the decaying bodies as giving off “a kind of lambent blue flame … which lit up a mass of human corruption, worthy to be described by Dante.”44 The disguise was much simpler than the ones Burton would later employ, but here as later it served to gain entry to actions in which mystery was mixed with religious significance; now as later he was moved by a fascination for foreign and forbidden things and a disposition to manipulate his own identity in order to draw closer to them.
Burton recounted these things about his childhood at least partly because he thought they pointed toward the conflicted relationship to English life he would always retain. The suspicion in which he was held by many influential people cast a pall over the diplomatic career he began in 1861; although he received a number of consular appointments, most of them sent him to difficult, even dangerous places in which he had little interest. Only Damascus, where he arrived in 1869, allowed him to draw on his knowledge of Eastern cultures (there he went back to his old practice of masquerading as a local, wandering about incognito in order to gain information, a stratagem in which he was now joined by his wife); but his inability to deal effectively with conflicts between various ethnic groups there—and especially his hostility toward the city’s Jews, part of a complex attitude to which we will come in a moment—overcame him and he was forced out. Trieste, his next and final posting, was easier to deal with but it was also a comedown from Damascus and paid less (he did a great deal of writing there, working in a room he furnished in a Moroccan style). During these years he spent periods in England, but often unhappily, and his closest associates in London were figures who resembled him in arousing suspicion and hostility in more conventional people. Among them were Richard Monckton Milnes and Algernon Swinburne, members with Burton of a band that called itself the “Cannibal Club,” known for their sometimes poetic eccentricity, their interest in erotic and pornographic literature, and their association with nonstandard sexual practices. Burton displayed these involvements most publicly in his translations of the Thousand and One Nights (including the commentaries that accompanied it) and his publication of the Kama Sutra (in a translation by someone else that he revised).
All the same, the knighthood he eventually received in 1886, four years before his death, owed more to his writing than to his government service. That he received it should remind us that Victorian England was morally and culturally far more diverse and open than its guardians of virtue wished. The Arabian Nights translation had many defenders as well as enemies, a response that testified to the more affirmative attitudes toward sexuality that began to appear from the 1860s, and that remained alive even among many highly respectable people and despite the objections of bigots; indeed, the still common image of Victorian life as one-sidedly repressive owes much to the reaction against these liberalizing currents.45 Such coexistence of staid and restrictive attitudes with more open and adventurous ones was exemplified by Burton’s own marriage: his wife, descendant of a family whose storied history went back to the Middle Ages (the Arundells) and a fervent Catholic, was also a determinedly independent woman who married without her parent’s consent and used her many social connections to defend her husband against his moralistic critics; she had much to do with obtaining his knighthood. At certain moments her fearful puritanism took destructive turns, leading her to suppress publications she saw as harmful to his reputation while he was alive, and to burn some of his notebooks and manuscripts after his death; but she clearly understood that these facets of his person and career were part of what made Burton the special figure he was, and to whom she was devoted.46 These complex, sometimes confusing aspects of Burton’s relations to circumstances and people in his time were deeply connected to the sense of himself as at once bound up in a particular cultural identity—British—and unable to enter fully into it, bred into him from childhood.
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The rich but also often troubling, equivocal, and inconsistent nature of Burton’s relations to other peoples and cultures is especially evident in his dealings with Jews and black Africans. Some of his pronouncements about both groups are bound to strike most people today as somewhere between embarrassing and despicable, especially since he regularly viewed them through the prism of race, and his unembarrassed use of racial categories in regard to those who bore the brunt of Nazi and colonialist violence makes it tempting to class him as an outright racist. We need to remember, however, that “race” could be an extremely vague notion in the nineteenth century, applied to groups both large and small and by no means (as some of the language quoted below shows) always indicating biological determination of traits. Pinning the label “racist” on him does not prepare us for the highly critical, even demeaning, things he said about supposedly higher or more advanced groups, notably Christians in general and his own countrymen in particular, especially as they appeared in colonial settings. Rather than suppose that it was some set of racist impulses that determined his attitude toward Jews and Africans, we need to consider the particular mix of hostility and appreciation he displayed toward each group, and to take the racial language he used not as driving his thinking but as the then-commonplace instrument through which he expressed it.
Burton’s offensive anti-Jewish pronouncements belong to the last two decades of his life, and had at least part of their origin in the tense and hostile relations with Jewish inhabitants of Damascus he developed after he became the British consul there in 1869. Conflicts between ethnic groups were rife in the city and its region, and Burton’s troubles began when he sided with Muslims who accused Jewish apprentices of defacing an Islamic school, and Jewish moneylenders of cheating peasants. After some Jews with connections in England lodged complaints about this with British officials in London, followed by Burton himself adding fuel to the fire by some hot-headed actions on other matters, he was dismissed from the long-coveted post. His anti-Jewish feelings deepened after he moved to Trieste, a city where Jews were prominent in business and cultural life, and where early stirrings of the political antisemitism that soon became powerful in the Habsburg empire (of which Trieste was then a part) were already present. It was there that he assembled materials for an essay entitled “The Jew” that remained unpublished in his lifetime but of which parts were issued by W. H. Wilkins in 1898, in the same volume that contained the text on the historical significance of Islam we considered earlier, as well as a piece about “The Gypsy.” The essay on Jews was a motley collection of his own observations and statements by others, not all negative or critical, but clearly intended to contribute to the burgeoning stream of anti-Jewish polemic that became a flood by the end of the century. It included most of the stock tropes of antisemitic rhetoric: Jews were covetous money-grubbers, shifty, selfish, and aggressive in their search for wealth; keeping apart from the peoples in whose lands they lived, they still managed to acquire great power and influence, feeding the sense of superiority that underlay their aggression toward others; thus they were rightfully feared and despised by those who knew them. Displaying as he often did the fruits of his wide reading, Burton acknowledged the defenses of Jews put forward by liberals and other defenders, inserting into his text a long passage from a speech by the Whig historian and politician T. B. Macaulay that attributed the negative qualities often identified with Jews to the exclusion and oppression visited upon them. Burton took this explanation seriously, but he blunted its effect by asserting that Jews had long responded to such treatment in a way that people of a more noble and generous nature would not have, namely by developing a theory and practice of revenge. He supported this view by citations from the Talmud and by a list of incidents in which Jews had been accused of violence toward outsiders, evidence that modern Jews did not shrink from putting the Talmudic precepts into practice. The credence Burton clearly gave to these accusations extended even to the often-repeated charge of murdering Christian children in order to use their blood in rituals. This part of the dossier against the Jews was highly truncated in the published version of “The Jew,” however, since the editor Wilkins (a friend of Burton’s and especially of his wife’s) thought it too offensive to publish in toto.47
What prefaced this polemic, however, was an account of something about Jews that Burton clearly admired, namely their strength and vigor, both as a group and as individuals. Of all human types the Jews “possess the most abundant vitality,” an “indestructible and irrepressible life-power” that found expression not just in the influence they had gained in so many countries, but also in mental and physical
