The Continuing War on the Memory of Goldwin Smith

Goldwin Smith – the prominent nineteenth century British-Canadian academic, historian and polemicist – has come it for a lot of pejorative attacks in last few decades. He was falsely accused by anti-jewish authors – notably Colonel Gordon Mohr – of being a jew and had an strongly anti-jewish statement he made modified to seem like he was a jew boasting about the power of jews over gentiles.

I have documented this and explained the transmission and transmutation of the claim that Goldwin Smith was a jew in a separate article (1) and also explained the strength and lucidity of Smith’s views on the jews in another article. (2)

One of the many things that Smith was on ‘the right side of history’ regarding was the pogroms in Tsarist Russia; where Smith was a frequent and deadly opponent of jewish writers who shrieked about how the Russian government was ‘terrorizing’ and ‘murdering’ jews as part of a deliberate and deadly campaign of genocide.

Smith you see was so ‘evil’ as to doubt the histrionic claims of jewish propagandists about this alleged genocide and tirelessly fought its proponents in the periodicals of the time. His arguments have been since been borne out by the historical research which now takes the same line that he argued all those years ago that the Russian pogroms were local affairs and absolutely nothing to do with the Tsarist government in general.

In fact, the Tsarist government repeatedly tried to stop the pogroms but was rather inefficient, corrupt and overly bureaucratic so simply couldn’t act fast enough with enough force to do so. (3)

This hasn’t stopped jews remembering in 2020 that Goldwin Smith was a foe of theirs and subsequently going after Cornell University’s ‘Goldwin Smith Hall’ and Goldwin Smith Professorships as Smith was Professor of English and Constitutional History at Cornell between 1868 and 1872. He was also a key figure in getting Cornell recognized as one of the top universities in North America because of his former Professorship at Oxford University between 1858 and 1866. (4)

As such in 2020 Cornell’s trustees voted to remove Smith’s name from ‘Goldwin Smith Hall’ and the professorial chairs attached to it. (5) However, they have yet to actually do so because it was simply ‘too difficult’ to do (read: extremely expensive and probably legally binding). (6)

Benjamin Ivry writing at the ‘Jewish Daily Forward’ tried to revive the issue in June 2023 when he started shrieking that Smith was ‘perhaps the most vicious antisemite in the English-speaking world’ and ‘authored many bigoted essays that put forth antisemitic, anti-feminist, anti-suffrage and anti-coeducation views.’ (7)

Thus Ivry – who likes trying to throw his personal handbag collection at dead people such as the famous Tom Clancy to name another of those he claims were ‘highly objectionable racist anti-Semites’ but are conveniently dead so they can’t give him a much deserved wedgie and swirly – was upset because in his view a learned opponent of the jews cannot be allowed to be remembered and memorialized by anything nice even though (predictably) Smith’s virulent pro-North journalism during the American Civil War isn’t mentioned since all that really matters is jewish feelings and nothing else.

This is decidedly obvious when Ivry writes:

‘Typical of Smith’s discourse during Russian pogroms was his lengthy justification of good-hearted Russian peasants who murdered, pillaged and raped in Jewish communities. Smith simultaneously down-pedaled the gravity of the carnage, claiming on no reliable evidence that reports were exaggerated.

Smith depicted Jews as a worthless primitive tribe that had better disappear as quickly as possible, either by total assimilation or forced deportation. At length and in detail, Smith trashed the Talmud and Kabbalah as mostly bilge.’ (8)

Ivry obviously hasn’t engaged with the literature on the pogroms and still thinks the histrionic claims of violently anti-Russian jewish propagandists like Lucien Wolf on the subject are ‘the truth’ because they were uncritically repeated without checking by Simon Dubnow in his five volume ‘History of the Jews’ among others.

