I have yet to see The Infidel. But note that the Muslim who discovers that he was born Jewish is played by Omid Djalili, an ethnic Persian. Not an Arab. And certainly not of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, as British Muslims overwhelmingly are.
They say that Ahmadinejad has a partly Jewish background. Why not? So had Wagner, with a name and face like his; very broad hints were dropped in his lifetime. And there have been Jews in Iran for a very long time indeed, whom Ahmadinejad would regard as nothing to do with the likes of Netanyahu, who would regard themselves as nothing to do with the likes of Netanyahu, and whom Netanyahu would regard as nothing to do with him.
When he says "Jews", he means "Jews like me". When Iranians of whatever persuasion say "Jews", they don't mean that at all. They see no connection between Persian Jewry and the secular Ashkenazi nationalist state. Nor does that state.
But then, those Western politicians who make the most fuss of how Christian they are, or at least those who do so in English, do not mean the Christians of the world's most Christian continent, or of the Pacific Islands, or of, say, Vietnam. And they certainly do not mean the Christians of Egypt, or Israel, or the West Bank, or Lebanon, or Syria, or Iraq, or Iran.
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Careful, Mr Lindsay. Re Wagner's alleged Jewish blood - a subject which I have seen discussed on your website before - the only possible verdict is "not proven".
ReplyDeleteThere are two candidates for Wagner's paternity: the man to whom his mother was married at the time the composer was born (C.F.W. Wagner, indubitably Gentile) or the man whom the composer's mother subsequently wed (Ludwig Geyer, sometimes thought to be Jewish but apparently wrongly so). Most of this comment is based on information in Milton Brener's book Richard Wagner and the Jews, especially p. 295.
Unless one counts a stray reference in 1869 (by somebody called Albert Hahn) to the "not German" shape of Wagner's nose, nobody seems to have attributed Jewish ancestry to Wagner before the 1870s, around the time that the Bayreuth Festival got going. A Viennese writer who hated Wagner (Ludwig Spiedel) insisted that Wagner was Jewish. Before that, even those who combined Jew-hatred with Wagner-hatred never conflated the two emotions.
Then, Nietzsche went to town on the "Jewish ancestry" theory, using it as another stick with which to beat Wagner (who himself came to suspect, later in life, that he might have been Geyer's son). But since Nietzsche - even before going absolutely berserkers in 1889 - was a still more habitual fantasist than Wagner was, and ten times more dirty a combatant, it is impossible to place the slightest trust in anything Nietzsche said on the topic of his former idol, his former idol's parentage, or anything that impinged on his former idol's existence. He never even bothered to hear the whole of Parsifal before unleashing his diatribe against it.