Though he was cut off geographically and saw less of his friends, Pyke remained in touch with the world beyond through newspapers delivered to the nearby village of Thursley. It was through these that he read with growing interest about the political developments in Germany. The rise of fascism was a subject that seemed to matter to him more than any other, and in particular the treatment of German Jews.
Just after the end of the Great War, Hitler had confided to a friend that he found German anti-Semitism much too ‘emotional’. He felt that it would never amount to anything more than short-lived pogroms. Instead he wanted to give this medieval superstition a more ‘scientific’ backbone – to produce what he called, in a chilling phrase, an ‘anti-Semitism of reason’.
In the two years after Hitler became Chancellor a mass of discriminatory laws were passed aimed at belittling, excluding and vilifying German Jewry. Pyke read in the newspapers about new laws that prohibited Jews from working in the civil service, state-run schools, universities and hospitals; soon German Jews would be unable to use public swimming pools in certain cities, employ Germans under a particular age, marry or have an affair with a non-Jew, fly the German flag or refer to themselves as citizens of Germany. Yet for the most part this statutory discrimination during the first two years of Hitler’s reign elicited little or no international outrage.
In part, this was because these laws had failed to inspire any popular torrents of anti-Semitism. When Goebbels called for a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses immediately after Hitler’s accession the response of the German people was apathetic, to say the least. In the months that followed, almost every attack on Jewish shops was orchestrated by the state. Just as Oswald Mosley failed in his attempts to transform British anti-Semitism into a wild, out-of-control force, it seemed that most Germans viewed anti-Semitism as a Nazi tic which they were largely prepared to ignore.
It was hard to see why this might change, especially given the standing of Jews in German society. When Hitler received his Iron Cross, it was on the recommendation of a Jewish officer – one of more than 100,000 Jews in the German Army. German Jews had enjoyed full legal equality with their fellow citizens since 1869 and were far more assimilated than their counterparts in Russia or Eastern Europe. Yet by the end of 1934 Pyke had become fixated by the issue of Nazi anti-Semitism. It concerned him, and that it did so was a telling reflection on his own relationship to Jewishness and just how much it had changed.
In his best-selling book To Ruhleben – And Back, published in 1916, Pyke not only omitted the fact that he had been held in Ruhleben’s Jewish barrack but made a point elsewhere in the book of describing the tenacity of German teenagers as ‘frightful’, ‘intense’ and ‘Semitic in its persistency’. In print, at least, Pyke had learnt to ape some of the casual anti-Semitism of Edwardian England. Seven years after publication, his brother Richard looked on in embarrassment as Pyke rowed with a Jewish barber who had suggested that he looked Jewish. It was more than coincidence that this argument took place with both brothers en route to their mother’s funeral.
Pyke’s prickly relationship with his own Jewishness was bound up with those complicated feelings he had about his mother. For as long as he could remember, Jewishness and Mary Pyke were inseparably intertwined, so to cut her out of his life implied the need to cauterise his Jewish identity. Jewish ritual, Jewish dress, Jewish culture, the gossipy provincialism of the well-off West London Sephardic community in which he had grown up: all this reminded him of his mother and as a young man he wanted nothing to do with it. Only in the years after her death did this change.
By 1935 Pyke could describe himself, without drowning in qualifications and parentheses, as an Englishman and a Jew. In notes from a meeting with Sir Isaac Woolfson, an interview which he hoped would be confidential, he said, ‘I have been told – and I find it true of myself – that a Jew can keep everything but a joke’ (before assuring Woolfson that he would try not to make him laugh).
This self-identification as both Englishman and Jew changed the way that Pyke read the news from Nazi Germany. He saw these developments from the perspective of both the oppressor and the oppressed. Those years spent running away from his own Jewishness had given him an understanding of the mindset which could make a person chase someone down the corridor yelling ‘Jew Hunt!’ – as had happened to him at Wellington. He could play the bumptious Little Englander as well as the Jewish intellectual and understood that ‘the Jews among all the persecuted are probably the only people who marry and breed with the consciousness that their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren will probably be persecuted’. The difference here, and it is crucial, was that Pyke did not see this as inevitable.
