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J. G. Frazer and the Jews
Religion (1992) 22, 135-150
J. G. FRAZER AND THE JEWS Robert Ackerman Along with H . G . Wells, J . G . Frazer was perhaps the most influential secularist voice in English in the 20th century . Nonetheless, a review of the distinctly unusual changes in his attitudes toward the Jews and Judaism over the years lends credibility to the notion that he may in fact have been ambivalent about religion throughout his long life . The key figures in this remarkable evolution were Heinrich Heine, William Robertson Smith, and Solomon Schechter ; Frazer's personal relationships with the latter two were crucial in causing him to reconsider his views and move from standard academic Oxbridge antisemitism to a position that can only be characterized as semitophilic . J . G . Frazer's views on the Jews, and especially their development, were decidedly unusual for their time ; more interestingly, they offer an insight into otherwise inaccessible aspects of his thought and may represent deep ambiguities on his part concerning religion . One of the basic questions I faced while writing Frazer's life' was how to understand his attitude toward religion . The attitude itself- toward religion in general and Christianity in particular-is of course emphatically and undeniably negative . It is illustrated so abundantly throughout nearly the entire body of his work, and especially in The Golden Bough, that it does not require demonstration . And yet, as I tried to `feel my way into' my subject's mind and heart, I gradually came to the surprising conclusion that J . G . Frazer, ostensibly the Voltaire de nos jours, and perhaps the most important secularist voice in English of our century, was in some sense deeply ambivalent about religion . 2 By this I do not mean that he was not in earnest in his lifelong assault ; indeed, if anything, he was painfully in earnest in everything he did and would have profited greatly had a sense of humour been part of his original endowment . Nonetheless, although he certainly did believe that religion was a manifestation of a fundamentally mistaken way of apprehending the world and thus an outlook happily superseded by positive science, that it was in Enlightenment terms an `error', such a formulation by itself does not exhaust the question . Despite his philosophe-like glee in impaling religion on the lance of rationality whenever he could, his writings and letters make it clear enough that he seems often to have been of two minds regarding religion . I cannot say that he was continuously racked by inner torment, nor even that he was always aware of this counter-sentiment, but of its existence I am certain . Let me offer some evidence . One of a number of texts that alerted me to the possibility of some deep-lying ambivalence is to be found in the second edition of The Golden Bough (1900) . It was in that edition that he asserted the theory 0048-721 X/92/020135 + 16 $03 .00/0
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for which he is now best known-that religion (or at least his rationalistic reduction of it) followed magic and preceded science in the series of major evolutionary phases in humanity's understanding of itself and the world, that it was based on fundamentally mistaken premises, and that at least the enlightened intellectual leadership of the West had moved beyond religion to science . In the preface to that very work, however, occurs this revealing military metaphor in which Frazer sets forth his view of the subversive nature and aims of the comparative study of religion : Well handled, it [the comparative method] may become a powerful instrument to expedite progress if it lays bare certain weak spots in the foundations on which modern society is built-it shows that much that we are wont to regard as solid rests on the sands of superstition rather than on the rock of nature . It is indeed a melancholy and in some respects thankless task to strike at the foundations of belief in which, as a strong tower, the hopes and aspirations of humanity through long ages have sought a refuge from the storm and stress of life . Yet sooner or later it is inevitable that the battery of the comparative method should breach these venerable walls, mantled over with ivy and mosses and wild flowers of a thousand tender and sacred associations . At present we are only dragging the guns into position : they have hardly yet begun to speak . . . . Yet this uncertainty [about what will replace religion] ought not to induce us, from any consideration of expediency or regard for antiquity, to spare the ancient moulds, however beautiful, which are proved to be out-worn . Whatever comes of it, wherever it leads us, we must follow truth alone . It is our only guiding star : hoc signo vinces. 3 In these brocaded sentences, this melancholy soldier makes it clear that although he may have enlisted in the artillery corps of reason and although he will assuredly do his duty, he is deeply uneasy about the goals of the campaign in which he is engaged . The target of the siege guns that have `hardly yet begun to speak', the ancient and venerable citadel of religion, is figuratively his own home, the place whence he himself comes and where his emotions still lie, the place the walls of which are `mantled over with ivy and mosses and wild flowers of a thousand tender associations' . If we agree that such a passage suggests that Frazer, master ironist at the expense of religion though he undoubtedly was, may nevertheless have been at least sporadically of two minds about the value and meaning of the enterprise that occupied his life, then an explanation is called for . What dreadful childhood event, what primal struggle with his father, which of the many other traumas for which psychobiography has prepared us had brought him to this pitch of ambivalence? Unfortunately for the psychobiographer ready to pounce, however, his memories of childhood and youth in the bosom of a loving family are uniformly pleasant, even idyllic . 4 Furthermore, except at the rarest of moments Frazer, a paralytically shy man according to most reports, 3 was not given to introspection and was distinctly averse to anatomizing his motives . (When one thinks for a moment about the size of his output,
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it becomes immediately apparent that he literally did not have the time to be self-absorbed .) I regret to say that the available evidence does not permit us, or at least does not permit me, to come up with a single satisfying explanation . For all that, one odd thing stood out . Although Frazer could not and did not ever return to the bosom of Christianity (as did his contemporary, that other ambivalent ethnographer, Andrew Lang 6), over time and for reasons that I doubt that he was ever fully aware of or understood, Judaism and especially the Jews came to take on a new and enhanced value . Religion in general and Christianity in particular continued to be dismissed, but it was as if the Jews, if not always the religion they professed, permitted his ambivalent admiration for religion-or at least for some of its results-to take on a local habitation and a name . Counter-evidence exists, and will be mentioned, but in the second half of his life, though he could never accept that God chose the Jews, it is not too much to say that J . G . Frazer himself chose them . Occasionally, even Judaism itself seems to have taken on aspects of the emotional value of his own lost faith . As a result, his changing views on Jews and Judaism-he began as a `normal' Oxbridge academic antisemite and emerged as a pronounced philosemite-offer an indirect view of this otherwise inaccessible inner movement of mind . To appreciate the norm, and therefore of just how far Frazer departed from it, here are two examples of Oxbridge antisemitism at the turn of the centuryone, indeed, taken from Frazer's own Trinity College, Cambridge . OXBRIDGE
ANTISEMITISM
When Lewis Namier, already a distinguished historian, was put forward for a fellowship at All Souls Oxford in 1911, he was blackballed because of his origins . We know this because a new Fellow of the college, A . F. Pollard, who was present at the election meeting, directly afterward wrote to his parents about what had happened : `The lawyers could not conscientiously run a law candidate, so we had two for history . The best man by far was a Balliol man of Polish Jewish origin and I did my best for him, but the Warden and a majority of Fellows shied at his race, and eventually we elected the two next best' . At Trinity, one of the Fellows, the philosopher J . McT . E . McTaggart (1866-1925), sometime in the 1890s appointed himself historian of the college and began to note down for posterity the Fellows' table-talk . 8 In that antediluvian day, when Cambridge knew not the pressure to publish, and many of the older Fellows were unmarried, a number of them would regularly repair to the rooms of one or another of an evening to push the port, to smoke, and to talk, and the next day McTaggart would record what he regarded as the highlights of the conversation . The result, hundreds and hundreds of slips of paper that fill numerous file boxes, constitutes something between a diary and
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an informal history of the college for the twenty years or so that he made his jottings . Dr David McKitterick, the Librarian of Trinity, in kindly allowing me to use a snippet from this mass of material, has asked me to note that competent authorities (G . M . Trevelyan and D . A . Winstanley) who knew McTaggart regarded him as unreliable and his notes as subhistorical gossip . One must be bold to disagree with such men, but in this case I shall . Although we should be unwise to depend upon McTaggart for ipsissima verba, for something like antisemitism, on which attitudes have changed so greatly over the intervening generations, in his unself-consciousness he seems an absolutely reliable witness about the tone of the place and time . That said, here is his entry for 19 October 1907 . (It is theoretically possible, but most unlikely, that Frazer was present ; he rarely dined in hall .) W . Everett,9 who is up as Clarke lecturer, said at Image's 10 last night that the President of Columbia (who is, of course, very Jewish 11 ) said to the President of Princeton that the head of a small place like Princeton away in New Jersey ought to be able to do his work in his sleep, while the President of Columbia was so busy he never got to sleep at all . `I don't doubt it', the Princeton man said . `We know that he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep' . H . M . Taylor 12 added that W . H . Thompson 13 had once said that the Jewish people might be Chosen but weren't Choice . Let us return to Frazer . His early position, to be illustrated shortly, was . one of smug bigotry . What then caused him to change? We cannot be sure what got him going, but that he changed is incontrovertible . His views altered quietly, perhaps insensibly, and only at especially stressful moments did they get articulated . In my opinion, throughgoing intellectualist though he was, what made him move was not some new book he read about the Jews but his part in two crucial personal relationships . Once his close friends included people who cared about Judaism and Jews, and especially once his best friend was a Jew, he came to admire them wholeheartedly, both as individuals and as a nation . However, his conversion to philosemitism on the personal level did not mean that he abandoned his rationalist disparagement of Judaism as theological system and social institution . In short, in his case as in that of many intellectuals, theory and behaviour did not always coincide . To the end he contradicted himself, and I am unsure whether he fully realized that he did . No simple statement resolves all the contradictions because he seems never to have formulated, much less resolved, the contradictions for himself . FRAZER'S LIFE But before we begin the demonstration of my argument in earnest, a biographical sketch is in order . 14 James George Frazer (1854-1941) was the exemplary eldest son of an exemplary family of the Scottish middle class . His
