What would Iris Murdoch have thought?
It is not difficult to imagine Iris Murdoch’s enraged grief over current events in Gaza and Israel. The atrocities initially committed by Hamas on October 7th continue. At the time of writing, Hamas still holds, underground, thirty dead and twenty living hostages, one of whom, desperately emaciated, has been filmed digging his own grave. The government of Israel’s response to these atrocities still follows its course, now familiar to anyone who watches BBC news. But what is less familiar, perhaps, is the recent reaction of some well-known Jewish voices to the Israeli government’s continuing response to October 7th. In the transcript of the podcast 'Unholy: Two Jews on the News', released on 12 June 2025, Jonathan Freedland’s and Yonit Levi’s question to the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari – ‘so […] this period, October the 7th 2023 till now, where does that fit? Is it a footnote or chapter in the sweep of Jewish history? - elicited this answer from Harari:
I think it could be one of the biggest turning points in Jewish history, maybe the biggest since the fall of the temple in 70 CE, since the Roman conquest. Because Judaism has survived. It became the world champion in surviving catastrophes, but it never faced a catastrophe like we are dealing with right now, which is a spiritual catastrophe for Judaism itself. Because what is happening right now in Israel could basically, I think could destroy 2000 years of Jewish thinking and culture and existence that the worst-case scenario that we are facing right now.
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, interviewed by Freedman and Levi on Unholy on 25th July 2025, stated this:
what I see is a trend line that’s going to end in a place that we’ve never seen before. It’s a world that I never knew growing up, but it’s a world my grandchildren will know growing up, a world in which my grandchildren will learn what it is to be Jewish in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah state.
And the Israeli novelist David Grossman, interviewed at the beginning of August 2025 by the Italian newspaper la Repubblica is reported to have said this:
I […]want to speak as a human being who was born into this conflict and has had his entire existence devastated by occupation and war. I want to speak as a person who has done everything he could to avoid calling Israel a genocidal state. And now, with immense pain and a broken heart, I must acknowledge that it is happening before my eyes. ‘Genocide’. [1]
Which opinions, by three leading modern Jewish thinkers, should give Iris Murdoch readers, Jewish or non-Jewish, pause for thought. If Israel is justly perceived in the future as a pariah state guilty of genocide, how will that perception alter these readers’ attitudes to the Holocaust and Murdoch’s rendering of it, particularly in her magnum opus on the subject, The Message to the Planet (1989)? And how will that perception alter Murdoch readers’ attitude to other imaginative writers’ depictions of the Holocaust, Howard Jacobson’s, for example, in his novel Kalooki Nights (2006), called by A.C Grayling ‘a work of genius’ [2], which I argue below owes a great deal to The Message to the Planet? Will Alfred Ludens, from the latter novel, be proved right?
About the Holocaust, Ludens had prided himself on keeping, as a historian, a cool head. Of course it was the unspeakable thing that it was, about which so many details were now known, about which words failed. Of course it made Jews feel more Jewish. It made Ludens feel more Jewish. But he did not think of it as a cosmic event which must somehow change the whole of human thought, altering philosophy and theology and closing the mouths of poets; such a view seemed to him superstitious, a denial of ordinary scholarship and ordinary hard-thinking rationality (194). [3]
When I wrote the piece below for last year’s Iris Murdoch conference, I did not share Ludens’ opinion about the Holocaust. I thought it was indeed an event which changed human thought. I, a non-Jew, thought of Israel as a profoundly special, a holy country. I am not sure I think so now.
