Twisted Logic
Fagin the Jew & Charles Dickens

Fagin as depicted by Joseph Clayton Clark, aka Kyd (1889)

2,283 words

[S]tanding over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. — Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

All my dearest companions have always been villains and thieves. — Fagin, “I’m Reviewing the Situation,” from Oliver!

In the decades before Critical Race Theory snake-oil salesmen (and women) got hold of English literature and found the original sin of whiteness there in abundance, several works from the white English canon had already been marked with the modern British equivalent of the green pen which the Lord Chancellor used to strike out impermissible passages in literary offerings. There always has to be someone between art and the public to make sure those poor, sheep-like people are kept safe from prowling literary works.

Othello was a slam-dunk from the off, not least because the lead was traditionally played by a white man who has gone full Justin Trudeau (never go full Justin Trudeau). In the 1984 film The Dresser, starring Albert Finney as a washed-up Shakespearean actor and Tom Courtenay as his theatrical assistant, there is an amusing scene pre-performance when Finney is looking into his mirror in complete blackface. Courtenay puts his head round the dressing-room door and says sadly, “It’s Lear, sir.”

A slightly revised version of Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth-century play Tamburlaine was performed in London in 2005. The major change was to a book-burning scene in which the Koran was originally one of the volumes consigned to the flames. The director told The Guardian newspaper that it was absurd for The Times to suggest this move had been to appease Muslims — and besides, there was a lot of anti-Turkish feeling in London around 1587, so Marlowe was just writing for his audience. Marketing via the racial animus of a potential readership is a charge also leveled at Charles Dickens, but the pre-woke fuss about his work did not involve the black or the Mohammedan, but a most insistent lobby which was still at the forefront of the offense industry in those now far-off days: the Jew.

The new commissars had always had Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, of course, to wail and beat their chests about, but even the wily old merchant didn’t rattle the Jewish cage as much as the character of Fagin did in one of Dickens’ most famous novels, Oliver Twist. Throughout the novel, Fagin, the old man who maintains a gang of juvenile pickpockets in a real den of thieves, is referred to by Dickens either by name or as simply “the Jew.” This, in the strange new moral mathematics of offense, equals anti-Semitism. The Jewish Chronicle (JC) of the time accused Dickens and his Jewish vagabond of “pandering to a vitiated taste . . . [and being] a contaminating influence.”

The main charges against Dickens’ presentation of Fagin is that he is portrayed as grasping, avaricious, and a moral monster, and that this is a clear and malicious stereotyping of Jews. This is such a weak argument that of course it is still very much in use today, only now with added minorities who have learned at the knee of the Jew. If moral monstrosity is an ideological blemish, then Dickens is a very blemished writer, his world being heavily populated by moral monsters.

As for Jews being portrayed as grasping and avaricious, supposedly offended ethnicities and religions always act as though there is no earthly reason for the animus they see all around them. Q: Why is it that white people insist on stereotyping young blacks as violent criminals? A: Sheer racism based on a small and errant sample whose crimes are in any case the product of white supremacy. And so it goes. Have there been no grasping and avaricious Jews — a sufficient number, perhaps, to furnish a robust caricature such as Fagin for the pen (quill or otherwise) of a popular writer? Offense first, history second; that’s the way business gets done in the anti-Semitism industry, as with all its offshoot franchises. Offend a Jew, and the one thing he will do is make things as hard for you as he can. The Jew, as the saying has it, cries out as he strikes you.

Oliver Twist is a familiar tale of innocence abroad in a world for whom that quality has only a market value, and Oliver is a socioeconomic unit to be fought over between morally differing parties. His birthplace was the workhouse, and that dread place claims him as its slave as it did his mother. His apprenticeship with a coffin-maker is seen as a welcome escape from servitude (although it is nothing of the sort), Mr. Brownlow represents the opulence and moral decorum of the higher (and moneyed) class, and Fagin and Sikes are the dark side of Dickens’ London. The unalloyed goodness of Rose and Mrs. Maylie may be a bit chocolate box (Dickens’ women often are), but they give the novel’s moral antipodes when set against Fagin, Bill Sikes, and the crew of ne’er-do-wells who run with them. The battle for Oliver’s innocent soul is underway.

Oliver is an ingenu, a naif abroad, like Voltaire’s Candide or Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and so falls into a tradition in which the mentally unsophisticated or afflicted are the ones who tell the truth. This is why the fool of the court is allowed to tell the King things no other courtier would dare (and so the fool becomes Lear’s counsellor when he is exiled out on the heath). So it is that Oliver begins his adventure by doing what no other boy had dared do in the workhouse: asking for more gruel.

Oliver’s early life in the workhouse is monstrous even by Dickensian standards, but the world that awaits him in London’s underworld is worse. Among the cast of lowlifes vying for Oliver’s soul, Bill Sikes is the demon king (albeit offset by the innate goodness of the doomed Nancy) and the role model for the brilliantly-drawn character of a boy pickpocket, The Artful Dodger. But Sikes is not Oliver Twist’s center of gravity, but is just a thuggish and dangerous presence for whom extreme violence is imminent at all times. Although the book revolves around Oliver himself, as he is battered like a storm-tossed skiff between rocks and the shore, the planet that revolves closest to that sun is Fagin.

The Jewish criticism of Oliver Twist stands on the repetition of the phrase “the Jew” to denote Fagin, as well as one or two unflattering descriptions of him and a general tone of avaricious and illegal gain. It is a stock-in-trade of Jewish outrage to overreact, and again it is a lesson that blacks and Muslims have learned well.