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parents - his father Daniel Frazer was a leading Glasgow pharmacist - were members of the breakway group that founded the Free Church of Scotland in 1843, and his youth was spent within the strenuous piety of that impassioned movement . The religious commitment of his family may be likened to an inoculation that mysteriously does not `take', however, because in adolescence the faith of his childhood seems to have fallen away completely and painlessly . Unlike so many eminent Victorians-John Ruskin, Samuel Butler, and Frazer's good friend Edmund Gosse are perhaps the best known among them-he experienced no agonizing or dramatic 'deconversion' from Christianity; instead of breaking with his Evangelical family, he remained close with them throughout his life . He •w rote to them and visited them in Scotland regularly, and attended church there and elsewhere as well intermittently throughout his adult life . 15 Yet there can be little doubt that he was an agnostic or atheist early on-if he did not arrive at the University of Glasgow in 1869 in that condition, he certainly was an unbeliever by the time he took his first degree, in 1873 . 16 Because the academic level of the Scottish universities was not then very high, like many other of his intellectually talented countrymen Frazer decided to go south to take a second B .A . A steady stream of such bright young Scotsmen, from Adam Smith to Andrew Lang, had won the Snell Exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford, and gone on to distinguished intellectual careers . Frazer might well have been one of them . He was not because, as he tells us in a reminiscence, his staunchly Free Church father feared the possibility of contagion from the last lingering vestiges of the Oxford Movement of thirty years earlier . Accordingly, he was directed to Cambridge, and this son of a pharmacist entered that most aristocratic of colleges, Trinity, in October 1874 . 17 He never left ; he was a student and then a Fellow of that college for sixty-seven years (1874-1941) . Like so many parents who are seduced by reputation in advising their children about choosing a university, Daniel Frazer got it wrong . Had he the slightest idea of the intellectual atmosphere of Trinity, both in the Senior Combination Room and among the student body, that college would probably have been the last place in the realm that he would have sent his talented son . The rationalistic tradition of Cambridge, the immense stature of Spencer and Darwin among the university's `reading men', and the personal example of Henry Sidgwick in resigning his Trinity fellowship because of doubts about Christianity combined to produce an atmosphere in which Frazer's own seemingly innate rationalism thrived . FRAZER AND JUDAISM
Let us now turn to Judaism . Frazer's encounter with Judaism and Jews divides naturally into several parts . First, and most potent of all so far as his early
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opinions are concerned, was the ambient antisemitism of 19th century Britain in which he was immersed from his youth .18 It is impossible to know, but unnecessary to be certain, whether his first exposure came from his family or elsewhere . To change the metaphor, it seems reasonable to assume that he was bombarded by this cultural `background radiation' from youth, and it was this that was responsible for his early `generic' antisemitism, to be illustrated shortly . But over the years, and starting even before Frazer decided to make the history of religion his life's work, a number of people affected him on this matter both intellectually and emotionally . About these it is possible to be much more specific : they were, in chronological order, Heinrich Heine, William Robertson Smith, and Solomon Schechter . These influences and relationships, when integrated into his own evolving thought and feelings, led ultimately to Frazer's philosemitism . They also led to his surprising decision in 1905 to begin the study of Hebrew. Once launched, he embarked with his usual astounding industry upon a relentless course of Bible reading and Semitic studies on his own that climaxed, paradoxically, in the muted antiJudaic polemic of the three volumes of Folk-Lore in the Old Testament (1918) . No evidence exists as to Frazer's first exposure to either Jews or Judaism . Only a large handful of Jews lived in pre-industrial Glasgow and its suburbs when Frazer was growing up there in the 1860s, so it is unlikely that he knew any himself. 19 As his school, Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, was founded by a Congregational clergyman in order to provide a good education for the sons of Dissenting Glasgow businessmen, it can hardly have had Jewish pupils . We may assume, therefore, that in his youth, with the possible exception of an occasional shopkeeper or peddler, he met no Jews and knew none . The archivist of the University of Glasgow has been kind enough to scan the class lists of the courses that Frazer took between 1869 and 1873 and writes that they contain no `obviously Jewish names' . 20 But of course we know that real Jews are not needed for antisemitism to exist and to flourish. 21 As a young man Frazer's personal exposure to Jews and therefore to contemporary Judaism in Britain may have been nil, but his earliest publications show that he had absorbed wittingly or otherwise a full measure of what I have termed `generic' or ambient anti-Jewish sentiment . Not only was it in the air in Britain, but as we have seen, Oxbridge long fostered a virulent if genteel antisemitism . It is evident in his first anthropological paper . Frazer made his public scholarly debut at a meeting of the Anthropological Institute in London on 10 March 1885 . In the chair was one of his early mentors, the Institute's founder and animating spirit, the rationalist, eugenicist, and physical anthropologist Francis Galton, and the audience included such intellectual dreadnoughts-and objects of Frazer's admiration-as E . B . Tylor and Herbert
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Spencer . As one might imagine, on such a momentous occasion Frazer, then thirty-one years old, took as much care with the tone as with the content of his talk . He very much wished to be perceived as something more than just another pedantic don, and to that end the antireligious and anticlerical irony that we think of as characteristic of all his later work is already in full view . His paper's title also looked forward to things to come : `On Certain Burial Customs as Illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul' . 22 The essay is an exhaustive and exhausting survey of burial customs from all over the world of ancient and `primitive' peoples, who for Frazer all share the same mentality and therefore the same `primitive theory of the soul' . In the present context it is noteworthy that Frazer includes European Jewry among his catalogue of ancients and `savages', and their customs are therefore canvassed alongside those of Greeks and Romans, American Indians, Australian aborigines, and other lesser breeds without the Law . Thus, in a long paragraph devoted to enumerating examples of the `primitive' idea that after a death has occurred in the house one must get rid of all water lest the ghost fall in and become offended, Frazer segues without a break from the Albanians to the Jews . Here is his sardonic footnote about Jewish behaviour: `The reason assigned for this custom by the most learned Talmudists is that the water is unclean because the Angel of Death has washed his dripping sword in it . Contrast the vivid spiritualism of this explanation with the vapid rationalism of the view that the emptying of the water is a means of announcing the death . Truly it is vain to bottle the new wine of reason in old customs' . 23 Moreover, the very sources he uses for this and other dismissive references make clear that he regarded Judaism as a dead letter, a creed wholly outworn . Here his authority is J . C . G . Bodenschatz, Kirchliche Verfassung der heutigen Juden . To appreciate the point, one must know that the 'heutigen' of his source refers to a book published in 1748, a mere hundred and thirty-seven years before the lecture . Besides Bodenschatz, Frazer's other principal authority on things Judaic in this essay is the still earlier Synagoga Judaica, by Johannes Buxtorf, published in 1661 . 24 Of a piece with this is a throwaway wisecrack in a brief note published in the Classical Review three years later on `The Bedstead of the Flamen Dialis' . In it he remarks that the feet of the bed in which the flamen slept had always to be daubed in mud : Instead of sleeping on the ground, as his predecessors doubtless did in days of old, the modern Flamen slept in a bed, but soothed his conscience by daubing the legs of the bed with mud and thus, by a convenient ecclesiastical fiction, sleeping on the ground . A chapter on ecclesiastical fictions would be agreeable and instructive reading . The ancient Jew rent his garments in mourning ; the modern Jew (who knows the value of clothes, even of old ones) contents himself with undoing a seam for a couple of inches or so . 25
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These snide references show Frazer at the outset of his career as what the British call a common or garden variety of antisemite ; his tone also permits us to infer his sense of the attitudes of the audience . By the early 1880s, however, the seeds of a counter-tendency had been sown in Frazer's mind . Although he may not have met many Jews himself, he had by then already come into contact with at least one modern, or at least post-biblical, Jewish sensibility: Heinrich Heine's . The effect was immediate, long lasting, and far-reaching . HEINE
We know exactly when he first came to know the work of that luminous but tortured soul . James George having taken second place in the classical Tripos in 1878, Daniel Frazer, his proud father, gave him a trip to Germany as a reward . Since even as a young man the workaholic Frazer could never allow himself to travel solely for pleasure or relaxation, the goal of the trip was to perfect his German, the language of classical scholarship . To further that end, in 1878 in Hamburg Frazer bought a set of Heine's collected works : it was love at first sight and lasted as long as Frazer lived . 26 Ever after, Frazer regarded Heine as one of the supreme lyric voices of world literature and, importantly for the argument here, expressly as a Jewish voice . Thus, to leap ahead thirty-five years, when in 1924 A . E . Housman sent him a copy of his Last Poems, Frazer, by then decidedly an admirer of the Jews, bestowed on his friend's work the highest possible accolade by comparing it to Heine's : and I cannot say fairer than that, as I regard Heine as one of the most consummate geniuses who ever used human language to express human thought and emotion . His mastery of language seems to me to approach the magical and supernatural . So I hope that you will not take it ill that I compare you to-I was about to say a German poet ; but I never forget that Heine was not a German but a member of a far finer race, who handled the German language and drew music from the instrument in a way that no native of the coarser German race has ever, to my knowledge, approached . 27 Heine seems quickly to have become the voice for a range of powerful emotions that Frazer was otherwise unable to express . The existence of a romantic' current, muffled but flowing nevertheless, beneath the highly coloured classical and latinate surface of Frazer's rationalist rhetoric takes on greater plausibility when one learns that his other favourite poet was the distraught, devoutly Christian Englishman, William Cowper (1731-1800) . 28 An odder poetic couple, a spirit more different from Heine's, does not quickly come to mind . They do have one thing in common, however-both are masters of pathos, an emotion not much in evidence in Frazer's work because of his strict adherence to what he understood as the canons of the `scientific' study of religion, which meant, among other things, suppression of one's personal voice in favour of the presentation of `objective' data . 29
