The November 1st issue of National Review includes a feature-length article by Matthew Scully about a figure most readers won’t recognize: the recently deceased Joseph Sobran, whom the title calls “Bard of the Right”. Mr. Scully drops hints that this “bard’s” songs were somewhat discordant, but the overall tone is respectful and regretful, concluding with, “What Joseph Sobran deserves right now is to be remembered at his best, as a kind and gentle person, a noble soul, and among opinion journalists, the greatest of his time.”
I beg to differ. Forgetfulness and silence would be kinder.
If I may compare the man to a thinker several orders of magnitude more significant, Sobran’s career resembled that of Tertullian, who began as an eloquent champion of Christianity and ended as a propagandist for a preposterous heresy. Similarly, the Joe Sobran of the 1970’s and early 1980’s was a witty and incisive presence on the National Review masthead. I remember looking forward to his essays and listening with interest to his radio commentaries.
At some point, however, his talent became poisoned by the conviction that American politics was being manipulated by conspiratorial Jews. He denounced President Reagan’s air strike against Libya in April 1986 as the product of “the Israeli lobby”, indulged in canards about American Jews’ supposed higher loyalty to “duplicitous” Israel, and asserted moral equivalency between persecuting Christians and persecuted Jews in medieval Europe. (Allegedly, “Some rabbinical authorities held that it was permissible to cheat and even kill Gentiles” and vilified Moses Maimonides for expressing a contrary view.) None of these opinions appeared in National Review, where he was a senior editor, but Bill Buckley nonetheless published an editorial dissociating the magazine from them and strongly warning his one-time protegé to mind his manners.
The upshot was a feud that attracted much attention on the Right. Sobran lost his position with National Review, along with his syndicated column and his radio show. Buckley’s side of the story can be found in a book-length essay, In Search of Anti-Semitism (1992). Sobran’s was reiterated in his last two decades of writings: Buckley had become a “servile appeaser” after being browbeaten by “the Jews” (personified by Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter). Alienated from the Right, Sobran peddled the “October Surprise” conspiracy theory (that candidate Ronald Reagan made a deal with Ayatollah Khomeini to prevent the release of the American hostages in Tehran before the 1980 election), blamed the American alliance with Israel for the 9/11 attacks, accused the Israeli government of planning to expel its Arab citizens, and routinely allied himself with the far Left on every question of foreign policy. (Of left-wing fantasist Seymour Hersh, he wrote, “Hersh really keeps his ear to the ground, has great sources, and collects well-earned enemies in every administration. I wonder how many high-level conspiracies he has aborted over the last four decades by getting wind of them in time.”) In domestic affairs, he evolved into a Lysander Spooner style libertarian crank. The tone of his columns grew increasingly grumpy and dogmatic, unsuited to persuade any but the already converted.
To grasp fully what kind of political animal the later Joseph Sobran was, one must read his speech, “For Fear of the Jews”, delivered to the Institute for Historical Review in June 2002. The history that the Institute wants to “review” is the Nazi murder of six million Jews. To this gathering of Jew haters and lunatics, Sobran declared,
Here I should lay my own cards on the table. I am not, heaven forbid, a “Holocaust denier.” I lack the scholarly competence to be one. I don’t read German, so I can’t assess the documentary evidence; I don’t know chemistry, so I can’t discuss Zyklon-B; I don’t understand the logistics of exterminating millions of people in small spaces. Besides, “Holocaust denial” is illegal in many countries I may want to visit someday. For me, that’s proof enough. One Israeli writer has expressed his amazement at the idea of criminalizing opinions about historical fact, and I find it puzzling too; but the state has spoken.
Does this agnosticism sound the slightest bit faux? Sobran also did not know Hebrew or Arabic, yet he did not doubt his own “scholarly competence” to reach conclusions about the history and politics of the Middle East.
Of course those who affirm the Holocaust need know nothing about the German language, chemistry, and other pertinent subjects; they need only repeat what they have been told by the authorities. In every controversy, most people care much less for what the truth is than for which side it’s safer and more respectable to take. They shy away from taking a position that is likely to get them into trouble. Just as only people on the Axis side were accused of war crimes after World War II, only people critical of Jewish interests are accused of thought-crimes in today’s mainstream press.
So, life being as short as it is, I shy away from this controversy. Of course I’m also incompetent to judge whether the Holocaust did happen; so I’ve become what might be called a “Holocaust stipulator.” Like a lawyer who doesn’t want to get bogged down debating a secondary point, I stipulate that the standard account of the Holocaust is true. [emphasis in original]
The normal point of stipulating something in an argument is to dismiss it as inconsequential. Someone who “stipulates” that Barack Obama was born in the United States is almost certainly a “birther” at heart. “Stipulating” that Saddam Hussein was a bloodthirsty tyrant is a standard prelude to excoriating the war that removed him.