Iris Murdoch, Howard Jacobson and 'the Jews'
Iris Murdoch once wrote to a Jewish friend after a visit to Israel that she was ‘practically a Jew myself by now’ (letter to Leo Pliatzky, April 1977 [4]) and one imagines, in the unlikely event of her having had to agree with the Jewish narrator’s statement in Kalooki Nights [5] that ‘in the end there are only two sorts of Jews […] Jews who see the funny side of things and those who don’t’ (421), that Murdoch would, though reluctantly, have identified with the second sort. It’s not easy to find the funny side of things in The Message to the Planet but there are a few cheering opportunities: the feminist artist Masie Tether’s attempts to liberate the imprisoned wife Franca with her comments about men like Franca’s husband Jack - ‘I know about husbands, I know their little ways, I’ve watched them at work, thank God I never had one’, or the English scholar of Polish Jewish ancestry, Alfred Ludens, meditating on the possible meanings of ‘Free bicycles’ as he searches for his hero of Sephardic Jewish origin Marcus Vallar. But it’s difficult, frankly, to integrate these moments with contemplation of the novel’s dreadful burden, the ‘black mountain’. Compare this with the belief of Max Glickman, professional cartoonist and first-person narrator of Kalooki Nights, that ‘for me nothing was so dreadful that I couldn’t see its essential drollery’ (422), seen both in his references to the Holocaust as well as to texts sacred to Jews: ‘It behoved a man living in the twenty-first century, as it behoved the dramatis personae of Genesis, to be acquainted with abomination’ (423), or in Max’s conversation with a friend about the growth of Holocaust denial – ‘not the Swastika as Scourge this time round but the Swastika as Scourgee, were such a word to exist, the Swastika as Bemused and Slandered Bystander, the Swastika as Boon could we only see it, the Swastika as Benediction' (348) – meaning that this is how forgetfulness starts, according to the friend. To which Max drolly replies：
I didn’t know how forgetfulness started. But I accepted that even a single instance of it amounted to such wickedness that Elohim would have been within his rights to put a torch to us once and for all. I’ll show you fucking forgetfulness, you fuckers! Or however Elohim talks. (349)
Which is to say that Murdoch and Jacobson, on the face of it anyway, get by different routes to the unspeakable place. Max’s drollery also extends to those close to him whose lives have been shaped by the Holocaust though they deny it. These include Max’s atheist Jewish father who, believing ‘that Jews bore a special responsibility not to be special, so he hated Israel for existing, then hated it for not existing well’ (397), was of the view that the only way that Jews could free themselves from ‘the death-in-life grip those slaughtered five or more million had on our imaginations was to live the life that they had not’ (7), and who ‘asked until the asking killed him, why does everything always have to come back to Jew, Jew, Jew?’ (7). They also include Max’s two Gentile ex-wives whose sweet nothings to him seem to consist mainly of anti-Semitic jokes; as well as Max’s third wife, a Jewish woman of piercing post-1948 conscience who when married to Max refers to Israel as Palestine, whom Max now looks back on as his wife of sorrows and whom in the end he calls ‘The fucking lugubrious Jewess […] Ghetto-laden, Holocaust-ridden, God-benighted, guilt-strewn, and now by that latest twist of morbid Jewish ingenuity, Jew-revolted' (399), a list of compound adjectives to which Max might have added the equally unforgiveable crime, ‘sandal-wearing’. Nothing so dreadful, as he had earlier said, that he couldn’t see its essential drollery.
A claim which is to be challenged, however energetically Max tries to maintain it. He certainly tries hard, given that the material on which he expends his energy is not exactly promising, including not only the Holocaust but the killing in 1973 by Emanuel Eli Washinsky, who had been Max’s post-war childhood friend, of his Orthodox parents in their beds by turning on the gas. This he had done, Emanuel stated at his trial, in order to test the opinion of the deputy director of an SS gassing institution, ‘wondering what all the fuss was about’ when belatedly arrested, that turning the tap on had been ‘no big deal’ (59). Emanuel had found, on the contrary, that it was a big deal. Confined to a secure psychiatric hospital and subjected to some ploddingly unimaginative anti-Jewish barbarities by his Gentile so-called nurses, Emanuel is subjected to additional humiliations in the silence of Max’s head after his release despite, or because of, Max’s attempts to revive his friendship with him and provide him with care and shelter. Manny was a ‘nutter’, ‘criminal I could have coped with, religious nutter, no’ (58); like his devout parents, the devout Manny had excluded himself from the society of those with whom Max could feel some affinity: ‘something makes me except the devout from the human family […] They step out by virtue of their other-worldliness, so I leave them there’ (55), ‘God-revering, God-startled’ though they be. And so at the end of the novel, with no drollery, Max leaves the devout, deluded and tormented Emanuel Eli, the man who re-enacted the Holocaust in his parents’ house, to go his own way into the future, peopled as it so evidently is by those who cry to be remembered despite, or because of, the jeers recorded by Primo Levi of the SS militia to camp inmates that even if only one survived to return home no one would believe their story.[6]