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Although Frazer's books and essays do contain occasional epigraphs from Heine, his admiration for the poet tended to emerge more in private utterance than in public . At least twice the telling quotation comes at a `peak' emotional moment, which is to say a moment where Frazer's ordinarily ample linguistic resources fail him . 30 Frazer's gifts lay in such a different band of the intellectual spectrum that he was unable to incorporate Heine into his ordinary style . So, although Heine resonated powerfully throughout Frazer's deepest emotional life, emerging at critical moments, I do not believe that Heine alone was enough to convert Frazer from an enemy to a friend of the Jews . In my view that transformation originated in Frazer's personal relationships with William Robertson Smith (1846-1894) and Solomon Schechter (1849-1915), his two best friends in the years from 1885 to 1905, the years, that is, before he learned Hebrew and launched himself as a biblical critic on his own . ROBERTSON SMITH AND SCHECHTER Looking back in 1912 at the study of myth in the preceding two decades, the French classical historian Salomon Reinach remarked that a sufficient epitaph for Robertson Smith was `genuit Frazerum' . 31 Even though Frazer very quickly outran the guidance of his erstwhile intellectual father and in fact disagreed with Smith much more often than not, the remark still has a point . When Smith met Frazer in 1884, the latter, although thirty years old and erudite and industrious, was still a conventional classical scholar . He had already begun a commentary on Pausanias, an author then receiving much attention as a result of the quickening pace of archaeological excavation all over Greece, but he had yet to commit himself wholeheartedly to a project, method, or cause . In the comparative anthropological study of the evolution of ancient and `primitive' religion Smith offered Frazer all three . Frazer, intoxicated by the intellectual vistas that Smith opened up to him, never looked back . In that crucial sense Smith created him as a scholar . Smith was a brilliant Semiticist and biblical scholar who, unusually for the period, had actually spent time in the Middle East ; he knew, had seen, and cared about real live Semites (both Arabs and Jews), as well as their texts . In those first giddy days Frazer, completely swept off his inexperienced feet by Smith's brilliance, wanted to know more about his new friend's subject in order to draw closer to him . He therefore returned to the Old Testament, which of course he knew well as a son of the `Wee Free', because of Smith's love for it . This was a return with a difference beause Smith caused Frazer to see the text as containing a rich lode of `primitive' material, and Frazer reread it with newly opened eyes . The lasting and profound difference between them was that Smith, for all his critical sophistication-which was always much greater than Frazer's-still read the Bible through the eyes of faith ; 32 Frazer, on the other hand, even before he met Smith, already thought of religion, in
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the best philosophe fashion, as a gigantic error that had been imposed by clever priests and magicians on a credulous populace . The last ingredient in this complicated recipe is Solomon Schechter . Schechter is best known in the United States as a leading theologian who was the first chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America . He was called to New York in 1902 from the faculty of Cambridge, where he had been Frazer's closest friend in the years following Smith's death in 1894. Schechter exemplified the new kind ofJewish scholar who had appeared in post-Napoleonic Europe . Judaism had always had men learned in the Law and the commentaries ; Schechter, a product of the Orthodox culture of Romania, began as one of them . But he then went west, via Vienna and Berlin, and in so doing added a knowledge of modern critical philosophy and scholarship to his pious foundation . He had first come to Britain as Claude Montefiore's tutor in rabbinics, then became reader in Talmud and Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge . Schechter achieved scholarly renown and immortality by being the first person to appreciate fully the meaning and value of the masses of manuscript fragments recovered from the manuscript graveyard (geniza) of the main synagogue in Cairo . Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, these contained most of what was known about the Essenes . To intellectual brilliance he added catholic interests and an attractive personality, so that among his wide circle of friends in Cambridge were such men as Charles Taylor, F . C . Burkitt, J . Rendel Harris, Mandell Creighton, A . C . Haddon, and William Robertson Smith . Of all these, according to his biographer, the most intimate was J . G . Frazer . 33 No information exists about how they met, but as Robertson Smith was also a Fellow of Christ's it is likely that he introduced them . After Smith's death in 1894 Frazer went into a deep depression that ended only with his marriage in 1896 ; Schechter's friendship seems also to have helped Frazer recover. In any event, by the turn of the century he and Schechter were constant companions . Crucially Schechter was able to do something that Smith could not-show by his own example that Judaism, far from being merely a collection of ancient texts, archaeological remains, and folkloric survivals, was a living culture with its own distinctive and valid way of understanding the world . Indeed, the main reason Schechter accepted the call to New York, despite his aversion to the public aspects of his new post, was that the intellectual stimulation of Cambridge was not enough . He could not live a full Jewish life there because to do so requires the existence of a Jewish community, and Cambridge had none . Frazer understood his friend's decision to leave, but was desolated by it nonetheless, and he never again attained with anyone else the intellectual and emotional rapport that he had had with Schechter . It does not seem at all
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farfetched to regard his decision to study Hebrew as an act of symbolic connection with his departed friend . That decision was made possible because in 1905 the Rev . R . H . Kennett, Regius Professor of Hebrew, was prevailed upon to offer a tutorial for a rather select group of his classical colleagues : to wit, Jane Ellen Harrison, F . M . Cornford, A . B . Cook, and J . G . Frazer . Who first had the idea for the class is unknown, but we know that its aim was to take its students to the point where they could read the Hebrew Bible on their own with the aid of a dictionary . After a few months only one student remained- Frazer. Like his classmates Frazer had studied many languages, classical and modern, throughout his life, but it seems safe to say that none was as difficult as Hebrew, begun at the age of fifty . Given his amazing capacity for work and the intimacy with Schechter that gave him an extra impetus to apply himself, it should not be surprising that Frazer soon was able to dispense with a teacher . The Wren Library at Trinity holds his Hebrew-English Bible, in which he noted the date that he finished each book . 34 He went through most of the text several times, in 1906-07, 1909, 1910, and 1915 . His notices of completion on the last two traverses include the words `for the most part without a dictionary' . Frazer became greatly enamoured of reading Hebrew, which became, in the decade before the First World War, his favourite recreation . CONSEQUENCES OF FRAZER'S FRIENDSHIPS
His friendship with Schechter also greatly heightened his sensitivity to antisemitism . Thus, in 1913 Czarist Russia once again revived the old blood libel-that Jews were using the blood of Christian children as an ingredient in the manufacture of Passover matzot . A Jew named Mendel Beilis was arrested and charged with murder in Kiev . Liberals everywhere denounced the trial as a sham and a mockery of justice . To prop up the prosecution's case, at the end of the trial a reactionary newspaper published a list of scholarly books that, in its view, supported the idea that at least in the past Jews actually did use Christian blood . Frazer was horrified to learn that a passage taken out of context from The Scapegoat (Part VI of the third edition of The Golden Bough) was on the list . He dropped everything and wrote a letter to The Times (11 November 1913) in whch he condemned the trial as a fraud and denied heatedly that his work in any way reinforced the prosecution's case . As the letter appeared the day that Beilis was acquitted, it is mainly of interest as an index of Frazer's deep commitment to the Jewish cause . 35 It is important to understand that his support of Beilis and the Jews was not part of a general liberal outlook on his part. Frazer was politically conservative, insofar as a man so wholly immersed in his work could be said to have any politics at all . Thus, he was one of the conservative majority of
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Fellows who voted to strip Bertrand Russell of his Trinity lectureship three years later during the war . 36 The first result of his new interest in Hebrew and the Bible was a long, shapeless set of notes entitled `Folk-lore in the Old Testament' that constituted his contribution to the Tylor Festschrift of 1907 . By folklore Frazer meant customs and practices that in his view were survivals from an earlier, more primitive mental stage . Typically, the evidence for this contention was a mass of customs and practices drawn from all over the `savage' world that he regarded as analogous to the alleged survival . In view of the pleasure he took in reading Hebrew, and of his vision of the Hebrew Bible as a vast field filled with such fossils, he soon decided to expand these jottings into a book . This work, in three stout quarto volumes, also entitled Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, took a decade to appear because it was composed in the interstices of writing and proofreading the great twelve-volume third edition of The Golden Bough . To examine it closely here would take too long and lead too far afield . 37 My summary judgment is that it is among the least successful of Frazer's major productions because it lacks both form and intellectual coherence . Although he never had time for theory and always preferred to plunge in in medias res, here Frazer's assumption that anything he regarded as a manifestation of the `primitive mind' would be so regarded by his audience finally sinks the work . He never explains the criteria he is using to decide what merits inclusion as a survival . Such objections notwithstanding-and they were not made at the time it was published-Folk-Lore in the Old Testament benefited immensely from its timing . Appearing as it did in November 1918, it stands at the head of what would become a long procession of subversion and debunkery of all that was true and holy right through the 1920s . Even though the work represents a reversion to Frazer's older anticlerical style, or perhaps the triumph of his innately rationalistic temperament, because it caught the tone of the time it was extremely popular . After bringing out a one-volume epitome of The Golden Bough (1922), the next year he did the same for Folk-Lore in the Old Testament . Both were best-sellers . It may well be psychologically significant that when the success of FolkLore in the Old Testament caused his publisher and others to ask him to treat the New Testament in the same manner, he replied that he had already planned more books than he would ever manage to complete in the years that were left to him, and therefore would be unable to write that particular volume . It is hard to believe that this refusal lacks symbolic value, but it is impossible to explore that here . Resisting such speculations, I shall instead content myself by remarking that Frazer's penchant for the Jews seems to have arisen as the combined result of his adulation of Heine and his deep personal commitment to Smith and Schechter . Together, this diverse trio made him see that modern Judaism at least was no dead letter .
