Double Agents

Espionage, Literature, and Liminal Citizens

Erin Carlston

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231510097
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Why were white bourgeois gay male writers so interested in spies, espionage, and treason in the twentieth century? Erin G. Carlston believes such figures and themes were critical to exploring citizenship and its limits, requirements, and possibilities in the modern Western state. Through close readings of Marcel Proust's novels, W. H. Auden's poetry, and Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, which all reference real-life espionaage cases involving Jews, homosexuals, or Communists, Carlston connects gay men's fascination with spying to larger debates about the making and contestation of social identity.

Carlston argues that in the modern West, a distinctive position has been assigned to those perceived to be marginal to the nation because of non-visible religious, political, or sexual differences. Because these "invisible Others" existed somewhere between the wholly alien and the fully normative, they evoked acute anxieties about the security and cohesion of the nation-state. Incorporating readings of nonliterary cultural artifacts, such as trial transcripts, into her analysis, Carlston pinpoints moments in which national self-conceptions in France, England, and the United States grew unstable. Concentrating specifically on the Dreyfus affair in France, the defections of Communist spies in the U.K., and the Rosenberg case in the United States, Carlston directly links twentieth-century tensions around citizenship to the social and political concerns of three generations of influential writers.

1

CITIZENS, ALIENS, AND TRAITORS

Judaism and homosexuality (most intensely where they overlap, as in a Proust or a Wittgenstein) can be seen to have been the two main generators of the entire fabric and savor of urban modernity in the West. […] This is a vast and as yet only imperfectly understood development, of which the role of homosexuality in politics and in the world of espionage and betrayal is only a specialized, though dramatic, feature.*

—George Steiner, “The Cleric of Treason”

Our goal has been, therefore, to inform the readers of this work as precisely as possible about the true mores of individuals who are much more numerous than might be supposed, and with whom we come into contact every day, without being in the least aware of their passions.

—Henri de Weindel and F.-P. Fischer,
L’Homosexualité en Allemagne

Nations are usually unstable entities, imaginatively even when not territorially, and Jews have long been the paradigmatic “test case” troubling the edges of European national identities. In a more occluded and indirect fashion, Jews have played a similar role in the United States; furthermore, responses to male homosexuals and Communists in both Western Europe and America have been, and in the case of homosexuals continue to be, infused with the residue of memes both philo- and anti-Semitic. That is, for well over a century, representations of Jewishness, homosexuality, and Communism have been related genealogically as well as analogically. Homophobia and anti-Communism are not merely structurally “like” anti-Semitism but remain closely affiliated with it and impelled by its energies.

Eve Sedgwick has raised legitimate objections to an indiscriminate collapsing of the space between Jewishness and homosexuality in contemporary discussions of minority oppression and the function of the closet, pointing out that, among other differences, the family of origin offers a site of identity and identification for Jews that it usually does not for homosexuals.¹ And more generally, religious beliefs, ethnic background, cultural practices, sexual desires, and political ideologies are not all—or would not all seem to be—the same kind of attribute of individuals or communities, nor do they appear to pose the same kind of challenge to the liberal nation-state. For example, Communism, inasmuch as most of its variants envisage a total and possibly violent alteration in the form of the state, seems to represent a much more concrete threat to liberal institutions than homosexuality.

Yet even if homosexuality, a commitment to Communism, and Jewishness are not equivalent as lived, material experiences of identity, they have nonetheless occupied the same imaginary spaces sequentially when not simultaneously. Jewishness has been represented as political conspiracy or congenital abnormality; Communism has been figured as a faith, homosexuals as a race. Furthermore, sexual desire, religious belief, and political loyalty are all essentially internal and affective phenomena: they belong to that private and subjective realm that, ever since the Enlightenment, Western nations have uneasily tended to concede might not be a legitimate concern of the state. At the same time, however, the need to ensure national unity has often inspired a passionate determination to establish objective external criteria that can measure adherence to national norms. Hence the insistence that a threatening difference must be written on the body, manifested in gender deviance, disease, or physical aberration; or that there can be a standardized litmus test, like having been at any time a member of the Communist Party, that can tell us, without error, what someone’s real political or religious commitments are.