By late 1934 he was convinced that Nazi anti-Semitism was a problem of such minatory potential that it must be solved. His frantic attempts to do so would change his political perspective for ever, stinging him out of his early retirement, whereupon, as the journalist Claud Cockburn put it, he ‘zig-zagged across the 1930s like forked lightning’.
How to End Anti-Semitism
First of all, why? Setting aside everything we know today, why, by late 1934, was it important to end Nazi discrimination against German Jews?
His answer was rooted in two historical parallels, the first of which was the execution of ‘witches’ in medieval Europe. Witches were believed to possess the magical ability to harm others, and, in a surprisingly similar way, the Nazi attitude towards Jews was rooted in the idea that the members of this minority had a threatening, unnatural power which allowed them to outperform their Gentile neighbours. ‘Belief in contemporary Germany that the dangerous quality ascribed to Jews is transmitted to their children, who must therefore in school be separated from other children, belief in the extraordinary power which so small a proportion as the 1 per cent Jewish population in Germany is accused of possessing, bears a striking resemblance to the dangerous powers ascribed to witches.’ Who was to say that the modern-day Germans would not have the Jews expelled or murdered, as their ancestors had done to so-called witches? As Pyke later explained in the New Statesman and Nation, things had become so bad in the Middle Ages that in some European towns ‘the guilty were roasted in a specially prepared oven’. He was bold enough to imply that something similar could happen in modern-day Germany.
The strength of his conviction came from a second historical parallel, that of the Turkish government’s genocidal assault on Armenian Turks during the Great War. More than a million men and women may have been murdered. Pyke was interested in what had happened in the years immediately beforehand. The Turkish government had, he explained, ‘bamboozled’ its people with propaganda. At length, the people of Turkey had been told that Armenian Turks were not only different but dangerous, and mass persecution did not begin – could not begin – until Turkish society had been sold this myth.
‘One thing is clear,’ wrote Pyke. ‘Our susceptibility to myths is a world danger. Because the application of science to human behaviour has come so late the myth is regarded as less dangerous than the bacillus. It is doubtful whether such a belief is justified.’ In the same way that the Turks had been bullied by their government into thinking of Armenians as dangerous and different, it seemed as though the Germans were being bamboozled into seeing Jews in a similar way. Pyke’s fear was that, as had been the case in Turkey, this might be a prelude to genocidal assault.
At the time this was a hysterical analysis. It was certainly not one you would find rehearsed in the mainstream British press. Germany was one of the most modern nations on Earth, a land of dynamic theatre, art and poetry. Scientifically and industrially it was one of the most advanced polities anywhere in the world. A parallel involving Turkey or indeed medieval Europe seemed far-fetched. Yet Pyke was convinced by the logic of his analogy.
He had identified the problem. Now for the solution.
Again he reached into the past, fixing upon the 1735 Witchcraft Act, ‘an event which may come to be regarded
as one of the three or four most significant events in the history of the race’. It was, he went on, ‘perhaps the first result in the Christian era of the impact of science on social behaviour’. Rather than dismiss witchcraft as superstitious nonsense the predecessors of modern-day scientists had shown it to be so. Once it had been made clear that the myth of witchcraft made no sense the laws prohibiting it were soon repealed. Why not do the same for the myth of anti-Semitism?
Only the year before, Pyke’s great idol, Bernard Shaw, had said on the subject of the Nazi discrimination against Jews: ‘It is idle to argue against this sort of insanity.’ He was right, in the sense that you would achieve little by arguing against it. Instead, you should demonstrate how it worked. Rather than attack the myth, explain how it was made. Or as Pyke put it: ‘The answer to those who try to incite us is not, “What you say is untrue,” but “Aha, I can tell you why you say that.”’