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Except for the comparison to Heine in the letter to Housman written in the following year, already cited, and a passing laudatory mention of the Jews in the dedication to his very last book, 38 the record contains nothing further . His fondness for Jews as individuals and as a modern people continued to coexist with his reflex antipathy to Judaism as an organized religion, at least in its biblical incarnation . Although he nowhere says this outright, he seems silently to have concluded that biblical Judaism must remain condemned because qua religion it exemplified a superseded stage of mental evolution . On the other hand, modern Jewry, once emancipated, had commendably begun to cast off what he would doubtless have seen as medieval foolishness and superstition . (One would give much to know whether Schechter ever explained his hopes and plans for renewing traditional Judaism, and if he did whether Frazer was able to understand him .) By Frazer's day most Jews had already begun their passionate embrace of the modern world and of secular education in particular as the primary means for improving their otherwise dreadful lot in life . CONCLUSION
A few general reflections : The argument from `temperament' is famously a way of explaining the unknown by the unknown, and I acknowledge that I am reduced to something like that here . I trust that I have demonstrated that Frazer was indeed an admirer of the Jews when in his world that was not at all the done thing and that his conversion to the Jews seems to have grown out of his relationships with Smith ana Schechter . From this I conclude that Frazer was the kind of person who, confronted by evidence that his behaviour has been foolish and unthinking-in this case, the result of a vulgar prejudiceis ready, willing, and able to change . Before he met Smith and Schechter he had already been bewitched by Heine but had probably otherwise not thought a great deal about the Jews and Judaism, and the antisemitism in his immediate environment certainly did not require him to do so . But, when his prejudices were challenged, either in some incident that we do not know about, or implicitly by his coming to know and care for Smith and Schechter, he had the mental clarity to recognize that he had been stupid and the strength of mind to change . In my experience, such clarity and strength are not widely distributed within the general population . These days not many words are offered in praise of rationalism, but I should like to offer two cheers on its behalf here . I have no doubt that Frazer came to a halt intellectually around 1905 and repeated himself endlessly thereafter . Closedmindedly, he stayed with comparative evolutionism to the end of his days in the face of a revolution in anthropology . A line of critics from Andrew Lang to Bronislaw Malinowski attacked him for a multitude of sins, and he could not or would not adapt . Today, on the rare occasions when he is mentioned at all, he is regarded as a figure of fun, a dinosaur stuck in the
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primeval prehistory of anthropology . But I hope that I have shown not only that something good may be said for the man, but that out of some ambivalent impulse, hidden from himself and ultimately from us as well, he was able to change and in fact acquitted himself handsomely in an encounter with one of the poisons that have so corrupted life in our century .
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A version of this essay was delivered at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in New Orleans in 1990 . For their useful suggestions I wish to thank Professors Ivan Strenski and Robert Segal .
NOTES 1 2
3 4
5
6 7
8
9 10 11
Robert Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work, Cambridge, U .K ., Cambridge University Press 1987, hereafter Frazer . In this I agree, albeit for different reasons, with Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Tangled Bank, New York, Atheneum 1962, p .251 ff, who sees the whole of Frazer's immense oeuvre as the record of a ceaseless and finally unsuccessful quest to achieve certainty about religion . The Golden Bough 2nd Edn, London, Macmillan 1900, I, xxi-xxii . In his autobiographical memoirs `Speech on receiving the freedom of the city of Glasgow' and `Memories of my parents', in Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogonies and Other Pieces, London, Macmillan 1935, pp .117-51 . Two acute, worldly observers, Jane Ellen Harrison and William James, who came to know him in his middle years, describe Frazer as painfully withdrawn (Harrison) and little better than a baby, socially speaking (James) . On the other hand, at an earlier date he was described by his good friend the psychologist James Ward as possessing `many attached friends' ; see Frazer, pp . 174-5, 64 . I believe that both descriptions are correct-that he started out relatively sociable (if always unworldly) and over time became increasingly isolated . For Lang's ambivalence about Christianity and his return to the religious fold, see Frazer, pp .151-3 . Colin Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876-1939, London, Edward Arnold 1979, p .110, quoting J . Namier, Lewis Namier: A Biography, London, Oxford University Press 1975, pp .75-6 . Trinity College Add . MS . 184, no . 179 : used with permission of the holders of copyright, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge . I wish especially to thank Dr David McKitterick, Fellow and Librarian of the College, and Mr Alan Kucia, manuscript cataloguer, for their help with this material . William Everett (1839-1910), American scholar and man of letters, Clarke lecturer in 1907 . J . M . Image (1842-1919), Fellow of Trinity ; Frazer's tutor when he was an undergraduate . At the risk of seeming literal-minded, I shall decode . The anecdote turns on a double synechdoche, in which `Columbia University' stands for New York City, which in turn stands for the Jews (i .e . `Jew York City') . The real president of Columbia at the time was the disagreeable autocrat Nicholas Murray Butler, who of course was neither Jewish himself nor ever known as a friend of the Jews . Obviously Everett knew this, and at least some of his English audience did as well or he probably would not have told the story .
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13 14
15 16
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23 24 25 26
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Henry Martyn Taylor (1842-1927), Fellow of Trinity, was initially a mathematician but after he lost his sight in 1897 became keenly interested in the adaptation of the Braille alphabet for scientific uses. W . H . Thompson (1810-86), Master of Trinity . Beside the usual obituaries, there exist two studies by Frazer's sometime amanuensis, R . Angus Downie: James George Frazer : The Portrait of a Scholar, London, Watts 1940 and Frazer and The Golden Bough, London, Gollancz 1970 . Downie recounts an amusing contretemps involving churchgoing in Frazer and the Golden Bough, p .66 . In `Speech on receiving the freedom', pp.123-4, Frazer acknowledges the influence of his professor of natural science at Glasgow, the eminent physicist Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) . From Thomson's lectures, the young man came away with the mechanistic idea that the world was `regulated by exact and unvarying laws of nature expressible in mathematical formulae' . `Speech on receiving the freedom', p .124 . The standard study is that of Holmes (note 7 above) . Dr Kenneth Collins of Glasgow, an authority on the history of the Jews in Scotland, in a personal letter of 13 April 1990, writes that `Glasgow's Jewish community in 1870 numbered about 600-800 souls, increasing to 1200 in 1881' . I wish to thank him for his help . In a letter of 6 March 1990 from Dr Michael S . Moss, archivist of the university, whose help I am pleased to acknowledge . Holmes (note 7) p .5 : `[The Jews] were 0 .1 per cent of the population in 1850 and in 1880, 1900, 1910, and 1939 they constituted only 0 .17 per cent, 0 .38 per cent, 0.53 per cent, and 0 .8 per cent, respectively' . Published in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute 15 (1886), but more easily consulted in Frazer's collection, Garnered Sheaves, London, Macmillan 1931, pp .3-50, including a valuable three-page precis of the ensuing discussion ; hereafter GS . GS p .32 and note 1 . This is noted by Jonathan Z . Smith, `The glory, jest and riddle : J . G . Frazer and The Golden Bough', Yale dissertation, 1969, p .25 . `The bedstead of the flamen dialis,' Classical Review 2 (1888), p .322 (= GS p.158) . This went so far as to include an offer from the young Frazer in 1886 to his publisher, George Macmillan, to prepare a bilingual edition of the poet's works for school use, Heine `being one of my favourite authors' . Macmillan rejected the proposal on commercial grounds, and it was never revived . See Frazer, pp . 67-8, 183 . MS, Library of Congress . For the full text, see Robert Ackerman, `Sir James G . Frazer and A . E . Housman : a relationship in letters', Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 15 (1974), pp .339-64. In his survey of the development of prose in English, English Prose Style, revised edn, New York, Pantheon 1952, pp . 191-2, Herbert Read offers an extract from The Golden Bough as an example of the continuation in the 20th century of the latinate classical `high style' . Frazer wrote a lengthy biographical memoir of Cowper to preface the two-volume collection of The Letters of William Cowper that he edited in 1912 as one of his periodic excursions into belles lettres . For this reason Frazer's prefaces are extremely important because only there did he allow the mask of objectivity to slip and to speak in propria persona . On this `romantic' communion with Robertson Smith, one of the emotional
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R. Ackerman summits of his life, see Frazer, pp .68-9 . Heine appears again when, under great stress and quite miserable, Frazer announced to his friend Hermann Diels his difficult decision to leave Liverpool and return to Cambridge ; see Frazer, p.214. Salomon Reinach, `The growth of mythological study', Quarterly Review 215 (October, 1911), pp .423-41 ; 'genuit Frazerum' occurs on p .438 . In a lecture commemorating the centenary of Smith's birth, C . E . Raven, then Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, stated flatly that Smith was always a Christian and that `He had no sympathy with . . . any thorough-going humanism or rationalism' . Centenary of the Birth on 8th November 1846 of the Reverend Professor W. Robertson Smith, Aberdeen, The University Press 1951, p .16 . Norman Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, Cambridge, U .K ., Cambridge University Press 1938, pp .87-8 . The preceding two paragraphs have been adapted from Frazer, p .182 . Trinity College Adv . c . 20 :3 . This discussion draws on Frazer, p .183 . We know both that Frazer was passionately involved and that the letter to The Times did not mark the limit of his involvement . According to Phyllis Abrahams, daughter of Israel Abrahams, Schechter's successor at Cambridge, sometime earlier during the Beilis case a letter to the press was drafted, to be signed by leading British academics, assailing the charges as false and the trial as a frameup . Abrahams was talking excitedly about it with Frazer when the masterful Mrs Frazer entered, angry that he should be distracting her husband from his all-important work . This once, however, the milktoast Frazer resisted. He is said to have cried out: `Leave me alone, woman! This is a matter of life and death!' Letter from Phyllis Abrahams (13 September 1970) to R. A . Downie, communicated by Downie to me . For Frazer's part in the Russell affair, see Frazer, pp.263-4 . For such a discussion, see Frazer, pp .273-7 . Frazer's last book, Totemica, London, Macmillan 1940, produced after he had gone blind in extreme old age, is dedicated to the Anglo Jewish philanthropist Sir Robert Mond, `worthy scion of his noble race' .
