buchan himself, rather than his stories, there can be no doubt. Lownie understates things when he writes that “It is difficult to find any evidence of anti-Semitism in Buchan’s own personal views.” He notes the close, long-lasting friendships he shared with Jewish friends like financier Lionel Phillips, to whom he dedicated Prester John, and his commitment to Zionism. Ursula Buchan notes that he maintained this support “at a time when Tory politicians were thought to damage their chances of preferment” by doing so and that he was one of only fifty MPs who signed a 1934 motion denouncing the treatment of Jews in Germany. The next year,
he spoke at a rally in Shoreditch organised by the National Jewish Fund, describing Zionism as “a great act of justice. It was reparation for the centuries of cruelty and wrong, which had stained the record of nearly every Gentile people.” His name was inscribed in the Golden Book of the Jewish National Fund of Israel. It also appeared in a Nazi publication, Who’s Who in Britain (Frankfurt, 1938), the entry reading: ‘Tweedsmuir, Lord: Pro-Jewish activity.’
“If anything,” she writes, the evidence shows that Buchan “was a philo-Semite. How could it be otherwise for a man deeply imbued in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and in Jewish historical culture?” Lownie, Allan Massie, and others have also noted the special cultural affinity Buchan felt for the Jews.
If Buchan is personally unimpeachable in this regard, it is worth returning to Sandbrook’s point in using Buchan as a stand-in for all the anti-Semitism in the literature of his age. Sandbrook describes Buchan’s books as being filled with Jewish conspiracies. (Sandbrook is definitely accurate to ascribe to Buchan suspicion of flappers and the general Roaring ‘20s lifestyle. I think it’s meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek but, frankly, I find his scorn for it fun and refreshing considering how much that period has been romanticized.) Lownie and Ursula Buchan both deal with this handily, as I hope I’ve shown. But it’s worth considering just what kind of threats he did fill his books with.
Certainly Buchan’s thrillers teem with conspiracies, but the enemies of a Buchan hero are typically foreign or politically radical. The most frequent culprits are Germans—The Power-House, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, and Mr Standfast all concern German plots against Britain. There are also the Bolshevik kidnappers of Huntingtower and the Irish extortionist and mystic Dominick Medina of The Three Hostages, one of whose victims is Jewish. Often these foreign villains operate disguised as upper-class Brits—the implication being that it’s an easily convincing cover.
But just as often the villains really are British, as with The Dancing Floor’s dissipated pervert Shelley Arabin, who abused the population of a remote Greek island to the point of turning them to paganism, or, most chillingly, the devil-worshiping parishioners of a quiet Scottish village in Witch Wood. And in at least two novels, the hero is part of the conspiracy! Midwinter concerns a Jacobite spy preparing the way for Bonnie Prince Charlie during the ‘45 and The Blanket of the Dark is about a young man, snatched from an obscure monastery, at the center of an attempted coup against Henry VIII, who himself appears as a sinister villain.
Christopher Hitchens once noted Buchan’s powers of sympathy across the lines ordinarily drawn between factions, and in most of his stories the heroes find honorable and sympathetic enemies they can respect and who remind the hero that the enemy is human, too. The best and most moving example is the German woman who shelters Hannay in Greenmantle. Hannay even feels sympathy for the Kaiser in that novel.
“It is quite impossible to imagine him doing somebody an injury or an injustice on the grounds of their social or ethnic origin.”
By the same token, the villains are often assisted by Englishmen, either out of pure venality or because they have been ideologically compromised—both signs of moral weakness. But even among these a rare man can prove himself courageous and upright, as the leftwing pacificist Launcelot Wake in Mr Standfast or the testy modernist poet John Heritage in Huntingtower convincingly show. “It is quite impossible,” Hitchens writes in his introduction to The Three Hostages, “to imagine [Buchan] doing somebody an injury or an injustice on the grounds of their social or ethnic origin.” What matters to Buchan is not ethnicity, class, or even political persuasion, but personal character, honor, and virtue, and of the latter most especially courage.
Why does any of this matter? Why go on about this for however many words this post has reached at this point?
First, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Buchan it’s the honor of fairness, and I hate to see a man I admire used as a byword for a fault of which he is innocent. Second, because Buchan is one of the kind of patron saints of this blog. I’ve enjoyed the last two years of John Buchan June and felt like I owed it to any of my handful of readers who have wondered about Buchan and anti-Semitism to sort through this.
And lastly, to bring it back around to The Rest is History, ever since their excellent episodes on Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, and Tolkien, I’ve thought that Buchan would make a marvelous subject for their treatment. He led a long, full, eventful life connected to many other remarkable people—including Sandbrook’s beloved Stanley Baldwin. Just recently I was reminded that it was Buchan who first told American journalist Lowell Thomas that he should look into the desert guerrilla activities of one TE Lawrence. Such a life deserves to be remembered well, and his stories to be appreciated.
More if you’re interested
The BBC radio piece on Buchan’s life and work linked above is an excellent short introduction and features interviews with literary scholar Kate Macdonald, novelist William Boyd, and two of Buchan’s grandchildren, James Buchan and the aforementioned biographer Ursula Buchan, whose book I strongly recommend. For John Buchan June for I’ve been reading the nicely designed paperback Authorised Editions from Polygon, which are endorsed by the John Buchan Society and feature excellent introductions by writers including Hitchens, Allan Massie, Hew Strachan, and former director of MI5 Stella Rimington. Buchan’s books are in the public domain and can be found for free online or in many poorly turned out print-on-demand editions on Amazon, but these are worth seeking out.
