(Jewish Group) Ernest Hemingway was a great writer. He was also an antisemite
Unquestionably, Ernest Hemingway was antisemitic. Studded throughout his letters are nasty remarks about Jews. But Hemingway felt his prejudice had a place in his fiction as well, most notably in “The Sun Also Rises,” his classic 1925 novel about a group of Paris expatriates at the bullfights in Pamplona.
Hemingway routinely describes Robert Cohn, introduced in the novel’s first lines as “the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton,” as a “kike” and a “rich Jew”; his obnoxiousness fuels the plot. (Cohn was based on Harold Loeb, a friend who gave Hemingway crucial support in getting his early work published; Hemingway could not forgive anyone who did him a good turn.) The antisemitic insult of writing a character like Cohn into his first major novel is breathtaking: it was not, like Hemingway’s letters, intended for private consumption only, but as characterization and a plot device in a work of fiction — a novel, as it turned out, written for the ages.
“The Sun Also Rises” is, for many readers, their introduction to Hemingway. It is taught in our schools. In writing it, Hemingway felt no need to censor himself, assuming, apparently, that readers shared his prejudice or at the very least did not object to it — indeed, that it added color to his story.
Carlos Baker, Hemingway’s first biographer, reassured readers that his subject’s antisemitism “was no more than skin deep.” We’re meant to give him a pass, it seems, because it was mainly “a verbal habit” and not “a persistent theme” — whatever that means. The very currency of this kind of prejudice is itself offered as compensation: If these sentiments and beliefs were so widespread, we can mentally edit them out or read them uncritically.
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