ROBERT ACKERMAN is Director of Humanities at the University of the Arts (Philadelphia) ; author of]. G . Frazer: His Life and Work, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1987, The Myth and Ritual School, New York, Garland 1990, and numerous articles on the Cambridge Ritualists . University of the Arts, Broad & Pine Streets, Philadelphia, PA 19102, U.S.A . R189 Nigel Religion 11/9/91 page 16
J. G. FRAZER AND THE JEWS Robert Ackerman Along with H . G . Wells, J . G . Frazer was perhaps the most influential secularist voice in English in the 20th century . Nonetheless, a review of the distinctly unusual changes in his attitudes toward the Jews and Judaism over the years lends credibility to the notion that he may in fact have been ambivalent about religion throughout his long life . The key figures in this remarkable evolution were Heinrich Heine, William Robertson Smith, and Solomon Schechter ; Frazer's personal relationships with the latter two were crucial in causing him to reconsider his views and move from standard academic Oxbridge antisemitism to a position that can only be characterized as semitophilic . J . G . Frazer's views on the Jews, and especially their development, were decidedly unusual for their time ; more interestingly, they offer an insight into otherwise inaccessible aspects of his thought and may represent deep ambiguities on his part concerning religion . One of the basic questions I faced while writing Frazer's life' was how to understand his attitude toward religion . The attitude itself- toward religion in general and Christianity in particular-is of course emphatically and undeniably negative . It is illustrated so abundantly throughout nearly the entire body of his work, and especially in The Golden Bough, that it does not require demonstration . And yet, as I tried to `feel my way into' my subject's mind and heart, I gradually came to the surprising conclusion that J . G . Frazer, ostensibly the Voltaire de nos jours, and perhaps the most important secularist voice in English of our century, was in some sense deeply ambivalent about religion . 2 By this I do not mean that he was not in earnest in his lifelong assault ; indeed, if anything, he was painfully in earnest in everything he did and would have profited greatly had a sense of humour been part of his original endowment . Nonetheless, although he certainly did believe that religion was a manifestation of a fundamentally mistaken way of apprehending the world and thus an outlook happily superseded by positive science, that it was in Enlightenment terms an `error', such a formulation by itself does not exhaust the question . Despite his philosophe-like glee in impaling religion on the lance of rationality whenever he could, his writings and letters make it clear enough that he seems often to have been of two minds regarding religion . I cannot say that he was continuously racked by inner torment, nor even that he was always aware of this counter-sentiment, but of its existence I am certain . Let me offer some evidence . One of a number of texts that alerted me to the possibility of some deep-lying ambivalence is to be found in the second edition of The Golden Bough (1900) . It was in that edition that he asserted the theory 0048-721 X/92/020135 + 16 $03 .00/0
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for which he is now best known-that religion (or at least his rationalistic reduction of it) followed magic and preceded science in the series of major evolutionary phases in humanity's understanding of itself and the world, that it was based on fundamentally mistaken premises, and that at least the enlightened intellectual leadership of the West had moved beyond religion to science . In the preface to that very work, however, occurs this revealing military metaphor in which Frazer sets forth his view of the subversive nature and aims of the comparative study of religion : Well handled, it [the comparative method] may become a powerful instrument to expedite progress if it lays bare certain weak spots in the foundations on which modern society is built-it shows that much that we are wont to regard as solid rests on the sands of superstition rather than on the rock of nature . It is indeed a melancholy and in some respects thankless task to strike at the foundations of belief in which, as a strong tower, the hopes and aspirations of humanity through long ages have sought a refuge from the storm and stress of life . Yet sooner or later it is inevitable that the battery of the comparative method should breach these venerable walls, mantled over with ivy and mosses and wild flowers of a thousand tender and sacred associations . At present we are only dragging the guns into position : they have hardly yet begun to speak . . . . Yet this uncertainty [about what will replace religion] ought not to induce us, from any consideration of expediency or regard for antiquity, to spare the ancient moulds, however beautiful, which are proved to be out-worn . Whatever comes of it, wherever it leads us, we must follow truth alone . It is our only guiding star : hoc signo vinces. 3 In these brocaded sentences, this melancholy soldier makes it clear that although he may have enlisted in the artillery corps of reason and although he will assuredly do his duty, he is deeply uneasy about the goals of the campaign in which he is engaged . The target of the siege guns that have `hardly yet begun to speak', the ancient and venerable citadel of religion, is figuratively his own home, the place whence he himself comes and where his emotions still lie, the place the walls of which are `mantled over with ivy and mosses and wild flowers of a thousand tender associations' . If we agree that such a passage suggests that Frazer, master ironist at the expense of religion though he undoubtedly was, may nevertheless have been at least sporadically of two minds about the value and meaning of the enterprise that occupied his life, then an explanation is called for . What dreadful childhood event, what primal struggle with his father, which of the many other traumas for which psychobiography has prepared us had brought him to this pitch of ambivalence? Unfortunately for the psychobiographer ready to pounce, however, his memories of childhood and youth in the bosom of a loving family are uniformly pleasant, even idyllic . 4 Furthermore, except at the rarest of moments Frazer, a paralytically shy man according to most reports, 3 was not given to introspection and was distinctly averse to anatomizing his motives . (When one thinks for a moment about the size of his output,
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it becomes immediately apparent that he literally did not have the time to be self-absorbed .) I regret to say that the available evidence does not permit us, or at least does not permit me, to come up with a single satisfying explanation . For all that, one odd thing stood out . Although Frazer could not and did not ever return to the bosom of Christianity (as did his contemporary, that other ambivalent ethnographer, Andrew Lang 6), over time and for reasons that I doubt that he was ever fully aware of or understood, Judaism and especially the Jews came to take on a new and enhanced value . Religion in general and Christianity in particular continued to be dismissed, but it was as if the Jews, if not always the religion they professed, permitted his ambivalent admiration for religion-or at least for some of its results-to take on a local habitation and a name . Counter-evidence exists, and will be mentioned, but in the second half of his life, though he could never accept that God chose the Jews, it is not too much to say that J . G . Frazer himself chose them . Occasionally, even Judaism itself seems to have taken on aspects of the emotional value of his own lost faith . As a result, his changing views on Jews and Judaism-he began as a `normal' Oxbridge academic antisemite and emerged as a pronounced philosemite-offer an indirect view of this otherwise inaccessible inner movement of mind . To appreciate the norm, and therefore of just how far Frazer departed from it, here are two examples of Oxbridge antisemitism at the turn of the centuryone, indeed, taken from Frazer's own Trinity College, Cambridge . OXBRIDGE
ANTISEMITISM
When Lewis Namier, already a distinguished historian, was put forward for a fellowship at All Souls Oxford in 1911, he was blackballed because of his origins . We know this because a new Fellow of the college, A . F. Pollard, who was present at the election meeting, directly afterward wrote to his parents about what had happened : `The lawyers could not conscientiously run a law candidate, so we had two for history . The best man by far was a Balliol man of Polish Jewish origin and I did my best for him, but the Warden and a majority of Fellows shied at his race, and eventually we elected the two next best' . At Trinity, one of the Fellows, the philosopher J . McT . E . McTaggart (1866-1925), sometime in the 1890s appointed himself historian of the college and began to note down for posterity the Fellows' table-talk . 8 In that antediluvian day, when Cambridge knew not the pressure to publish, and many of the older Fellows were unmarried, a number of them would regularly repair to the rooms of one or another of an evening to push the port, to smoke, and to talk, and the next day McTaggart would record what he regarded as the highlights of the conversation . The result, hundreds and hundreds of slips of paper that fill numerous file boxes, constitutes something between a diary and
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an informal history of the college for the twenty years or so that he made his jottings . Dr David McKitterick, the Librarian of Trinity, in kindly allowing me to use a snippet from this mass of material, has asked me to note that competent authorities (G . M . Trevelyan and D . A . Winstanley) who knew McTaggart regarded him as unreliable and his notes as subhistorical gossip . One must be bold to disagree with such men, but in this case I shall . Although we should be unwise to depend upon McTaggart for ipsissima verba, for something like antisemitism, on which attitudes have changed so greatly over the intervening generations, in his unself-consciousness he seems an absolutely reliable witness about the tone of the place and time . That said, here is his entry for 19 October 1907 . (It is theoretically possible, but most unlikely, that Frazer was present ; he rarely dined in hall .) W . Everett,9 who is up as Clarke lecturer, said at Image's 10 last night that the President of Columbia (who is, of course, very Jewish 11 ) said to the President of Princeton that the head of a small place like Princeton away in New Jersey ought to be able to do his work in his sleep, while the President of Columbia was so busy he never got to sleep at all . `I don't doubt it', the Princeton man said . `We know that he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep' . H . M . Taylor 12 added that W . H . Thompson 13 had once said that the Jewish people might be Chosen but weren't Choice . Let us return to Frazer . His early position, to be illustrated shortly, was . one of smug bigotry . What then caused him to change? We cannot be sure what got him going, but that he changed is incontrovertible . His views altered quietly, perhaps insensibly, and only at especially stressful moments did they get articulated . In my opinion, throughgoing intellectualist though he was, what made him move was not some new book he read about the Jews but his part in two crucial personal relationships . Once his close friends included people who cared about Judaism and Jews, and especially once his best friend was a Jew, he came to admire them wholeheartedly, both as individuals and as a nation . However, his conversion to philosemitism on the personal level did not mean that he abandoned his rationalist disparagement of Judaism as theological system and social institution . In short, in his case as in that of many intellectuals, theory and behaviour did not always coincide . To the end he contradicted himself, and I am unsure whether he fully realized that he did . No simple statement resolves all the contradictions because he seems never to have formulated, much less resolved, the contradictions for himself . FRAZER'S LIFE But before we begin the demonstration of my argument in earnest, a biographical sketch is in order . 14 James George Frazer (1854-1941) was the exemplary eldest son of an exemplary family of the Scottish middle class . His
