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A LEADING London rabbi, Yitzhak Schochet of Mill Hill United Synagogue, has suggested that there are anti-Semitic elements in David Hare's new play, Gethsemane. Are there?
Gethsemane was publicised as a work that takes a critical look at party political fundraising and its relationship to the way in which the worlds of business and the media are caught up in the process. There was no missing the fact that at least one of the principal characters in Gethsemane, named Otto Fallon, enjoys close similarities to Tony Blair's (Jewish) fundraiser, Lord Levy.
Both Fallon and Levy were once in the music business. Both are wealthy businessmen and entertain the Prime Minister - though Fallon's friends play squash with the mythical prime minister, rather than the tennis that Levy enjoyed with Blair.
Hare has insisted that the play is "pure fiction". But whether it is or not, Rabbi Schochet has reportedly accused Hare of having created one character in it who is "very much like Fagin but worse". The rabbi's accusation would bear more serious consideration if he had seen the play, but he was only quoting those friends of his who had. One character, they told him, was "portrayed with all the stereotypes associated with a Jew in terms of his association with money and everything else".
I think the reference to "very much like Fagin but worse" is preposterous hyperbole. Fagin was a major crook and a corruptor of youth. The integrity of Otto is never impugned. Yet I do believe there is a germ of truth in Rabbi Schochet's criticism. In my original review of the play I described Otto as a "Jewish hairdresser" and "a slightly distasteful, anti-Semitic stereotype of Hare's invention". But when the first edition of the Standard came out the National Theatre telephoned to ask us to remove the reference to "Jewish" because, it was rightly said, the play never refers to Fallon as Jewish. My words "anti-Semitic stereotype" were also excised for later editions.
I do not believe Hare is anti-Semitic. His play about the Israeli-Arab conflict was admirably balanced. But facts speak for themselves: Stanley Townsend's Otto undoubtedly looks Jewish. Almost the only reference to Fallon in the stage directions is the illiterate "cufflinks flashing an air of unforced wealth". Whatever Hare was trying to imply by so writing, I did feel he was at pains to paint a familiar caricature of a philistine businessman for whom money was all that mattered.
Why make him so flamboyantly Jewish in manner and appearance if not to foster the impression that mercenary obsessions and Jewishness are yoked together?