His solution was to ‘demilitarise’ the Nazi myth of anti-Semitism by showing the world how it worked. The effect would be like having a magic trick explained – everyone would feel a bit silly for not having seen what was going on earlier. Pyke proposed an international centre devoted to exploring and exploding the myth of anti-Semitism. The work must be done by academics, for ‘people will take from them what they won’t take from their own political leaders’, and the findings would be taught in schools. Eventually anti-Semites would go the way of flat-Earthers: they would be seen first as wrong, then old-fashioned and finally mad. ‘Let a man be thought to be deranged and you isolate him as no prison can do,’ noted Pyke, words which had particular weight from someone who had spent four months in solitary confinement and had since been declared borderline insane.
While organisations such as the World Alliance for Combating Anti-Semitism aided its victims and pushed for boycotts of German goods, and the British government was offering sanctuary to those German Jews who excelled in science and art, none of these measures addressed the taproot of this largely Christian affliction. This is what set Pyke’s solution apart. In Germany the Nazis would soon open a Forschungsabteilung Judenfrage – a ‘Research Department for the Jewish Question’. Pyke was proposing the opposite. As a Jew he would launch an institute devoted to the ‘Nazi Question’.
He was realistic about what it could achieve. At no point did he believe that its findings would bring about a Damascene conversion for the Adolf Hitlers and Alfred Rosenbergs of the world. Yet he held out the real hope that its work could affect ‘the marginal convert’, the ordinary German, ‘the man who unless something is done may tomorrow become an anti-Semite’.
For the diplomat and politician Sir Andrew McFadyean, this idea had to it ‘a touch of genius’, though Pyke was perhaps less impressed by his own handiwork. All he had done was look to the past for analogies.
Socrates once warned that the advent of writing and reading would lead to ‘forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories’. The solution to this problem had been hidden in plain view. As Pyke saw it, he was merely the first one who had gone to the trouble of looking for it. As McFadyean went on to say, what really made this solution remarkable was that nobody had thought of it before.
At the start of 1935, with most of his debts written off, Pyke began to raise money for a myth-busting scientific institute devoted to the study of anti-Semitism. The initial response was hesitant. Professor David Keilin, Quick Professor of Biology at Cambridge, assured Pyke that as a Jew he had found the most effective response to Jew-baiting was not academic analysis but ‘commonsense and sense of humour’. The Marquess of Reading, the first practising Jew in the British cabinet, explained that for similar reasons he was unable to lend his name to the scheme. Indeed, many of those English Jews first approached by Pyke suggested that an institute like this might in fact make matters worse. These were men who had learnt to think of anti-Semitism as if it was rain during an English summer: a regrettable fact of life which should be endured, laughed at and otherwise ignored. They were in a minority.
After six months of fundraising Pyke had the backing of Lord Lytton, the Fabian leader Sidney Webb and prominent English Jews such as Lord Melchett, Sir Robert Waley-Cohen and Sir Albert Beit, all of whom provided money, advice and further introductions. The largest cheque, for £200, came from Victor Rothschild, the twenty-four-year-old polymath and heir to a banking dynasty, who had helped Pyke earlier with Malting House. Neither man could have guessed the decisive role that Rothschild would later play in Pyke’s life when serving as an MI5 officer.
By July 1935, with the project still gathering momentum, Pyke met another secular Jew devoting himself to the future of the Jewish people. Chaim Weizmann was a Zionist who had played a part in the genesis of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and as such belonged to the long tradition of Jews on the religious periphery, from Herod to Herzl, who have changed Jewish history. Before rushing off to the 1935 World Zionist Conference in Lucerne, Weizmann gave Pyke a tip. To win over reluctant English Jews he must get the backing of at least one overseas Jewish community. Weizmann suggested South Africa, adding that he had a number of contacts there. Pyke agreed, renewed his passport and in September set off for Johannesburg.