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parents - his father Daniel Frazer was a leading Glasgow pharmacist - were members of the breakway group that founded the Free Church of Scotland in 1843, and his youth was spent within the strenuous piety of that impassioned movement . The religious commitment of his family may be likened to an inoculation that mysteriously does not `take', however, because in adolescence the faith of his childhood seems to have fallen away completely and painlessly . Unlike so many eminent Victorians-John Ruskin, Samuel Butler, and Frazer's good friend Edmund Gosse are perhaps the best known among them-he experienced no agonizing or dramatic 'deconversion' from Christianity; instead of breaking with his Evangelical family, he remained close with them throughout his life . He •w rote to them and visited them in Scotland regularly, and attended church there and elsewhere as well intermittently throughout his adult life . 15 Yet there can be little doubt that he was an agnostic or atheist early on-if he did not arrive at the University of Glasgow in 1869 in that condition, he certainly was an unbeliever by the time he took his first degree, in 1873 . 16 Because the academic level of the Scottish universities was not then very high, like many other of his intellectually talented countrymen Frazer decided to go south to take a second B .A . A steady stream of such bright young Scotsmen, from Adam Smith to Andrew Lang, had won the Snell Exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford, and gone on to distinguished intellectual careers . Frazer might well have been one of them . He was not because, as he tells us in a reminiscence, his staunchly Free Church father feared the possibility of contagion from the last lingering vestiges of the Oxford Movement of thirty years earlier . Accordingly, he was directed to Cambridge, and this son of a pharmacist entered that most aristocratic of colleges, Trinity, in October 1874 . 17 He never left ; he was a student and then a Fellow of that college for sixty-seven years (1874-1941) . Like so many parents who are seduced by reputation in advising their children about choosing a university, Daniel Frazer got it wrong . Had he the slightest idea of the intellectual atmosphere of Trinity, both in the Senior Combination Room and among the student body, that college would probably have been the last place in the realm that he would have sent his talented son . The rationalistic tradition of Cambridge, the immense stature of Spencer and Darwin among the university's `reading men', and the personal example of Henry Sidgwick in resigning his Trinity fellowship because of doubts about Christianity combined to produce an atmosphere in which Frazer's own seemingly innate rationalism thrived . FRAZER AND JUDAISM
Let us now turn to Judaism . Frazer's encounter with Judaism and Jews divides naturally into several parts . First, and most potent of all so far as his early
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opinions are concerned, was the ambient antisemitism of 19th century Britain in which he was immersed from his youth .18 It is impossible to know, but unnecessary to be certain, whether his first exposure came from his family or elsewhere . To change the metaphor, it seems reasonable to assume that he was bombarded by this cultural `background radiation' from youth, and it was this that was responsible for his early `generic' antisemitism, to be illustrated shortly . But over the years, and starting even before Frazer decided to make the history of religion his life's work, a number of people affected him on this matter both intellectually and emotionally . About these it is possible to be much more specific : they were, in chronological order, Heinrich Heine, William Robertson Smith, and Solomon Schechter . These influences and relationships, when integrated into his own evolving thought and feelings, led ultimately to Frazer's philosemitism . They also led to his surprising decision in 1905 to begin the study of Hebrew. Once launched, he embarked with his usual astounding industry upon a relentless course of Bible reading and Semitic studies on his own that climaxed, paradoxically, in the muted antiJudaic polemic of the three volumes of Folk-Lore in the Old Testament (1918) . No evidence exists as to Frazer's first exposure to either Jews or Judaism . Only a large handful of Jews lived in pre-industrial Glasgow and its suburbs when Frazer was growing up there in the 1860s, so it is unlikely that he knew any himself. 19 As his school, Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, was founded by a Congregational clergyman in order to provide a good education for the sons of Dissenting Glasgow businessmen, it can hardly have had Jewish pupils . We may assume, therefore, that in his youth, with the possible exception of an occasional shopkeeper or peddler, he met no Jews and knew none . The archivist of the University of Glasgow has been kind enough to scan the class lists of the courses that Frazer took between 1869 and 1873 and writes that they contain no `obviously Jewish names' . 20 But of course we know that real Jews are not needed for antisemitism to exist and to flourish. 21 As a young man Frazer's personal exposure to Jews and therefore to contemporary Judaism in Britain may have been nil, but his earliest publications show that he had absorbed wittingly or otherwise a full measure of what I have termed `generic' or ambient anti-Jewish sentiment . Not only was it in the air in Britain, but as we have seen, Oxbridge long fostered a virulent if genteel antisemitism . It is evident in his first anthropological paper . Frazer made his public scholarly debut at a meeting of the Anthropological Institute in London on 10 March 1885 . In the chair was one of his early mentors, the Institute's founder and animating spirit, the rationalist, eugenicist, and physical anthropologist Francis Galton, and the audience included such intellectual dreadnoughts-and objects of Frazer's admiration-as E . B . Tylor and Herbert
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Spencer . As one might imagine, on such a momentous occasion Frazer, then thirty-one years old, took as much care with the tone as with the content of his talk . He very much wished to be perceived as something more than just another pedantic don, and to that end the antireligious and anticlerical irony that we think of as characteristic of all his later work is already in full view . His paper's title also looked forward to things to come : `On Certain Burial Customs as Illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul' . 22 The essay is an exhaustive and exhausting survey of burial customs from all over the world of ancient and `primitive' peoples, who for Frazer all share the same mentality and therefore the same `primitive theory of the soul' . In the present context it is noteworthy that Frazer includes European Jewry among his catalogue of ancients and `savages', and their customs are therefore canvassed alongside those of Greeks and Romans, American Indians, Australian aborigines, and other lesser breeds without the Law . Thus, in a long paragraph devoted to enumerating examples of the `primitive' idea that after a death has occurred in the house one must get rid of all water lest the ghost fall in and become offended, Frazer segues without a break from the Albanians to the Jews . Here is his sardonic footnote about Jewish behaviour: `The reason assigned for this custom by the most learned Talmudists is that the water is unclean because the Angel of Death has washed his dripping sword in it . Contrast the vivid spiritualism of this explanation with the vapid rationalism of the view that the emptying of the water is a means of announcing the death . Truly it is vain to bottle the new wine of reason in old customs' . 23 Moreover, the very sources he uses for this and other dismissive references make clear that he regarded Judaism as a dead letter, a creed wholly outworn . Here his authority is J . C . G . Bodenschatz, Kirchliche Verfassung der heutigen Juden . To appreciate the point, one must know that the 'heutigen' of his source refers to a book published in 1748, a mere hundred and thirty-seven years before the lecture . Besides Bodenschatz, Frazer's other principal authority on things Judaic in this essay is the still earlier Synagoga Judaica, by Johannes Buxtorf, published in 1661 . 24 Of a piece with this is a throwaway wisecrack in a brief note published in the Classical Review three years later on `The Bedstead of the Flamen Dialis' . In it he remarks that the feet of the bed in which the flamen slept had always to be daubed in mud : Instead of sleeping on the ground, as his predecessors doubtless did in days of old, the modern Flamen slept in a bed, but soothed his conscience by daubing the legs of the bed with mud and thus, by a convenient ecclesiastical fiction, sleeping on the ground . A chapter on ecclesiastical fictions would be agreeable and instructive reading . The ancient Jew rent his garments in mourning ; the modern Jew (who knows the value of clothes, even of old ones) contents himself with undoing a seam for a couple of inches or so . 25
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These snide references show Frazer at the outset of his career as what the British call a common or garden variety of antisemite ; his tone also permits us to infer his sense of the attitudes of the audience . By the early 1880s, however, the seeds of a counter-tendency had been sown in Frazer's mind . Although he may not have met many Jews himself, he had by then already come into contact with at least one modern, or at least post-biblical, Jewish sensibility: Heinrich Heine's . The effect was immediate, long lasting, and far-reaching . HEINE
We know exactly when he first came to know the work of that luminous but tortured soul . James George having taken second place in the classical Tripos in 1878, Daniel Frazer, his proud father, gave him a trip to Germany as a reward . Since even as a young man the workaholic Frazer could never allow himself to travel solely for pleasure or relaxation, the goal of the trip was to perfect his German, the language of classical scholarship . To further that end, in 1878 in Hamburg Frazer bought a set of Heine's collected works : it was love at first sight and lasted as long as Frazer lived . 26 Ever after, Frazer regarded Heine as one of the supreme lyric voices of world literature and, importantly for the argument here, expressly as a Jewish voice . Thus, to leap ahead thirty-five years, when in 1924 A . E . Housman sent him a copy of his Last Poems, Frazer, by then decidedly an admirer of the Jews, bestowed on his friend's work the highest possible accolade by comparing it to Heine's : and I cannot say fairer than that, as I regard Heine as one of the most consummate geniuses who ever used human language to express human thought and emotion . His mastery of language seems to me to approach the magical and supernatural . So I hope that you will not take it ill that I compare you to-I was about to say a German poet ; but I never forget that Heine was not a German but a member of a far finer race, who handled the German language and drew music from the instrument in a way that no native of the coarser German race has ever, to my knowledge, approached . 27 Heine seems quickly to have become the voice for a range of powerful emotions that Frazer was otherwise unable to express . The existence of a romantic' current, muffled but flowing nevertheless, beneath the highly coloured classical and latinate surface of Frazer's rationalist rhetoric takes on greater plausibility when one learns that his other favourite poet was the distraught, devoutly Christian Englishman, William Cowper (1731-1800) . 28 An odder poetic couple, a spirit more different from Heine's, does not quickly come to mind . They do have one thing in common, however-both are masters of pathos, an emotion not much in evidence in Frazer's work because of his strict adherence to what he understood as the canons of the `scientific' study of religion, which meant, among other things, suppression of one's personal voice in favour of the presentation of `objective' data . 29