In short, all of these modes of being are and historically have been discursively shaped in relation to one another as what Daniel Itzkovitz calls, in the case of homosexuality and Jewishness, “closet identities.” Itzkovitz argues in response to Sedgwick that her analysis “examines neither the popularly constructed contents of the Jew’s closet nor the retroactive relation these cultural fantasies have on the constitution of actual Jewish and queer identities. Only separating homophobia and anti-Semitism does not fully account for the ways that anti-Semitism and homophobia are inflected by one another, and the ways discourses of Jewishness and queerness speak through one another. The language of anti-Semitism utilizes and is bound up with the discourse of homophobia in particularly resonant ways.”² Examining the histories of discourses of both Semitism and sexuality—whether anti- or philo-Semitic, homophobic or homophilic—leaves little doubt that, as numerous scholars have by now demonstrated, in the West the two have been powerfully analogous in their configuration for at least several hundred years. Most obviously, “both Jew and homosexual are other to society’s Christian and heterosexual norms.”³ But “Jew” and “homosexual” are not merely comparable terms for marginality; these categories of racial and sexual difference have been mapped onto each other and then onto Communism, coconstructing each other as physiologically, socially, and politically foreign. In the next sections of this chapter I will look at some of the dominant tropes of that mutual constitution, which include the claims that homosexuals and Communists, like Jews, are alien to the nation, that Jews and Communists are particularly prone to sexual deviance and license, and that homosexual and Jewish men are equally aberrant in their gender identity—they are like women—and thus unsuited for citizenship. Jews, homosexuals, and Communists have all been associated with physical and mental disease, with threats to the family, with moral decay. And all have been understood to constitute secret societies within society, freemasonries: states within the state.

ENLIGHTENMENT AND JEWISH EMANCIPATION

The pre-Enlightenment history of Jews and anti-Semitism in Europe has been too thoroughly documented to require elaboration here, but it is worth noting several features of early modern anti-Semitism because of their continuity into the Enlightenment era. Although the legal and material status of Jews has varied considerably over time and in different regions of the world, discourses about Jews have remained extraordinarily consistent,⁴ so that today one may encounter ideas about Jews and Jewishness easily traceable, with little alteration, to the thirteenth century; this will be my justification for making some very broad generalizations in the remarks that follow.

First and most obviously, Jews long constituted a diasporic and stateless group of people whose forced wanderings across Europe calcified their image as perpetual strangers and contributed to the assumption that their loyalties, if any, were extranational. Second, in Christian countries Jews were treated as deicides and heretics, yet while discrimination against Jews in the early modern period was usually justified on religious grounds, even converted, baptized Jews and their descendants were sometimes subject to restrictions, suggesting that well before the rise of nineteenth-century racialist thought, Jewishness was already viewed as an essential quality supplemental to religious affiliation.⁵ Finally, the confinement of Jews in many places to urban ghettoes and to specific professions such as moneylending created enduring associations between Jews, cities, and capital.

Turning now to the late eighteenth century and to the three countries with which this study is particularly concerned—France, the United States, and Britain—we find that in the aftermath of the wars of religion, the Enlightenment, and the revolutions it inspired, revolutionary governments in France and America sought to decouple religious affiliation from citizenship, a project with profound consequences for the emancipation of Jews. In particular, John Locke’s intellectual heirs drew a sharp distinction between citizenship as a public status and religious faith as an internal, and hence inviolably private, experience. In addition to the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (1789) and the Bill of Rights (1791), numerous other French and American documents of the revolutionary period expound on this critical distinction. For instance, the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, authored by Thomas Jefferson, states that natural rights, including the right to participate fully in the life of the nation, cannot be allocated by one person or group to other persons or groups on the grounds of shared religious conviction, since this would amount to a coercion that God Himself does not exercise over us because it is incompatible with human free will.⁶ In a 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, George Washington spoke even more forcefully of the natural right to “liberty of conscience,” decrying the apparently benign idea of religious “tolerance” on the grounds that people’s natural rights are inalienable and should not depend on their being tolerated by other people: “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”⁷

