But there was also the shift, however paradoxical, in the perception of the Jew as a consequence of the first successful decades of Israel’s life as a state. In a word, the Jew was no longer a shadowy, ghettoized mystery, but a farmer, a pilot, a worker. Throwing off the role of victim he stood up and was suddenly comprehensible as one of the world’s dangerous peoples – dangerous in the conventional military and characterological sense. He was like everybody else now and for a time it would be difficult to imagine the traditional anti-Semitic attitudes feeding themselves on warriors rather than passive victims. For a time Israeli technical and military missions were spread across Africa and her example seemed about to become an inspiration for any poor country attempting to enter this century.

This exemplary condition was not to last. An irony so gigantic as to sweep the mind into the explications of mysticism moved Israel partially in fact, entirely in the world’s perception, from a land settled by pastoral socialists and internationalist soldier-farmers, into a bellicose armed camp whose adamant tribal defensiveness has inevitably hardened against neighboring peoples to the point of fanaticism. Jewish aloneness is back, but now it is armed. One more impersonation has been added to the long historic list that supplied so many contradictory images: Einstein and Freud and/or Meyer Lansky or another gangster; Karl Marx and/or Rothschild; the Prague Communist chief Slansky running Czechoslovakia for Stalin, and/or the Jew Slansky hanging by the neck as tribute to Stalin’s paranoid anti-Semitism.

Focus is much involved with impersonations. Its central image is the turning lens of the mind of an anti-Semitic man forced by his circumstances to see anew his own relationships to the Jew. To a certain degree, it seems to me that Newman’s step toward his human identification with some part of the Jewish situation has indeed occurred, at least in sectors of the democratic world, since the mid-forties, and so the projection of such a change as occurs in this story was not altogether romantic and unlikely.

But in the four decades since writing Focus certain new perspectives on the Jewish situation have opened up from surprising angles. In particular the attitudes of some Asian peoples toward certain successful strangers settled in their midst, for example the Chinese in Thailand and the Vietnamese in the Cambodia of Sihanouk before the Vietnamese occupation of that country. It used to amuse me to hear descriptions in Bangkok of the local Chinese, which were so exactly similar to what people used to say about Jews, and doubtless still do in the West. ‘The Chinese really have only one loyalty, to one another. They are very clever, study harder in school, always try to be first in their studies. There are lots of Chinese bankers in Thailand, too many; in fact, it was a real mistake to give Chinese Thai citizenship, because they have secretly taken control of the banking system. Besides, they are spies for China, or would be in time of war. Actually, what they are after is a revolution in Thailand [despite their being bankers and capitalists] so that we would end up as dependents of China.’