The Anti-Semitism of Sherlock Holmes
The World's First Consulting Detective was Jew-Wise
Arthur Conan Doyle's celebrated fictional consulting detective Sherlock Holmes is famous the world over and has been since his entrance over a century ago into the pages of the 'Strand' Magazine. While many commentators and littérateurs talk of the prose style, narrative dynamics and 'scientific' methods of Doyle's Holmes: there is an aspect of the stories that is rarely if ever mentioned in so far as Holmes is also no friend of the jews.
Indeed, this is one aspect of the stories that is consciously whitewashed in the most famous and best received television adaptation of a number of the Holmes stories starring the late Jeremy Brett. This was done by inserting a jewish diamond broker with contacts in the Netherlands into the 'Adventure of the Mazarin Stone' who then helps Mycroft Holmes (Sherlock's elder brother) and causing the evil Count Silvius to hire anti-jewish thugs to destroy his office, beat him up and kill his jewish workers (identified by their kippot).
This literary license is no surprise to any familiar with the Holmes stories as Doyle's work has frequently been 'enlarged' upon by those who admire it and new chapters added, such as the additions by Baring-Gould who suggested that Holmes met Karl Marx in the British Museum (who Holmes thinks is a boring fat old drunk) and whose son - with fellow character Irene Adler (from 'A Scandal in Bohemia') - was responsible for the Allied victory over the Third Reich in his fictionalised biography of Doyle's character. (1)
The actual written stories of Doyle's Holmes contain no such positive and victimised jews, but rather they portray the jews in an extremely unflattering way. This fits in with the general intellectual background and thought that Holmes evinces during the stories, which is decidedly nationalistic in nature. Although few commentators and littérateurs have commented on this beyond writing it off as 'bourgeoisie prejudice of the times' which Doyle later 'recanted and regretted', which is a true as far as it goes but does not affect or alter the nationalistic message of the Holmes stories that I shall discuss in my future article: ‘The Nationalism of Sherlock Holmes’.
I would add this nationalistic message does extend to a general opposition of jews as Doyle's perception of jews is of the greedy, unscrupulous capitalist who would sell you the time of day if he could. We find that in the 'Adventure of the Creeping Man' a jewish doctor from Prague named Loewenstein has been selling rich men from around the world a quack serum made from hormones extracted from the glands of male great apes, which is supposed to bring back the sexual vigour and youth of the purchaser.
For this purpose, Loewenstein has been abducting apes from zoos around Europe - including London - and extracting their hormones for profit and then disposing of the creatures he has operated on. The serum - affecting a leading academic expert on great apes - has the effect of giving the 'patient' the mentality of a great ape, which causes the learned Professor to go insane and attack his young wife to be only to be saved his dog and Holmes.
A series of events that could be easily read as as a metaphor for jews (represented by Loewenstein) injecting their values into leading non-jewish intellectuals through selling them fake goods and/or products that they unscrupulously acquired/created (the serum), which then leads the leading intellectuals to attack their own people quite irrationally (the professor's attack on his wife to be) that can only be stopped by those keeping an eye on the activities of the jews (the dog and Holmes).
Loewenstein is never caught - unlike Professor Moriarty (who was based off a well-known jewish criminal of the day named Adam Worth) - and we may presume continues to peddle his 'serum' to gentiles with more money than sense around Europe: much to Holmes' evident distaste (he describes Loewenstein as a 'notorious' quack). (2) The moral of the 'Adventure of the Creeping Man' is very simply that you should not trust what jews try to sell you or get you to believe.
This theme of jewish shysters and con-men is kept up in 'The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place' when Holmes calls jews notorious usurers and unscrupulous moneylenders (3) and suggests by implication that they are a plague on the British Empire that should be dealt with as a matter of urgency by the British government.
Holmes also returns to a similar theme when he points out that jews are the majority of criminal middle-men, fences for stolen goods and try to swindle honest Britons vis-a-vie his reference to 'jew brokers' in 'The Adventure of the Cardboard Box'. (4) He further clarifies his opposition to jews in 'A Study in Scarlet' when he talks of how jews are 'seedy pedlars', (5) which does actually bear a relation to the fact that jews at this time dominated the pedlar trade especially the sale of 'old clothes', (6) which was well-known at the time. (7)
As such Doyle's Holmes does reflect the ideas of his time, but he also goes further by portraying jews as unscrupulous usurers and con-artists on several occasions. As well as even once suggesting by the use of a jewish surname that an American woman from Atlanta (named Mrs Hebron) who slept with and had a child by a negro (and who calls herself a 'betrayer of her race') (8) and whose sexual union with a negro Holmes and Watson both call 'unnatural'. (9)
As Mrs Hebron - in spite of her self-description - is proud of what she has done as the negro was a 'good man': we can suggest that what is being depicted by Doyle here - irrespective of his much later personal comments on the subject of jews - is jews are race-mixers par extraordinaire and are acting as the vanguard of a new racially mixed civilisation and in essence that jews are the enemies of the West who are destroying it by racially-mixing to protect themselves.
Thus Holmes should be described as something of a foe of the jews and in stark contrast to Doyle's much later public philo-Semitism during the 1920s and 1930s.
References
(1) William Baring-Gould, 1962, 'Sherlock Holmes: A Biography of the World's First Consulting Detective', 1st Edition, Rupert Hart-Davis: London
(2) Arthur Conan Doyle, 1999, 'Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Facsimile Edition', Vol. 3, 1st Edition, Wordsworth: Ware, p. 1012
(3) Ibid, p. 1116
(4) Ibid, Vol. 1, p. 313
(5) Ibid, p. 16
(6) Betty Nagar, 1992, 'Jewish Pedlars and Hawkers 1740-1940', 1st Edition, Porphyrogenitus: Camberley
(7) Andrew Heinze, 1990, 'Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity', 1st Edition, Columbia University Press: New York, pp. 195-200
(8) Conan Doyle, Op. Cit., Vol. 1, pp. 329-330
(9) Ibid, p. 323; 327