Harry Lewis, a former Harvard College dean and current computer-science professor, has written a piece for the Harvard Crimson in which he takes the university to task for teaching its students the very anti-Semitism it now feebly claims to oppose.
He’s right, and educators would do well to pay careful attention to the details of his argument. Lewis’s case rests on the expansion of classes teaching subjects like “decolonization,” an academic theory of justified violence whose application to Israel was wholly invented but wholly embraced by progressive educators and their students. Where I’m less sanguine is when it comes to solutions to this particular iteration of the problem—his or anyone else’s. And the reason for that can be found not in Harvard’s Middle Eastern studies classes but over in the English department: Geoffrey Chaucer’s opus The Canterbury Tales.
Specific types of anti-Semitism move from politics into culture, at which point they gain an immunity to all rationality and reason. This is because they have become, essentially, folktales. Folktales are an enduring method for societies to pass down their stories in a way that embeds them in inherited worldviews. Folktales aren’t necessarily untrue, but they can’t be fact-checked. Folktales are often the false way societies choose to remember real events.
And that brings us to the father of English poetry himself, Geoffrey Chaucer. The 14th century giant of literature’s most famous work is The Canterbury Tales, a collection of two dozen stories being told by a bunch of traveling English characters. One of those stories is also the most famous retelling of a blood libel in popular culture: The Prioress’s Tale. It is a version of the accusation of the ritual murder of a boy, Hugh of Lincoln, in 1255. The most likely reason the Christian clergy of Lincoln fabricated Jewish culpability for the boy’s death was so little Hugh could be sainted and attract tourists and pilgrims for the town’s benefit. The story of Hugh of Lincoln has been the subject of other famous English ballads and makes an appearance in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The “decolonization” tale is now flirting with folktale status, carefully following the path of every major blood libel throughout history. The idea that Israel is a project of colonization of indigenous Palestinian territory is obviously untrue—the ignorance one would have to possess to even consider erasing the people of Israel from the land of Israel is staggering, which is why the theory is popular at places like Harvard.
The world-historical idiocy required to assert that Israel is nothing more than a colonial power is, in fact, one reason for how quickly it spread in the sealed containers of Ivy League classrooms. No one expected to have to argue against the historical equivalent of “the earth is flat,” and it was hard to believe something so daft would catch on so quickly and spread so widely.
But catch on it did, so here we are. Harry Lewis is right that “When complex social and political histories are oversimplified in our teachings as Manichaean struggles—between oppressed people and their oppressors, the powerless and the powerful, the just and the wicked—a veneer of academic respectability is applied to the ugly old stereotype of Jews as evil but deviously successful people.”
And he is right that it might help students if there were a system of committee-led curriculum diversification that would enable some Harvard students to be exposed to facts without prohibiting the classes that teach decolonization.
Such changes would be a race against the clock. The decolonization blood libel moves fast. It’s likely that the authors random college students like to read, musicians they listen to, actors they follow, and essayists they think they’re supposed to admire have signed on to some open letter accusing the Jews of systematic ritual child murder. Maybe it’s too much to assume that they’ve read Chaucer or Joyce but they’ve probably read Sally Rooney, or at least watched the equally excruciating tv adaptations of the books she refuses to have translated into Hebrew. They might’ve been inspired not by Roger Waters’s Nazi cosplay but by Lana Del Rey’s courageous decision not to inflict her aggressive mediocrity on her Israeli fans. Perhaps they pretend to know who Melissa Barrera is so they can stand with her, or they read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s name on one of the most morally repugnant documents of our time and remembered that whatever it is he says, they’re supposed to agree with.
Anyway, they know you can’t trust anyone who hasn’t added a watermelon icon to their social-media feed. Which probably means Professor Lewis’s advice will fall on deaf ears.