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Although Frazer's books and essays do contain occasional epigraphs from Heine, his admiration for the poet tended to emerge more in private utterance than in public . At least twice the telling quotation comes at a `peak' emotional moment, which is to say a moment where Frazer's ordinarily ample linguistic resources fail him . 30 Frazer's gifts lay in such a different band of the intellectual spectrum that he was unable to incorporate Heine into his ordinary style . So, although Heine resonated powerfully throughout Frazer's deepest emotional life, emerging at critical moments, I do not believe that Heine alone was enough to convert Frazer from an enemy to a friend of the Jews . In my view that transformation originated in Frazer's personal relationships with William Robertson Smith (1846-1894) and Solomon Schechter (1849-1915), his two best friends in the years from 1885 to 1905, the years, that is, before he learned Hebrew and launched himself as a biblical critic on his own . ROBERTSON SMITH AND SCHECHTER Looking back in 1912 at the study of myth in the preceding two decades, the French classical historian Salomon Reinach remarked that a sufficient epitaph for Robertson Smith was `genuit Frazerum' . 31 Even though Frazer very quickly outran the guidance of his erstwhile intellectual father and in fact disagreed with Smith much more often than not, the remark still has a point . When Smith met Frazer in 1884, the latter, although thirty years old and erudite and industrious, was still a conventional classical scholar . He had already begun a commentary on Pausanias, an author then receiving much attention as a result of the quickening pace of archaeological excavation all over Greece, but he had yet to commit himself wholeheartedly to a project, method, or cause . In the comparative anthropological study of the evolution of ancient and `primitive' religion Smith offered Frazer all three . Frazer, intoxicated by the intellectual vistas that Smith opened up to him, never looked back . In that crucial sense Smith created him as a scholar . Smith was a brilliant Semiticist and biblical scholar who, unusually for the period, had actually spent time in the Middle East ; he knew, had seen, and cared about real live Semites (both Arabs and Jews), as well as their texts . In those first giddy days Frazer, completely swept off his inexperienced feet by Smith's brilliance, wanted to know more about his new friend's subject in order to draw closer to him . He therefore returned to the Old Testament, which of course he knew well as a son of the `Wee Free', because of Smith's love for it . This was a return with a difference beause Smith caused Frazer to see the text as containing a rich lode of `primitive' material, and Frazer reread it with newly opened eyes . The lasting and profound difference between them was that Smith, for all his critical sophistication-which was always much greater than Frazer's-still read the Bible through the eyes of faith ; 32 Frazer, on the other hand, even before he met Smith, already thought of religion, in
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the best philosophe fashion, as a gigantic error that had been imposed by clever priests and magicians on a credulous populace . The last ingredient in this complicated recipe is Solomon Schechter . Schechter is best known in the United States as a leading theologian who was the first chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America . He was called to New York in 1902 from the faculty of Cambridge, where he had been Frazer's closest friend in the years following Smith's death in 1894. Schechter exemplified the new kind ofJewish scholar who had appeared in post-Napoleonic Europe . Judaism had always had men learned in the Law and the commentaries ; Schechter, a product of the Orthodox culture of Romania, began as one of them . But he then went west, via Vienna and Berlin, and in so doing added a knowledge of modern critical philosophy and scholarship to his pious foundation . He had first come to Britain as Claude Montefiore's tutor in rabbinics, then became reader in Talmud and Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge . Schechter achieved scholarly renown and immortality by being the first person to appreciate fully the meaning and value of the masses of manuscript fragments recovered from the manuscript graveyard (geniza) of the main synagogue in Cairo . Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, these contained most of what was known about the Essenes . To intellectual brilliance he added catholic interests and an attractive personality, so that among his wide circle of friends in Cambridge were such men as Charles Taylor, F . C . Burkitt, J . Rendel Harris, Mandell Creighton, A . C . Haddon, and William Robertson Smith . Of all these, according to his biographer, the most intimate was J . G . Frazer . 33 No information exists about how they met, but as Robertson Smith was also a Fellow of Christ's it is likely that he introduced them . After Smith's death in 1894 Frazer went into a deep depression that ended only with his marriage in 1896 ; Schechter's friendship seems also to have helped Frazer recover. In any event, by the turn of the century he and Schechter were constant companions . Crucially Schechter was able to do something that Smith could not-show by his own example that Judaism, far from being merely a collection of ancient texts, archaeological remains, and folkloric survivals, was a living culture with its own distinctive and valid way of understanding the world . Indeed, the main reason Schechter accepted the call to New York, despite his aversion to the public aspects of his new post, was that the intellectual stimulation of Cambridge was not enough . He could not live a full Jewish life there because to do so requires the existence of a Jewish community, and Cambridge had none . Frazer understood his friend's decision to leave, but was desolated by it nonetheless, and he never again attained with anyone else the intellectual and emotional rapport that he had had with Schechter . It does not seem at all
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farfetched to regard his decision to study Hebrew as an act of symbolic connection with his departed friend . That decision was made possible because in 1905 the Rev . R . H . Kennett, Regius Professor of Hebrew, was prevailed upon to offer a tutorial for a rather select group of his classical colleagues : to wit, Jane Ellen Harrison, F . M . Cornford, A . B . Cook, and J . G . Frazer . Who first had the idea for the class is unknown, but we know that its aim was to take its students to the point where they could read the Hebrew Bible on their own with the aid of a dictionary . After a few months only one student remained- Frazer. Like his classmates Frazer had studied many languages, classical and modern, throughout his life, but it seems safe to say that none was as difficult as Hebrew, begun at the age of fifty . Given his amazing capacity for work and the intimacy with Schechter that gave him an extra impetus to apply himself, it should not be surprising that Frazer soon was able to dispense with a teacher . The Wren Library at Trinity holds his Hebrew-English Bible, in which he noted the date that he finished each book . 34 He went through most of the text several times, in 1906-07, 1909, 1910, and 1915 . His notices of completion on the last two traverses include the words `for the most part without a dictionary' . Frazer became greatly enamoured of reading Hebrew, which became, in the decade before the First World War, his favourite recreation . CONSEQUENCES OF FRAZER'S FRIENDSHIPS
His friendship with Schechter also greatly heightened his sensitivity to antisemitism . Thus, in 1913 Czarist Russia once again revived the old blood libel-that Jews were using the blood of Christian children as an ingredient in the manufacture of Passover matzot . A Jew named Mendel Beilis was arrested and charged with murder in Kiev . Liberals everywhere denounced the trial as a sham and a mockery of justice . To prop up the prosecution's case, at the end of the trial a reactionary newspaper published a list of scholarly books that, in its view, supported the idea that at least in the past Jews actually did use Christian blood . Frazer was horrified to learn that a passage taken out of context from The Scapegoat (Part VI of the third edition of The Golden Bough) was on the list . He dropped everything and wrote a letter to The Times (11 November 1913) in whch he condemned the trial as a fraud and denied heatedly that his work in any way reinforced the prosecution's case . As the letter appeared the day that Beilis was acquitted, it is mainly of interest as an index of Frazer's deep commitment to the Jewish cause . 35 It is important to understand that his support of Beilis and the Jews was not part of a general liberal outlook on his part. Frazer was politically conservative, insofar as a man so wholly immersed in his work could be said to have any politics at all . Thus, he was one of the conservative majority of
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Fellows who voted to strip Bertrand Russell of his Trinity lectureship three years later during the war . 36 The first result of his new interest in Hebrew and the Bible was a long, shapeless set of notes entitled `Folk-lore in the Old Testament' that constituted his contribution to the Tylor Festschrift of 1907 . By folklore Frazer meant customs and practices that in his view were survivals from an earlier, more primitive mental stage . Typically, the evidence for this contention was a mass of customs and practices drawn from all over the `savage' world that he regarded as analogous to the alleged survival . In view of the pleasure he took in reading Hebrew, and of his vision of the Hebrew Bible as a vast field filled with such fossils, he soon decided to expand these jottings into a book . This work, in three stout quarto volumes, also entitled Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, took a decade to appear because it was composed in the interstices of writing and proofreading the great twelve-volume third edition of The Golden Bough . To examine it closely here would take too long and lead too far afield . 37 My summary judgment is that it is among the least successful of Frazer's major productions because it lacks both form and intellectual coherence . Although he never had time for theory and always preferred to plunge in in medias res, here Frazer's assumption that anything he regarded as a manifestation of the `primitive mind' would be so regarded by his audience finally sinks the work . He never explains the criteria he is using to decide what merits inclusion as a survival . Such objections notwithstanding-and they were not made at the time it was published-Folk-Lore in the Old Testament benefited immensely from its timing . Appearing as it did in November 1918, it stands at the head of what would become a long procession of subversion and debunkery of all that was true and holy right through the 1920s . Even though the work represents a reversion to Frazer's older anticlerical style, or perhaps the triumph of his innately rationalistic temperament, because it caught the tone of the time it was extremely popular . After bringing out a one-volume epitome of The Golden Bough (1922), the next year he did the same for Folk-Lore in the Old Testament . Both were best-sellers . It may well be psychologically significant that when the success of FolkLore in the Old Testament caused his publisher and others to ask him to treat the New Testament in the same manner, he replied that he had already planned more books than he would ever manage to complete in the years that were left to him, and therefore would be unable to write that particular volume . It is hard to believe that this refusal lacks symbolic value, but it is impossible to explore that here . Resisting such speculations, I shall instead content myself by remarking that Frazer's penchant for the Jews seems to have arisen as the combined result of his adulation of Heine and his deep personal commitment to Smith and Schechter . Together, this diverse trio made him see that modern Judaism at least was no dead letter .
