I cannot glance through this novel without once again feeling the sense of emergency that surrounded the writing of it. As far as I knew at the time, anti-Semitism in America was a closed if not forbidden topic for fiction – certainly no novel had taken it as a main theme, let alone the existence within the Catholic priesthood of militants whose duty and pleasure was to stoke up Jew-hate. When one is tempted to say that everything in the world has gotten worse, here is one shining exception.

I was reminded of this only recently when quite by chance I happened to tune in on a local Connecticut radio station and heard a Catholic priest trying to reason an obviously anti-Semitic man out of laying the blame for several bombings of Jewish homes and synagogues in the Hartford area upon the Jews themselves. There was a widespread search going on for the perpetrators, so the man had called into the priest’s talk program to offer his ideas as to who might have been responsible. He had no doubt it was somebody whom a Jew had mistreated, either one of his employees, or somebody who had bought some defective item from him, or someone he had bilked out of money, or maybe it was the work of the client of a Jewish lawyer outraged at having been defrauded. There were, he thought, all sorts of interesting possibilities since the Jews, as everyone knew, have a habit of defrauding and exploiting their workers, and in general have no respect for right and wrong and feel responsible only to one another. (The arsonist was caught some weeks later – a mentally disturbed young Jew.)

I had not heard this litany since the thirties and early forties. Not since before the photos of the bodies were published in the papers. But here it was again, as though freshly minted, brand new discoveries that the caller was supremely confident everyone knew perfectly well but thought it bad manners to talk about in public. And such was the confidence of his manner that he soon had the poor priest on the ropes and could assert with utmost self assurance that he was simply being factual and not anti-Semitic.

The differences now, of course, are that no Hitler stands at the head of the greatest armed force in the world vowing the destruction of the Jewish people, and there is an Israel, which, notwithstanding all the futility of much of its present vision, is still capable of defending the right of Jews to exist. This book, in short, was written when a sensible person could wonder if such a right had reality at all.

It is inevitable that one should wonder whether anything like the situation in this novel could recur, and it is a question no one can answer. In the fifties and sixties I might have persuaded myself that its recrudescence was not likely, and I would have based such reasoning on what had begun to seem a truly profound shift in the world’s conception of the Jew. For one thing, anti-Semitism, linked as it was to totalitarianism, was being viewed as one of the keys to the dismantling of democracy and at least in its political forms was no longer an option for people who, whatever their private grievance against Jews, were still committed to the liberal state. This conjunction between mere private prejudice and public calamity had not even been broached when this book was written, and it is the centerpiece of its shape and action. By the end of World War II anti-Semitism was no longer a purely personal matter.