It is to this point of similarity between Jacobson’s and Murdoch’s novels (Murdoch also refers to Primo Levi) that I now turn: to Murdoch’s Emanuel Eli figure, Marcus Vallar, and to Alfred Ludens, the possible shadowy original of Max Glickman. Both Marcus Vallar and Emanuel Eli enter psychiatric institutions; both defy the efforts of their closest acquaintances to understand them; and each has a special affinity either with children or with ‘the pure of heart’ as Psalm 24 has it – a clue about the country at the entrance to which both enigmatic figures stand. That country is Israel, site of two of the most shattering events in the history of religious belief: the transmitting of the ten commandments by God to man, and the sending by God of his only son in the shape of a man who was crucified and after three days rose from the dead. Although Emanuel’s motivations to murder recede into the mists of his distress, we can hypothesise that while one motive compelled him to reenact the Holocaust, another forced him to test how far he could offend the God of Israel, author of the fifth and sixth commandments, before he was incinerated; with a third motive directing him to find out whether, as with Isaac, the Almighty would provide an alternative sacrifice at the last moment. In Murdoch’s novel, more than one character suggests that Marcus Vallar identifies with the well-known Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, and we know how that story, if one is not inclined to award it historical authenticity, turned out: and, so it seems, at the moment of his own death, did Marcus. One answer to why both novelists incorporate these references to the beliefs of the people of Israel into their novels is their discovery that only thus can the black mountain of the Holocaust be climbed or, to abandon the metaphor, be talked about, once they have arrived at its foothills. It is too dreadful to be discussed directly. In Murdoch’s last novel a character thinks, after retelling a Holocaust story to another character, that ‘Even to tell it to anybody was a sin, why this one little story, when the whole thing was so eternally hideously immense’ (172) [7], and in an interview Jacobson said that in Kalooki Nights ‘his aim was to try and broach the whole business of the Holocaust. Not to re-evoke the Holocaust, but to think about the way we talk about it’ [8]. This is perhaps what one remembers most about each novel: how each talks about the Holocaust. We have listened briefly to the talk of a few characters in Kalooki Nights as recorded by Max Glickman: the talk of his father, of his two caricatured anti-Semitic Aryan wives, of his pro-Palestinian Jewish wife, as well as to the enigmatic talk of his deeply distressed friend Emanuel, which Jacobson suggests is at least partly a product of traumatic exposure to reports of Holocaust horrors when a child. In The Message to the Planet, the closest we get to direct talk about those horrors is in a brief unacknowledged heart-breaking reference to a small ‘child of Auschwitz’ in Primo Levi’s If This is a Man. And having thus limited themselves, each novel discourages further talk about the Holocaust. One way of talking that both novelists vigorously discourage is talking about the Holocaust as mystical event – as in ‘the unfathomable evil of the Holocaust’ as a recent Church of England report has it on relations between Christians and Jews, while the same report fails to recommend the ending of Chrisitan attempts to convert Jews to Christianity [9]. Kalooki Nights goes further than The Message to the Planet in its explicit attribution to Christianity of a major role in the prehistory of the Holocaust: not only in Max Glickman’s droll references to the massacres of his forebears in such comically unlovely places as Lithuania’s Novoropissick but also in this, for example, the sadness of religious Jews’ reaction to a son ‘marrying out: their sadness at
the depletion, the erasure, the annulment, the extinction in the arms of no matter how welcoming a Gentile future of their hard-won Jewish past. Not negligible, such concerns, when you consider how intrinsic to Christianity disparagement of Judaism has been. Marry a Christian and you marry into your own denial. (138)
A reminder that on their wedding night his Aryan wife Chloe had asked Max, ‘Do you mind if I pray for you tonight, darling?’ after stating that ‘though she wasn’t Catholic she had spent some time at a Catholic school where they had taught her to pray for all the Jews they knew as they were earmarked for eternal damnation.’ Drollery again.
