It was inevitable, that thing with Daniel Levy. You knew it would happen, just not quite how. In the event it was a caller to a Talksport Radio show who said what you knew they were thinking out there. That one of England’s heroes from the Euros final, captain Harry Kane, was being thwarted in his desire to leave Spurs and find career fulfilment at last season’s Premier League winning club, Manchester City, because “Daniel Levy is a Jew, he is not going to let him go for nothing is he?”’
The comment wasn’t heard by listeners on air because the short time delay allowed the station to “dump” it. Knowing they had the facility to dump it probably also explains why the presenters simply cut the caller off and carried on. But the station also goes out live on YouTube — as much radio does now — and the sentiment was heard there, and has now been played millions of times since, not least by people scandalised by its casual antisemitism.
For several weeks now I’ve been worrying — as some of you will have too — at the way in which this business was being portrayed. On the one hand, you had what you might call the Great Goyishe Hero, noble, straightforward, always looking to do his best for club or country. All he wants to do is win some trophies in the Indian summer of his career, and though — yes — he is in the middle of a six-year contract with Tottenham, he had (say various unattributable sources to various journalists) “a gentleman’s agreement” that he would be allowed to leave.
On the other, you have the short-statured, bald, wealthy businessman, the subject of endless clichéd comments for his abilities to “drive a hard bargain” — harder, it would seem, than anyone else. What does this hard bargainer do? He (according to these sources and these journalists) violates his gentleman’s agreement with our Harry.
Proving, of course, that he is no gentleman. You could weep for Harry, England and St George. For Jews, this is the characterisation if not from hell, at least from some bad history.
My player, my ducats. Readers will remember that some time ago I wrote about an encounter in The Times’ office with a young intern who quite innocently expressed to me the view — something he said that “everyone knows” — that “Jews are stingy. Tight with their money”. Clearly this was a commonplace belief from where he came, among his friends and I daresay his family. Half a century ago, I heard it at school in the form of jokes like “how do you kill a Jew? Throw a ha’penny under a bus.” Use the word “ha’penny” now and they won’t know what you’re talking about. The rest, I fear, they’ll understand.
The English (I can’t speak for the other Brits) have long had a particular way dealing with “others”. The most common form of marking their superiority has been the use of demeaning stereotypes, which have often been baked into jokes or sayings. The Italians are cowardly, the Germans brutal, the Irish stupid, the blacks are lazy, the Jews are mean. And grasping. They place the gaining or keeping of riches above all else: above country, above even family. Let alone above the hopes and desires of football players and supporters.
It can’t be repeated often enough that the two greatest Jewish figures in English literature, Shylock and Fagin, conform to this stereotype. And despite the efforts of some scholars to rescue them from the damage they do to Jews, their meaning is clear. As one of Shakespeare’s Venetians reports:
“I never heard a passion so confused,
So strange, outrageous, and so variable,
As the dog Jew did utter in the streets:
‘My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!
Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!’”
Shylock probably owes his existence to Shakespeare noting the commercial success of Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta and deciding to follow suit. In 2015, when Marlowe’s play was revived by the RSC, the scholar Charles Nicholl wrote in the Guardian that, “The Jew of Malta is certainly a play about antisemitism, but is it also (as is often thought) an antisemitic play? It is true that [the main character] Barabas is given the stock negative attributes of the Jew — rapacious and avaricious, a usurer who has ‘filled the gaols with bankrupts’, a hater of Christians… It may also be true that Barabas was played wearing a large false nose…” At which point you feel that the coming “but” had better be a bloody good one.
“But Marlowe’s purpose in presenting us with this pantomime Jew is surely to satirise the crudity of the stereotype.”
Nicholl was writing both out of the goodness of his heart and from the centre of his tuchas. Marlowe, who knew no Jews, did know his audience. So did Shakespeare. So did Dickens. And even if they hadn’t, the picture they created of the Jew was clearly in their own minds. As it was in the mind of the Talksport caller.
For the rest, all I can add is that evidence of that improbable “gentleman’s agreement” between Kane and Levy had better exist. Because if it doesn’t, then Kane’s PR people and a shedload of journalists have unwittingly helped in the perpetuation of the bigot’s favourite Jewish stereotype.