Although the federal powers of the United States thus foreswore religious discrimination, individual states had considerable leeway to refuse Jews rights to vote and hold public office, and many of them did so well into the nineteenth century. In France, in contrast, once Jewish emancipation came it was—formally, at least—unqualified. Founding documents of the First Republic clearly established that the basis for granting Jews citizenship was the essentially private nature of religious faith. While the question of Jewish enfranchisement was being debated before the Assemblée nationale of 1789, the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, who favored the Jews’ emancipation, contended that a sphere of privacy should protect intimate personal beliefs, and that the separation of church and state was necessary both to avoid religious warfare and for the free exercise of conscience: “The law cannot affect the religion of a man. It can take no hold over his soul; it can affect only his actions, and it must protect those actions when they do no harm to society. God wanted us to reach agreement among ourselves on issues of morality, and he has permitted us to make moral laws, but he has given to no one but himself the right to legislate dogmas and to rule over [religious] conscience.”⁸

As we will see in the next chapter when we consider the Dreyfus Affair, it eventually became crucial to French republicanism to insist on the inconsequence of race and religion to any discussion of rights. Indeed, Clermont-Tonnerre argued fervently that in order to maintain the sphere of privacy, the republic must define citizens—persons considered in their public instantiation—as individuals whose religious and ethnic affiliations not only were irrelevant to their enfranchisement but should be actively suppressed in order to break up any subnational identifications that might mediate between the individual and the state: “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals. They must be citizens. It is claimed that they do not want to be citizens, that they say this and that they are [thus] excluded; there cannot be one nation within another nation. … It is intolerable that the Jews should become a separate political formation or class in the country. Every one of them must individually become a citizen; if they do not want this, they must inform us and we shall then be compelled to expel them.”⁹

Clermont-Tonnerre’s views won out, and the emancipation proclamation that was eventually issued in 1791 clearly defined the nation as a social contract between neutral individuals who, other than the implicit requirements of (adult) age and (male) sex, had no other specificity and therefore were all formally equal, in the sense of having identical relations to the state. “The National Assembly,” the proclamation declares,

considering that the conditions requisite to be a French citizen, and to become an active citizen, are fixed by the constitution, and that every man who, being duly qualified, takes the civic oath, and engages to fulfill all the duties prescribed by the constitution, has a right to all the advantages it insures;

Annuls all adjournments, restrictions, and exceptions, contained in the preceding decrees, affecting individuals of the Jewish persuasion, who shall take the civic oath, which shall be considered as a renunciation of all privileges in their favor.¹⁰

Thus, French Jews are legally defined from the outset not as members of a minority group within the nation but as individuals marked by a quality of Jewishness—a Yiddishkeit or judaiété—that is incidental to their citizenship.

Jewish emancipation took place in a more piecemeal fashion in Britain than it had under the revolutionary regime in France; in the course of the nineteenth century various reform bills gradually lifted restrictions on the rights of Jews to take fellowships at British universities, to hold public office, and so on until eventually, with the elevation of Nathan Rothschild to the House of Lords in 1884, Jews had been admitted to every level of civil society. Thus, we do not find in Britain the same kinds of foundational documents that we have in France defining the relationship of Jews to the state. But although there is no British equivalent of the emancipation proclamation, Thomas Macaulay’s famous 1831 speech in Parliament calling for Jews to be made eligible for public office can serve as a measure of the centrality of Enlightenment thought to Whig politics, indicating that in Britain, too, Jewish enfranchisement was predicated on the assumption that religious observance and participation in the state are distinct and unrelated functions:

We hear of essentially Protestant governments and essentially Christian governments, words which mean just as much as essentially Protestant cookery, or essentially Christian horsemanship. Government exists for the purpose of keeping the peace, for the purpose of compelling us to settle our disputes by arbitration instead of settling them by blows, for the purpose of compelling us to supply our wants by industry instead of supplying them by rapine. […] Why a man should be less fit to exercise those powers because he wears a beard, because he does not eat ham, because he goes to the synagogue on Saturdays, instead of going to church on Sundays, we cannot conceive.¹¹

“By the 1870s,” writes Bryan Cheyette, ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Citizens, Aliens, and Traitors
• 2. The Dreyfus Affair
• 3. Secret Dossiers
• 4. Truth Breathing Down the Neck of Fiction
• 5. The Ganelon Type
• 6. Strictly a Jewish Show
• Conclusion
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index