Jacobson’s explicit references in Kalooki Nights to Christianity’s role in the prehistory of the Holocaust are not exactly comfortable reading for those of us raised as Christians, though the scornful Jacobson wouldn’t care less, his rage being, as we have seen, distributed fairly across a variety of targets in addition to Christians, including religious Jews, non-religious Jews, himself (you can, as Max says, ‘come to dislike your own mind (449)), God for existing, God for not existing, God for abandoning his people; not forgetting Max’s father’s rage powering his own dream of establishing ‘a kind of muscular Zionism of the mind, without the necessity of actually establishing a Zionist state and going […] “berserk in someone else’s country”' (18) - in stark contrast, one might add to Max’s own message to the Christians:
[to them] I had one thing and one thing only I wanted to say: You threw us out, you won’t now dictate to us where we can go. A Chinaman might be entitled to express an opinion, but a Christian of French or German or even English descent, no sir. Not when the mess, if you go back far enough – and I go back far enough – is all your doing. (398)
It is arguable that Jacobson’s rage in this novel enables him to acquire some sense of peace by the end of it, but if this is true it is not the peace of forgetfulness. In the interview I quoted from earlier he mentioned that ‘occasionally I find myself on the radio with a rabbi, and I'm the one saying: "Never forget.” They say: "Well, we've got to move on." You move on, rabbi, I'm not’. It is also arguable that Murdoch, unable or unwilling in The Message to the Planet to name as explicitly as Jacobson the role of Christianity in the prehistory of the Holocaust, is left in despair at the end of her novel, but one might add that the silence following the first two lines of the hymn by an Anglican priest which end the novel can be read as tacit acknowledgement of Christianity’s history, since that silence stresses the impossibility of singing ever again the original second two lines, which might be rewritten ‘to thee our morning hymns cannot ascend, thy praise can never sanctify our rest.’ A further paper would have something to say about Murdoch’s diverting use of Anglican clerics, especially bishops, as human shields against difficult thinking, and her use of an Anglican priest in this novel is no exception. But if Murdoch herself is nowhere as explicit as Jacobson about Christianity’s place in the Holocaust’s origins, we know that she read and called ‘splendidly critical’ a biography of Jesus by a friend and at one point future Anglican priest, who ended his biography with words Jacobson might have written:
When the Church triumphed over the synagogue […] the deadly legacy of anti-Semitism remained embodied in the Christian view of the world. Not until over twenty years after the Second World War did the Roman Catholic Church officially absolve the Jewish people from guilt in the death of Jesus. By then, there were millions of Jesus’s fellow believers in Judaism who had died either directly or indirectly because of the idea that they had killed the Son of God. [10]
And A.N. Wilson concludes that ‘if [Jesus] had foreseen the whole of Christian history’ and, one might add in 2025, the history of Israel, he might ‘have exclaimed with Job, “Why died I not from the womb? […] For now, should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest”’ (Wilson, 256), words which Murdoch undoubtedly internalised and which perhaps informed her last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), whose tragic sense of exhausted peace conveys the necessary inevitability of Christianity’s end.
Notes
1. https://uk.lapresse.it/world-en/2025/08/01/
2. Grayling’s review in The Times, an excerpt from which is quoted on the front cover of the 2007 Vintage Books paperback edition, remarks that Kalooki Nights ‘is the most intelligent and important novel to appear in this country in years … a work of genius.’
3. Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet (1989; Harmondsworth: Penguin 1990).
4. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, Living on Paper (London: Chatto and Windus, 2015), 446.
5. All page references to Howard Jacobson, Kalooki Nights (2006; London: Vintage, 2007).
6. All Primo Levi references to If This is a Man (1958, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979)
7. Iris Murdoch, Jackson’s Dilemma (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995).
8. Howard Jacobson, interview with Gerald Jacobs, The Jewish Chronicle, Sept 4 2008.
9. God’s Unfailing Word: Theological and Practical Perspectives on Christian–Jewish Relations (London: Church House Publishing, 2019).
10. A.N Wilson, Jesus (1992, London: Pimlico, 2003)
Author bio: Rob Hardy is an honorary professor at Henan Normal University, China, and a visiting fellow at the Iris Murdoch Research Centre, University of Chichester. His main publications are Psychological and Religious Narratives in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction (Edwin Mellen, 2000); Men’s Yearning Anger Towards Women in the Writings of D.H. Lawrence, Dion Fortune and Ted Hughes (Edwin Mellen, 2015); and Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America: The Battle of Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).