Jews in George Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’
Eric Arthur Blair - better known by his nom de plume George Orwell - is one of the best-known and most read of all twentieth century novelists. Indeed, he is so well-known that two of his novels ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ have become synonymous with the rhetorical critique of governments around the world and used as comparatives when talking about the invasive nature of current and future communications technology.
What is less well-known about Orwell is that he was himself a Marxist and a communist, but one who agreed with Trotsky rather than Stalin. Orwell as an extreme left-winger fought in the Spanish Civil War as part of the POUM - the dissident Communist party - contingent of the militia. He and his wife who was similarly inclined politically barely escaped the purges of the POUM and the FAI (the Anarchist party) by the PSUC (the orthodox Stalinist Communist party) with their lives when Orwell was discharged from the Spanish Republican Army’s 29th division after suffering a nearly fatal wound to the throat and fled to the south of France.
Orwell a few months after his incongruous flight from the place he had imagined was a ‘worker’s paradise’ penned a short work ‘Homage to Catalonia’ detailing his experiences in Spain. This little work is well-known however to students of Marxism and the Spanish Civil War as while it contains little of substance: what little it does contain is fairly explosive. For in it we find many of the later criticisms of the left’s conduct in and around Spain as well as the function of orthodox (Stalinist) Communist parties as simple adjuncts for the foreign policy interests of the USSR as opposed to being genuinely revolutionary organisations.
As such then ‘Homage to Catalonia’ in spite of being a small work packs a large punch as can easily be seen by noting the sheer amount of very mixed leftist reactions to it: both historically and currently. What however is not often pointed out about his ‘Homage to Catalonia’ is that it contains references to jews that Orwell met while he was serving in the Spanish Republic’s Army.
Specifically, it contains references to two jews: one is a fleeting reference to a female jewish volunteer ‘Storm Trooper’ (i.e., used to mean an émigré from Germany) in Barcelona who Orwell met briefly. (1) She was naturally not at the front lines like her fellow émigré communists, but rather hiding behind the lines and part of the communist terror apparatus that was operating against people like Orwell and his wife.
Orwell being highly sympathetic to all forms of socialism does not look down on this in ‘Homage to Catalonia’ and indeed spends parts of the text implicitly defending what came to be known as the ‘red terror’ against its detractors. Orwell even spends part of ‘Homage to Catalonia’ talking about the ‘outrageous claims’ of the anti-communist elements of the British and Spanish press in relation to churches being burnt and nuns raped.
It doesn’t occur to Orwell that these ‘champions of the working class’ had done things that would now be classed as war crimes especially as Orwell himself in ‘Homage to Catalonia’ applauds the indiscriminate destruction of churches and expropriation of the clergy without a moment’s thought. Indeed jewish communists - such as George Mink - were major players in the attacks on non-communist Spaniards as well as being under orders from Stalin to eliminate as many non-Stalinist communists and leftists as possible, which was conducted by the PSUC under the rubric of rounding up POUM and FAI members as ‘fascist spies’.
Essentially while the jews were very heavily represented in the volunteers who went to aid the Spanish Republic and also among the ‘advisers’ sent to Spain by the USSR and the international Communist parties. (2) They were under-represented in terms of combat troops in that they only formed a single company on their own (3) in spite of jews being massively over-represented among European communists. (4)
This dichotomy was something we may reasonably suggest that Orwell was aware of given his active presence in anti-fascist and Marxist circles and would have come across the common right-wing charges that the jews (not without evidential foundation as it happens) had shirked their military duties in the First World War. Thus, as an active anti-fascist and anti-anti-Semite: Orwell may well have decided to create the two dimensional second jew who makes an appearance early on in ‘Homage to Catalonia’.
This individual named Benjamin Levinski was apparently a Polish jew by birth, but only spoke French. (5) Levinski was allegedly a captain in the POUM militia, and his commander was a Belgian major named Kopp.
The difference between Levinski and Kopp is quite striking to the reader in that Kopp is a full-blooded individual with a lot of detail about his appearance (stout bordering on overweight), his background (engineering) as well as the fact that he was Belgian and would be imprisoned should be return to Belgium as a devout Communist as well as that he had a wife and children and among other things a desire to be promoted which eventually becomes his downfall when he is arrested by PSUC troops while acting as courier to Republican military headquarters from the engineering units on the front lines.
Levinski on the other hand has no such detail: this is odd precisely because Levinski was Orwell’s commanding officer for the entire of his time (several months) on the Huesca front and while we learn a great deal of information about other individuals that Orwell came into contact with at this time. We have no such details about Levinski. Levinski doesn’t even appear as a normal human being in ‘Homage to Catalonia’: he doesn’t chit-chat, he doesn’t seem to have any individuality nor any interest in debating politics in the military tedium that Orwell vividly describes.
Levinski only appears - and then usually in the company of the far more human Kopp - when there is daring-do to perform and war on the despicable fascists to be waged. Even then Levinski simply pops in and out of the action like an afterthought. Performing a ‘heroic deed’ here and there but then simply going back to non-existence in spite of allegedly being Orwell’s commanding officer there.
More damning to this jewish superman - which Levinski is fundamentally portrayed as - is that he is simply forgotten in the second half of ‘Homage to Catalonia’, while Kopp is not. When we consider that Levinski is lionized extensively by Orwell in conjunction with Kopp in the first half of the work: it is rather odd that he is simply dropped - like a now useless literary character (rather like Captain Hastings' sudden disappear from Agatha Christie's 'Poirot' novels) - in the second half. This is especially so as the second half of ‘Homage to Catalonia’ focuses on the persecution and execution of the POUM officers and leadership by the PSUC and as such frequently mentions Kopp, but never talks about Levinski.
How can we resolve this oddity?
The simplest way is to suggest that Orwell’s ‘Levinski’ was simply a literary creation meant to serve a political purpose by portraying the ‘heroic jew’ who had long been the subject of derogatory right-wing and fascist propaganda. His two-dimensional character and lack of personality directly suggest this as well as the fact that while he was Orwell’s commander: he never seems to do much in the way of commanding in ‘Homage to Catalonia’ but rather spends his time being a propaganda billboard for the ‘bravery of jewish leftists’.
In all essentials he is nothing but a cartoon.
In summary then the Benjamin Levinski of Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’ was not a real person and as such hardly the paragon of ‘jewish militant bravery’ that he is portrayed as but may have been based on a real commander of Orwell’s. If this is true, then Orwell’s Levinski likely bears very little resemblance to the historical individual and as such highlights more the desperate attempts to whitewash jewish communists by the left as opposed to any ‘stereotype breaking’ role model that he is cast as.
References
(1) George Orwell, 2013, [1938], ‘Homage to Catalonia’, 1st Edition, Penguin: New York, pp. 112-113
(2) David Boyd Haycock, 2012, ‘I Am Spain: The Spanish Civil War and the Men and Women who went to Fight Fascism’, 1st Edition, Old Street: Brecon, pp. 73; 163-164; Richard Baxell, 2012, ‘Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle against Fascism’, 1st Edition, Aurum: London, pp. 55-56; 82-83
(3) Bernard Wasserstein, 2012, ‘On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War’, 1st Edition, Profile: London, pp. 66-68
(4) Ibid, pp. 63-65; 112-116
(5) Orwell, Op. Cit., p. 19