Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

by Christopher Hitchens

It’s not merely that anti-Jewish clichés occur in his books; it’s that they occur so frequently. The usual form they take is a reference to Judeo-Bolshevism—the sympathy of Jews, even rich ones, for the Russian Revolution. That, however, might be described as political anti-Semitism, just as Buchan’s energetic support for the early Zionist movement might be called political philo-Semitism. Paradoxically, perhaps, Buchan greatly disliked as a person the most anti-Jewish and pro-Zionist figure of his day, Arthur Balfour. Indeed, Balfour was the basis for the villain Andrew Lumley in Buchan’s first thriller, The Power House. I mention this for two reasons. First, the book describes an invisible, string-pulling, sinister secret government, but one run by English lords and financiers rather than exotic or cosmopolitan types. Second, Buchan openly admitted that his model in the writing of it (he called the novel “a tribute at the shrine of my master in fiction”) was E. Phillips Oppenheim, whom he further described—in an instance, perhaps, of trying too hard—as “the greatest Jewish writer since Isaiah.” In “The Grove of Ashtaroth” the friend for whom the purgative enterprise is undertaken is a man described by the narrator as a Jew trying to “pass,” who because of his ancestry is vulnerable to the delicious temptations of strange gods. This is excessive on Buchan’s part, and arguably a “transferred” aspect of that very element in himself: the element of the mystical and the bizar...