How antisemitic was Joseph Conrad, author of ‘Heart of Darkness’ and ‘The Secret Agent’?
The author was known to disparage Jews, yet sometimes he was also thought to be one
A 1920s portrait of the author Joseph Conrad Photo by Getty Images
By Benjamin Ivry November 20, 2024
A century after his death in 1924, the Polish-born English novelist Joseph Conrad remains a subject of debate among his biographers over the extent to which he did, or did not, hate Jews.
“Not surprisingly,” declared Bernard Meyer, who used a psychoanalytic approach, “Conrad exhibited evidence of antisemitism.” Yet Jeffrey Meyers, another critic examining the same evidence, demurs. The disagreements begin over the character of Conrad’s birthplace, Berdychiv, about 100 miles southwest of Kiev, which was considered the most Jewish city in Ukraine.
Jews in Berdychiv amounted to about 80% of the population. Sholem Aleichem captured the city’s spirit in fiction, but perhaps the most international literary event, notes biographer John Stape, occurred there when the French novelist Honoré de Balzac visited seven years before Conrad was born. On that occasion, Balzac took offense when local Jewish residents gathered to admire his gold watch-chain, so he struck them with his walking-stick.
As a member of Berdychiv’s Catholic minority, Conrad expressed no such physical violence against his Jewish neighbors. Indeed, he was discreet in his published writings, where sometimes Yiddishkeit was implied rather than openly declared. But in his private correspondence, Conrad repeatedly insulted Jews, especially when writing to friends who were notorious antisemites.
The irony was that repeatedly, Conrad was assumed to be Jewish, simply because of where he was born. In a 1918 essay, Frank Harris, a scabrous UK author, grouped Conrad with the English Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill, author of the novels Children of the Ghetto and The King of Schnorrers. Harris complained that the “trashiest hack” among fiction writers could achieve popularity merely by claiming to be “one of the oppressed race.”
Conrad replied with a fully documented letter to The New Republic, published under the headline “Mr. Conrad is Not a Jew.” While underlining his Polish Catholic roots (and the fact that his wife was “not a Jewess”), Conrad added that he never would have denied being an “Israelite” if he really was, as that “race” occupied “such a unique place in the religious history of mankind.”
The neutral term “unique” is scarcely laudatory, although decades later, Conrad would be posthumously classified as a Jew once again. In 1936, the German Nazi propagandist Wilhelm Stapel determined that Conrad must have been a “cosmopolitan” Polish Jew, largely because his books appeared in Germany from a Jewish publisher, Samuel Fischer.
Yet when speaking candidly, Conrad was, repeatedly and outspokenly, disdainful of Jews. In 1916, the British poet Arthur Symons wrote to a mutual friend to explain that Conrad had reported on a visit to a Paris consulate to arrange a visa matter: “There were 25,000 stinking Jews on the stairs.” To another correspondent, Conrad confided that he had “somehow got the notion” that the art historian Bernard Berenson was a “noxious old Jew — and now I know better!”
Routinely in private letters, Conrad would insult his Anglican publisher Stanley Unwin by calling him a Jew whenever he did anything he disapproved of. Less jocular altogether was when Conrad transposed this habit of misidentifying Jews into fiction.
In the novel Under Western Eyes, Razumov, a young Russian student, declares that his name “is not Gugenheimer” and that he is not “a democratic Jew.” Later, he mutters at an adversary: “Cursed Jew!” However, the narrator notes, the opponent in question might have been Transylvanian, Turkish, or Andalusian, but was not Jewish, thereby serving as yet another example of the author seeing Jews where they did not exist. The “Gugenheimer” reference is considered to target the real-life Swiss Jewish mining magnate Meyer Guggenheim.
Such remarks have been diagnosed by some authors as a symptom of his upbringing among the Polish-landed gentry in Ukraine. Yet others, like Meyers, assert that Conrad’s contemporaries, comparatively speaking, were far more outspoken antisemites in fiction.
Conrad only explicitly identified two of his minor characters as Jewish. One such was Señor Hirsch, a Jewish hide merchant who found himself caught up in political upheavals in the novel Nostromo.
Constantly terrified, Hirsch is eventually captured and executed, amidst detailed descriptions of his ordeals. The literary historian Irving Howe (born Horenstein of Bessarabian Jewish origin), opined that the “sheer quantity of Jewish suffering” in Conrad’s story was “itself evidence of Jewish cowardice.” Alternately, Howe proposed, Conrad might have been indulging in the “Elizabethan game of having his Jew sweat.”
This possible reference to Shakespeare’s Shylock or Marlowe’s Jew of Malta might be apt were Hirsch more than just a two-dimensional character who epitomizes woe. Another, even lesser, Jewish innkeeper named Yankel appears in Conrad’s short story “Prince Roman.”
Prone to uttering “Nu!” with more or less authentic Yiddishkeit, Conrad’s Yankel also exclaims the more puzzling “Tse! Tse!,” an expression which is also heard from a non-Jewish servant in Conrad’s story “The Planter of Malata,” set in Sydney, Australia and on a fictional island named Malata.
The literary maven Cedric Watts plausibly implied that the most significant Jewish characters in Conrad’s works may not have been identified as such: the villainous anarchists in the novel The Secret Agent.
This relative reticence at a time when fiction writers unabashedly slated Jews as loathsome and anti-social, may have allowed Conrad to retain popularity with perceptive Jewish readers who might otherwise have been put off by open hostility.
On a personal level, Conrad could be friendly to select Jews, like the artist Jacob Epstein, who sculpted his portrait, or his compatriot, Bruno Winawer, whose satiric Book of Job Conrad translated into English.
One enthused reader was the German Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who cites Conrad in her own classic text The Origins of Totalitarianism. The subtitle of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, exploring the concept of the banality of evil, may echo Conrad’s discussion of banality in Under Western Eyes.
Later Jews who, like Arendt, saw in Conrad a voice applicable to their own historical context included the editors of Yediot Aharonot, who in 2008 issued a new Hebrew edition of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, translated by the novelist Shulamit Lapid and her son, the journalist Yair Lapid.
In an introduction, the Lapids suggested that Conrad’s colonizers were akin to the fraught situation in Gaza, teaching readers that “occupation corrupts.” Alluding to the ever-current lessons of Conrad, they added that indifference, rather than hatred, was the ultimate corruption, placing colonizers at the “heart of darkness.” Few novelists have been so permanently in the forefront of political messaging, even if in some cases, as with Yair Lapid, who later supported Israel’s actions under the Netanyahu government in the Israel–Hamas war, advocacies may apparently switch with time.
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