The British Jew actually enjoyed far more freedom and tolerance than his European counterpart when Dickens was writing. Robert Butterworth writes in Dickens, Religion, and Society:

The position of British Jews in the early nineteenth century was already considerably better than that of their European co-religionists. They did not have to wear distinctive clothing, were not forced to live in ghettoes, could settle wherever they liked, were not barred by law from any business . . . and could hire non-Jewish labour.

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This leniency, of course, applies to Fagin as much as it does to the prosperous Jewish tailor in the East End of London. Tolerance often breeds crime in the tolerated. But alongside the Jewish pearl-clutching over Fagin, there seems to be an obsession with showing that Dickens himself was at least part Jewish. Quite what this would prove, unlikely as it is, I don’t know. Dickens never comes across personally as grasping and avaricious.

A recent piece of ancestral forensic work was carried out by the very same The Jewish Chronicle quoted earlier. “Dickens was prejudiced,” announces the headline, “but did he also have Jewish ancestry?” This is interesting if you like that sort of genealogical grubbing about, and it is akin to those TV programs which show some plantation owner in a black activist’s past.

In a letter from 1863, a quarter of a century after Oliver Twist was first published as a serial, Dickens feels the need to present his credentials as a Judeophile:

I have no feeling toward the Jewish people but a friendly one. I always speak well of them, whether in public, or private, and bear my testimony (as I ought to do) to their perfect good faith in such transactions as I have ever had with them. And in my Child’s History of England, I lost no opportunity of setting forth their cruel persecution in old times.

Dickens included a donation to a Jewish home for the poor with which his correspondent was involved. The passage reads like one of today’s “groveling apologies,” as they are known, issued by some errant celebrity after a social media faux pas.

The minority environment in which Dickens was writing, and of which he wrote, has been expanded now to include all non-white minorities (or the “global majority,” as the rather self-defeating phrase has it). Publishing houses have for a long time employed “sensitivity readers” to make sure that an approved ethnic quota, as well as the correct moral coding, is present in a prospective novel. There will not be another Great English Novel as long as you have to squeeze Tambo ‘n’ Bones into every plotline.

If Dickens’ portrayal of the villainous Fagin is anti-Semitic, the bar is set very low indeed. A proper anti-Semite, eager to feed the festering bile of his Jew-hating audience, would have made of Fagin’s trial and death sentence an orgy of sneering invective levelled at the Twelve Tribes. But the scene passes with no mention of anything even remotely Hebraic, and insults thrown at Fagin are limited to the other prisoners, who “assailed him with opprobrious names . . .”

This, then, is the Jewish scale of equivalence applied to “anti-Semitic” literary works, and it is the precursor to the offense industry that is currently booming (although now possibly at peak trading, with a slump both expected and much to be desired) in Dickens country, as everywhere else in white literary territory. I do hope not many blacks have read Faulkner . . .

One slip of the pen — paragraphia as another Jew, Freud, termed this unconscious mistake expressed in writing — one caricature too many, one familiar term (“Jew”) reiterated throughout a book to refer to a Jew, and Oliver Twist becomes Mein Kampf set in the taverns and dockyards of Old London Town.

The 1968 musical film of the novel is a delight if you like that sort of thing, which I very much do. Oliver! Is up there with West Side Story, My Fair Lady, and Porgy and Bess round my way. Bill Sikes is played, in one of the greatest pieces of casting in British cinema, by legendary drinker Oliver Reed, although his dog Bull’s-Eye has been given a makeover as a beautiful British Bulldog, not the mangy whelp Dickens portrays.

Fagin, on the other hand, played by the brilliant Ron Moody, must have given The Board of Deputies of British Jews fifty fits. Hook-nosed, greasy, and greedy, and with an obvious Yiddisher accent, Fagin is the personification of the dark, threatening Jews of Nazi propaganda posters. In possibly the movie’s best musical number, Fagin reviews the situation, and this would have driven Jewish offense-meters into the red more than a black girl playing Anne Frank.

Nowadays, of course, anti-Semitism really is back in a town it never really left, at least in the Jewish perception: Dickens’ beloved London Town, to be precise, and it’s not the “dripping poison” the JC finds in Fagin. The anti-Semitism Jews are now experiencing has nothing to do with Dickens, and you are unlikely to look in a swarthy Syrian’s knapsack and see, together with the Koran, a copy of Barnaby Rudge or Bleak House. Jews whined first in England when it came to oppression, and now everyone else is joining in, having read and inwardly digested the Jewish victimhood playbook. Jews don’t really like it when they have to play with other children.

I don’t know if Dickens made the big time in the United States to the extent Shakespeare did, but should you be new to the novels of “Boz” (Dickens’ original pen name), Oliver Twist is a personal recommendation. Most people in Britain now know Dickens, if at all, via TV adaptations of his work. But although some of the golden repartee remains, Dickens should always be read — Oliver! Aside — just as Shakespeare should always be seen. Fagin, Bill Sikes, and even Nancy are three of his most memorable villains (Nancy’s heart of gold notwithstanding), and Dickens is a master caricaturist (to the dismay of English literature critics of the Jewish persuasion) here as in all his novels. Little Oliver’s battered innocence is an underlying theme uniting the central, character-driven plot and subplots, but the cast of characters is as rich as ever.

Dickens also does London better than any English writer. I used to live in the area known as Jacob’s Island (also Folly Ditch in the novel), where Fagin’s fictional den of thieves was located, and I have seen the supposed (again, of course, fictional) spot where Bill Sikes is finally hung, if somewhat unconventionally. Nowadays it’s all warehouse conversions and multi-million-pound apartments rather than the rotting wasteland Dickens describes. I suppose that is a type of social progress, something Dickens was committed to in his work and lecture tours.

Oliver Twist deserves its place on any reading list. But beware the Jew: the novel may soon be on the banned books list should our latter-day Fagins so decide.