One of his first introductions was to General Smuts, the former South African Prime Minister who had helped found the League of Nations. Smuts was taken by the idea and agreed to lend his name to what Weizmann called a ‘really good cause’. For the next four months, Pyke was on the drawing-room circuit, delivering stump speeches to South African Jews about the need for a scientific institute devoted to the study of anti-Semitism in the face of worrying Nazi discrimination. He finished each talk with the same plaintive line: ‘Do you know of any better proposal, more practical, more immediate? If you do, I will chuck this and work for that. But if you do not, I ask you to promise to give as much as you possibly can.’
Pyke was in his element. He had spent much of his adult life presenting or defending unusual ideas to thoughtful strangers. He was a powerful, lively speaker who liked to punctuate his most serious passages with moments of comedy – usually inspired by Shaw. He revelled in reversal. Resistance, he told himself, was due to a lack of imagination, and it was essential to tease the audience into seeing the world upside down.
The response to Pyke’s South African fundraising was overwhelming, and in January 1936 he returned to Britain with pledges worth £8,000. Admittedly these had all come on the condition that he raise a further £72,000 elsewhere – which was what he planned to do in Britain and the United States. Yet in the months that followed the project’s momentum began to fade. Pyke found himself unable to secure the necessary four- or five-figure sums, and, as progress slowed, several South Africans withdrew their support.
Perhaps there was another way of doing this? Could he not produce a scientific analysis of anti-Semitism by himself?
In a letter to The Times in the summer of 1936, concerning the connection between anti-Semitism and the laws against witchcraft, Pyke hinted that he might do just that. He followed up in September with an extended piece in the New Statesman and Nation which read like the précis of a book. By November he had written a deconstruction of anti-Semitism that ran to more than 100,000 words. But just as he began to revise his manuscript, his attention was dragged elsewhere.
Before he could finish this book or work out where he had gone wrong with his fundraising, Pyke became caught up in the solution of first one problem, then another, each one incrementally more urgent than the last. This was how his grasshopper mind worked. He was, he once wrote, ‘a mere dreamer of brilliant ideas’. Steering a solution through to completion was always less attractive than the magical prospect of identifying a fresh problem and solving it.
Dr Alfred Blunt, Bishop of Bradford, was not afraid of controversy. At a regional Diocesan conference on 1 December 1936, this forthright bishop asked his fellow clergy whether the new monarch, Edward VIII, was fully aware of the religious significance of his role
as Defender of the Faith for, if he was, ‘some of us wish that he gave more positive signs of such awareness’.
This was a none-too-subtle reference to the possibility of the King marrying his mistress, Wallis Simpson, a twice-married Baltimorean with milky skin and a lean, unforgiving face. Blunt’s remarks lit the touchpaper on the greatest royal scandal of the twentieth century. Though the story had been kept out of the British press until then, by the end of the week newspapers were jammed full with opinion pieces on the subject and photographs of the couple taken during the summer. The interest was such that people would queue in the street to buy the evening paper. It was a perfect storm of national introspection, touching on issues of class, sex, monarchical deference, British identity, religious propriety and the constitutional implications of this marriage. There was also a hunger to find out how this romance would end and how the rest of the world had reacted to the news.
‘Society is suspended in mid-air,’ the King told Alfred Duff Cooper, a member of the Cabinet, holding up a chair to make his point. ‘Nobody knows what is right.’ Nobody knew, and yet everyone had an opinion. The King’s Private Secretary assured the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, that ‘there is little doubt what the opinion of the people would be’. The Labour leader, Clement Attlee, was confident that his feelings matched those of his entire party, ‘with the exception of the intelligentsia who can be trusted to take the wrong view on any subject’. ‘I do know public opinion in this country,’ insisted Baldwin, later described by the King as ‘the Gallup Poll incarnate’. All the same, Duff Cooper remarked, ‘it was curious how everybody who had sought the views of taxi drivers, hairdressers, hospital nurses, clerks or servants had heard exactly what they wanted to hear, that is to say their own opinion’.
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