Ezra Pound, Red-headed Poet, Issues Fire Call to Jewish Intellects for Jewish Clarity

Writing “On The Divisions in Jewry,” Ezra Pound, the American expatriate poet has a slashing attack on the Jewice race in the latest edition of the “Harkness Hoor,” Yale student magazine. Pound, writing in his individualistic staccato manner, is at times almost incomprehensible. He writes:

“I wish the Jews wd. bury their own dead and clean their own stables. There IS a division in Jewry, why it shd. be necessary for the Aryan critics to busy themselves with necessary intra-tribal operations, is beyond me. Sepphadim exist and know it, they are not by themselves and of themselves confounded with the schnorrers and lowdowns.

“Perhaps the Maimonides element is the dominat, perhaps the Confucianism of Rabbi Jesu, i.e., when he told ’em to attend first to their co-nationals, was an ideal beyond their attainment. But, ANYHOW, as at least 80 percent of modern Hebrews appear able to dissociate their ideas, to keep two and more concepts separate in their minds, for at least the duration of a critical essay, I wish a few dozen of them would ACT for the final sepulture of Paul Rosenfeld and his twin spirit Waldo Frank and for all sundry other members of the 12 tribes, the two tribes, the lost tribes (of whom undoubtedly the English descendants are the most Waldo-frankian) and than an unrollable stone be placed on the tombs of same and clamped down with indestructible concrete.

“When you consider the blessing that Jewish clarity has been, for at least the days of Spinoza, when you consider that it has been the ‘salt’ in muddling teutonic countries, you have a double reason for being irritated with French sentimentalism, which is nine times more squashy and idiotic than that of the worst of British weeper’s.

“With two whole colleges of Jewish cardinals in the two leading American Rabbinical schools, a fire call from the above signed ought emphatically not to be necessary.”