Otherwise, he’d know that Smith was actually right – since he bothered to read the official government reports from Russia rather than believe and uncritically repeat assorted ‘witness testimonies’ about drunken Ukrainian Cossacks’ roasting jewish babies over open fires – and that the view of the pogroms promoted by both the jews and the Soviet Union itself as inspired and organized by the Russian government of the time is not only wrong but simply a lie.

Ivry also tries to traduce Smith’s academic reputation by claiming that:

‘Goldwin Smith was a wealthy journalist and academic who never produced any original research or historical publications of lasting value. He donated money and books to Cornell, winning affection and prestige, but taught there for only three years.’ (9)

This is manifestly untrue and also shows Ivry’s lack of knowledge of the history of… well… history.

Firstly, at the time Smith was writing ‘original research’ simply didn’t exist as we’d understand it today as very few historians wrote ‘research based’ material but rather interpretations of extent sources. Smith actually did write ‘research based’ material as it happens (10) but also wrote far more substantially about political theory (11) and – common for the time – wrote lectures as well as gave them. (12)

So Ivry is simply wrong and looking for ways to traduce Smith by making up claims that simply aren’t true.

Secondly, if we were to imply Ivry’s ‘standard’ then people like John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and Mary Wollstonecraft would be judged as never having have produced ‘any original research or historical publications of lasting value’ because only academic specialists tend to read their works in the same way that few people today read the theological and philosophical works of say Jonathan Edwards.

Yet despite that all four of these individuals I have mentioned are important historical figures and are rightly judged as such and so is Smith as a major public intellectual within the British Empire – especially Great Britain and Canada – who is acknowledged even by Ivry to have had a significant impact on the formation of many future leaders of Canada. (13)

Ivry seeks to downplay Smith’s intellectual importance by snidely suggesting he ‘just donated money’ to Cornell and other institutions, but this simply isn’t true as Ivry would know if he’d bothered to check the sheer number of replies and counters written against Smith in his lifetime in major periodicals (such as ‘The Nineteenth Century’) and in book form (including at least one anti-Goldwin Smith play I’ve discovered).

Smith was no small fry in the Victorian intellectual landscape: he was a giant and like many contemporary intellectual giants (and best-selling novelists) they get largely forgotten after they die (for example the great late Victorian/Edwardian crime novelist Fergus Hume).

No matter what Ivry tries to claim and lie about: facts don’t care about Ivry’s hurt jewish feelings that just about every great man throughout history has hated jews often for exactly the same reasons.

The reality is that the reason jews like Ivry are so upset with Smith and are desperately trying to totally expunge his legacy is because Smith was both extremely effective and right and the jews simply haven’t ever forgiven him for standing tall and taking them to task for and exposing their lies.

Remember Goldwin Smith: a great man who deserves to be remembered.

References

(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-lies-they-tell-about-goldwin

(2) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/goldwin-smith-a-nineteenth-century

(3) On this see: John Doyle Klier, Shlomo Lambroza (Eds.), 1992, 'Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York; John Doyle Klier, 2011, 'Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-1882', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York.

(4) https://cornellsun.com/2020/12/15/trustees-vote-to-remove-goldwin-smith-who-held-racist-sexist-beliefs-from-honorary-professor-titles/

(5) Ibid.; also https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/12/cornell-renaming-goldwin-smith-professorships

(6) https://forward.com/culture/549007/goldwin-smith-antisemitic-anti-feminist-cornell-college-of-arts-and-sciences/

(7) Ibid.

(8) Ibid.

(9) Ibid.

(10) For example: Goldwin Smith, 1905, 'Irish History and the Irish Question', 1st Edition, McClure and Phillips: New York

(11) For example: Goldwin Smith, 1878, 'The Political Destiny of Canada', 1st Edition, Willing & Williamson: Toronto

(12) For example: Goldwin Smith, 1865, 'England and America: A Lecture', 1st Edition, A. Ireland: Manchester

(13) https://forward.com/culture/549007/goldwin-smith-antisemitic-anti-feminist-cornell-college-of-arts-and-sciences/

(14) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/goldwin-smith-a-nineteenth-century