Sobran brushed past the greatest atrocity of the 20th Century so that he could characterize it as “a device for exempting Jews from normal human obligations. It has authorized them to bully and blackmail, to extort and oppress.” Like Iran’s Ahmadinejad, he said that “the chief use of the Holocaust story is to undergird the legitimacy of the state of Israel” and denied any historical connection between Jews and the Promised Land, calling Israel “a ‘homeland’ most [Jews] have never lived in, and in which none of their ancestors has ever lived”.
National Review’s eulogium has little to say about that Joseph Sobran. Mr. Scully doesn’t overlook him completely but shies away from the obvious conclusion:
Joe traded a friend and mentor who loved him [Buckley] for new company that was beneath him, National Review for the Institute for Historical Review. His appearance before that sorry outfit a few years ago (it’s the kind of group where they talk about “the Holocaust story”) remains impossible to explain, at least if you’re trying to absolve him. If, as I had always supposed, Joe was just one damn stubborn spaniel who didn’t know when to let the point go, then what was he doing with all those wolves? It calls to mind a Sobran line directed at Mario Cuomo, in that letter rebuking the governor’s way of sounding pro-life while encouraging exactly the opposite cause: “The worst thing I can say about you is a thing that is too obvious to deny: that these fanatics accept you as one of their own.”
A few minutes’ googling will unearth plenty of fanatics who accept Joe Sobran as one of their own. Maybe they aren’t wrong.
National Review displays big-heartedness when it devotes a thirteenth of an issue to a generally favorable portrayal of a man who called its founder “jumpy about Jews”, a “servile appeaser” and worse, and who worked hard, albeit not very influentially, to promote causes that NR has strenuously opposed. Well, magnanimity is a virtue, and the so-called “Bard of the Right” was too extreme and eccentric to do much damage. In the future, he will do less.
Addendum: In addition to the political views discussed above, Sobran devoted much energy to an unharmful lunacy, the belief that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (or, as he himself preferred, “Oxenford”), was the real author of the works of William Shakespeare. About this hobbyhorse, Mr. Scully writes,
He did, in 1997, finally publish his masterwork on the Shakespeare authorship question, resolving the case in favor of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. He loved Shakespeare, who “seems to know us better than we know him,” and if the author was actually someone else, then it seemed to Joe worth ten years of his life to prove. It didn’t really matter to him that even the small group immersed in this 400-year-old controversy refused to give him much of a hearing, dismissing Alias Shakespeare with condescending lectures on “serious scholarship.”
Actually, anti-Stratfordians edged away from Sobran largely out of distaste for his antisemitic ramblings. His arguments and approach otherwise fall well within the mainstream of their movement. Most of his material was, in fact, cribbed from Charlton Ogburn, Jr.’s megabiblium, The Mysterious William Shakespeare, which spreads the case for Oxenford, such as it is, over eight hundred disjointed pages. Alias Shakespeare has the virtue of being a well-written precis. It makes just two original contributions of any note.
First, Sobran insists that Oxenford’s homosexuality (for which there is scanty evidence; the earl fathered children by at least three women, though political enemies did once accuse him of goings-on with a Venetian choir boy) was central to the “plot” to keep his authorship secret. For reasons never quite revealed to us, using a pseudonym and, especially, omitting the Shakespearean poems from the First Folio were essential to preserving Oxenford’s reputation.
Second, Sobran believed himself to have a particularly acute ear for Shakespeare’s “voice prints”. An appendix to Alias Shakespeare reproduces the undisputed Oxenford corpus – 20 poems of widely varying merit – and finds passages in Shakespeare that, in Sobran’s judgment, must have come from the same pen. To those of us without the analyst’s gift, it looks like he has simply set side-by-side passages where the two authors use the same words, a method that could prove that almost anyone wrote almost anything. We can, however, go beyond that vague objection, for the appendix includes a “natural experiment” testing whether Sobran was in truth able to “hear” Shakespeare under other guises.
As Sobran evidently did not realize, the first 16 lines of one of Oxenford’s poems (beginning “In Peascod time when hound to horn gives ear while buck is kill’d”) were written not by Oxenford but by Thomas Churchyard. Oxenford then added 12 lines of his own as a continuation. (Vide Poems IVa (Churchyard) and IV (probably Oxenford) in Steven May’s edition of the poems, published in the journal Studies in Philology (1980) and in his study The Elizabethan Courtier Poets (1999).)
If the Sobran ear is reliable, one would expect it to find few, if any, Shakespearean echoes in Churchyard’s verse. Yet his 16 lines are credited with 16 parallels. There are ten in Oxenford’s dozen lines. Indeed, the “Shakespearean density” of the Churchyard portion exceeds what Sobran detects in any other passage of comparable length. In the one poem that the earl published under his own name, there are a mere 15 parallels in 26 lines.
It appears, then, that Sobran could not distinguish Churchyard from Oxenford or Shakespeare. His method proves nothing but the power of wishful thinking.