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Except for the comparison to Heine in the letter to Housman written in the following year, already cited, and a passing laudatory mention of the Jews in the dedication to his very last book, 38 the record contains nothing further . His fondness for Jews as individuals and as a modern people continued to coexist with his reflex antipathy to Judaism as an organized religion, at least in its biblical incarnation . Although he nowhere says this outright, he seems silently to have concluded that biblical Judaism must remain condemned because qua religion it exemplified a superseded stage of mental evolution . On the other hand, modern Jewry, once emancipated, had commendably begun to cast off what he would doubtless have seen as medieval foolishness and superstition . (One would give much to know whether Schechter ever explained his hopes and plans for renewing traditional Judaism, and if he did whether Frazer was able to understand him .) By Frazer's day most Jews had already begun their passionate embrace of the modern world and of secular education in particular as the primary means for improving their otherwise dreadful lot in life . CONCLUSION
A few general reflections : The argument from `temperament' is famously a way of explaining the unknown by the unknown, and I acknowledge that I am reduced to something like that here . I trust that I have demonstrated that Frazer was indeed an admirer of the Jews when in his world that was not at all the done thing and that his conversion to the Jews seems to have grown out of his relationships with Smith ana Schechter . From this I conclude that Frazer was the kind of person who, confronted by evidence that his behaviour has been foolish and unthinking-in this case, the result of a vulgar prejudiceis ready, willing, and able to change . Before he met Smith and Schechter he had already been bewitched by Heine but had probably otherwise not thought a great deal about the Jews and Judaism, and the antisemitism in his immediate environment certainly did not require him to do so . But, when his prejudices were challenged, either in some incident that we do not know about, or implicitly by his coming to know and care for Smith and Schechter, he had the mental clarity to recognize that he had been stupid and the strength of mind to change . In my experience, such clarity and strength are not widely distributed within the general population . These days not many words are offered in praise of rationalism, but I should like to offer two cheers on its behalf here . I have no doubt that Frazer came to a halt intellectually around 1905 and repeated himself endlessly thereafter . Closedmindedly, he stayed with comparative evolutionism to the end of his days in the face of a revolution in anthropology . A line of critics from Andrew Lang to Bronislaw Malinowski attacked him for a multitude of sins, and he could not or would not adapt . Today, on the rare occasions when he is mentioned at all, he is regarded as a figure of fun, a dinosaur stuck in the
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primeval prehistory of anthropology . But I hope that I have shown not only that something good may be said for the man, but that out of some ambivalent impulse, hidden from himself and ultimately from us as well, he was able to change and in fact acquitted himself handsomely in an encounter with one of the poisons that have so corrupted life in our century .
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A version of this essay was delivered at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in New Orleans in 1990 . For their useful suggestions I wish to thank Professors Ivan Strenski and Robert Segal .
NOTES 1 2
3 4
5
6 7
8
9 10 11
Robert Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work, Cambridge, U .K ., Cambridge University Press 1987, hereafter Frazer . In this I agree, albeit for different reasons, with Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Tangled Bank, New York, Atheneum 1962, p .251 ff, who sees the whole of Frazer's immense oeuvre as the record of a ceaseless and finally unsuccessful quest to achieve certainty about religion . The Golden Bough 2nd Edn, London, Macmillan 1900, I, xxi-xxii . In his autobiographical memoirs `Speech on receiving the freedom of the city of Glasgow' and `Memories of my parents', in Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogonies and Other Pieces, London, Macmillan 1935, pp .117-51 . Two acute, worldly observers, Jane Ellen Harrison and William James, who came to know him in his middle years, describe Frazer as painfully withdrawn (Harrison) and little better than a baby, socially speaking (James) . On the other hand, at an earlier date he was described by his good friend the psychologist James Ward as possessing `many attached friends' ; see Frazer, pp . 174-5, 64 . I believe that both descriptions are correct-that he started out relatively sociable (if always unworldly) and over time became increasingly isolated . For Lang's ambivalence about Christianity and his return to the religious fold, see Frazer, pp .151-3 . Colin Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876-1939, London, Edward Arnold 1979, p .110, quoting J . Namier, Lewis Namier: A Biography, London, Oxford University Press 1975, pp .75-6 . Trinity College Add . MS . 184, no . 179 : used with permission of the holders of copyright, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge . I wish especially to thank Dr David McKitterick, Fellow and Librarian of the College, and Mr Alan Kucia, manuscript cataloguer, for their help with this material . William Everett (1839-1910), American scholar and man of letters, Clarke lecturer in 1907 . J . M . Image (1842-1919), Fellow of Trinity ; Frazer's tutor when he was an undergraduate . At the risk of seeming literal-minded, I shall decode . The anecdote turns on a double synechdoche, in which `Columbia University' stands for New York City, which in turn stands for the Jews (i .e . `Jew York City') . The real president of Columbia at the time was the disagreeable autocrat Nicholas Murray Butler, who of course was neither Jewish himself nor ever known as a friend of the Jews . Obviously Everett knew this, and at least some of his English audience did as well or he probably would not have told the story .
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13 14
15 16
17 18 19
20 21 22
23 24 25 26
27
28
29 30
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Henry Martyn Taylor (1842-1927), Fellow of Trinity, was initially a mathematician but after he lost his sight in 1897 became keenly interested in the adaptation of the Braille alphabet for scientific uses. W . H . Thompson (1810-86), Master of Trinity . Beside the usual obituaries, there exist two studies by Frazer's sometime amanuensis, R . Angus Downie: James George Frazer : The Portrait of a Scholar, London, Watts 1940 and Frazer and The Golden Bough, London, Gollancz 1970 . Downie recounts an amusing contretemps involving churchgoing in Frazer and the Golden Bough, p .66 . In `Speech on receiving the freedom', pp.123-4, Frazer acknowledges the influence of his professor of natural science at Glasgow, the eminent physicist Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) . From Thomson's lectures, the young man came away with the mechanistic idea that the world was `regulated by exact and unvarying laws of nature expressible in mathematical formulae' . `Speech on receiving the freedom', p .124 . The standard study is that of Holmes (note 7 above) . Dr Kenneth Collins of Glasgow, an authority on the history of the Jews in Scotland, in a personal letter of 13 April 1990, writes that `Glasgow's Jewish community in 1870 numbered about 600-800 souls, increasing to 1200 in 1881' . I wish to thank him for his help . In a letter of 6 March 1990 from Dr Michael S . Moss, archivist of the university, whose help I am pleased to acknowledge . Holmes (note 7) p .5 : `[The Jews] were 0 .1 per cent of the population in 1850 and in 1880, 1900, 1910, and 1939 they constituted only 0 .17 per cent, 0 .38 per cent, 0.53 per cent, and 0 .8 per cent, respectively' . Published in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute 15 (1886), but more easily consulted in Frazer's collection, Garnered Sheaves, London, Macmillan 1931, pp .3-50, including a valuable three-page precis of the ensuing discussion ; hereafter GS . GS p .32 and note 1 . This is noted by Jonathan Z . Smith, `The glory, jest and riddle : J . G . Frazer and The Golden Bough', Yale dissertation, 1969, p .25 . `The bedstead of the flamen dialis,' Classical Review 2 (1888), p .322 (= GS p.158) . This went so far as to include an offer from the young Frazer in 1886 to his publisher, George Macmillan, to prepare a bilingual edition of the poet's works for school use, Heine `being one of my favourite authors' . Macmillan rejected the proposal on commercial grounds, and it was never revived . See Frazer, pp . 67-8, 183 . MS, Library of Congress . For the full text, see Robert Ackerman, `Sir James G . Frazer and A . E . Housman : a relationship in letters', Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 15 (1974), pp .339-64. In his survey of the development of prose in English, English Prose Style, revised edn, New York, Pantheon 1952, pp . 191-2, Herbert Read offers an extract from The Golden Bough as an example of the continuation in the 20th century of the latinate classical `high style' . Frazer wrote a lengthy biographical memoir of Cowper to preface the two-volume collection of The Letters of William Cowper that he edited in 1912 as one of his periodic excursions into belles lettres . For this reason Frazer's prefaces are extremely important because only there did he allow the mask of objectivity to slip and to speak in propria persona . On this `romantic' communion with Robertson Smith, one of the emotional
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31 32
33 34 35
36 37 38
R. Ackerman summits of his life, see Frazer, pp .68-9 . Heine appears again when, under great stress and quite miserable, Frazer announced to his friend Hermann Diels his difficult decision to leave Liverpool and return to Cambridge ; see Frazer, p.214. Salomon Reinach, `The growth of mythological study', Quarterly Review 215 (October, 1911), pp .423-41 ; 'genuit Frazerum' occurs on p .438 . In a lecture commemorating the centenary of Smith's birth, C . E . Raven, then Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, stated flatly that Smith was always a Christian and that `He had no sympathy with . . . any thorough-going humanism or rationalism' . Centenary of the Birth on 8th November 1846 of the Reverend Professor W. Robertson Smith, Aberdeen, The University Press 1951, p .16 . Norman Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, Cambridge, U .K ., Cambridge University Press 1938, pp .87-8 . The preceding two paragraphs have been adapted from Frazer, p .182 . Trinity College Adv . c . 20 :3 . This discussion draws on Frazer, p .183 . We know both that Frazer was passionately involved and that the letter to The Times did not mark the limit of his involvement . According to Phyllis Abrahams, daughter of Israel Abrahams, Schechter's successor at Cambridge, sometime earlier during the Beilis case a letter to the press was drafted, to be signed by leading British academics, assailing the charges as false and the trial as a frameup . Abrahams was talking excitedly about it with Frazer when the masterful Mrs Frazer entered, angry that he should be distracting her husband from his all-important work . This once, however, the milktoast Frazer resisted. He is said to have cried out: `Leave me alone, woman! This is a matter of life and death!' Letter from Phyllis Abrahams (13 September 1970) to R. A . Downie, communicated by Downie to me . For Frazer's part in the Russell affair, see Frazer, pp.263-4 . For such a discussion, see Frazer, pp .273-7 . Frazer's last book, Totemica, London, Macmillan 1940, produced after he had gone blind in extreme old age, is dedicated to the Anglo Jewish philanthropist Sir Robert Mond, `worthy scion of his noble race' .
ROBERT ACKERMAN is Director of Humanities at the University of the Arts (Philadelphia) ; author of]. G . Frazer: His Life and Work, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1987, The Myth and Ritual School, New York, Garland 1990, and numerous articles on the Cambridge Ritualists . University of the Arts, Broad & Pine Streets, Philadelphia, PA 19102, U.S.A . R189 Nigel Religion 11/9/91 page 16