John Buchan a Racist?

This question is well tackled in “A Life of John Buchan - Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps” by Ursula Buchan (pp. 298-300. The extract is below. One of the most pressing issues that concerned JB in and out of Parliament in the early 1930s was the plight of European Jews, and the development of Palestine as a homeland for the persecuted. And in the light of the work he did in this field, we must consider the charge of anti-Semitism, which surfaces from time to time, mainly as a result of about a dozen unfavourable comments by fictional characters, mostly to be found in the Hannay books. If the question is whether JB was, himself, anti-Semitic, it is important to avoid anachronism. Racial and national stereotyping, favourable and unfavourable, was commonplace throughout all society during his entire lifetime. It is hardly surprising that characters in JB’s novels should engage in it, in ways that both commend and criticise. As it happens, there are favourable depictions of individual Jews in the short story, ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’, in A Lodge in the Wilderness and, in particular, A Prince of the Captivity. In any event, great care should be taken to avoid attributing to an author the views of his fictional creations. For example, in The Thirty- Nine Steps, the anti-Semitic comments of the freelance American spy, Scudder, are explicitly denounced by Sir Walter Bullivant, as well as Hannay (who thought them ‘eyewash’); both of them, of course, are also products of JB’s imagination. (Scudder believes in a conspiracy of Jews seeking war for profit and to get back at Russia for the pogroms, which turns out to be completely wrong; the enemies in the book are in fact Prussian-led.) In any event, the case can be made that distinctions expressed by his characters and those made by JB outside his novels were really to do with nationality and culture, rather than genetics. JB was no cultural relativist. If he was not personally anti-Semitic, it would be hard to argue that he intended to be so in his writing. If anti- Semitism were found in his work, that would be the result of the reader’s perception and not JB’s intention. The evidence of his close personal relationships with Jews and his support for the Jewish people – at a time when Tory politicians were thought to damage their chances of preferment by such support – suggests that, if anything, JB was a philo-Semite. How could it be otherwise for a man deeply imbued in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and in Jewish historical culture? As Allan Massie puts it, ‘I think it well nigh impossible for a Presbyterian Scot to be hostile to the Jews and Israel.’ It is no surprise, therefore, that one of his most long- standing friends was the Jewish economist Moritz Bonn, who fled from Germany in 1933. Hermann Eckstein, a Rand magnate and banker, threw JB’s engagement party. He dedicated Prester John to the Jewish financier Sir Lionel Phillips, in whose house he and Susie spent the first week of their honeymoon. He and Dr Chaim Weizmann, later the first President of Israel, were good friends. All of which at the very least suggests that there were prominent Jews who did not consider JB anti-Semitic. He supported the Balfour Declaration, which endorsed a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine. A Prince of the Captivity has been called ‘almost certainly the first major anti-Nazi popular novel’.55 In 1933, as Chairman of the Parliamentary Pro-Palestine Committee, JB received a deputation from ‘the leaders of the synagogue’ concerned with the persecution of German Jews; sitting at dinner that evening next to ‘my beloved Mrs. Jimmy’ (de Rothschild) he was so moved by singing the Hymn of Exile ‘that I made a really good speech’.56 On 5 April 1933, less than three months after Hitler came to power, JB was one of only fifty MPs who signed an Early Day Motion deploring the treatment of Jews in Germany. In the spring of 1934, he spoke at a rally in Shoreditch organised by the National Jewish Fund, describing Zionism as ‘a great act of justice. It was reparation for the centuries of cruelty and wrong, which had stained the record of nearly every Gentile people.’ His name was inscribed in the Golden Book of the Jewish National Fund of Israel. It also appeared in a Nazi publication, Who’s Who in Britain (Frankfurt, 1938), the entry reading: ‘Tweedsmuir, Lord: Pro-Jewish activity.’