Nature’s Iscariot: Mushrooms, Poetry, and Anti-Semitism
by and published in Edition Six of Pomegranate
Mushroom
The mushroom is the elf of plants,
At evening it is not;
At morning in a truffled hut
It stops upon a spot
As if it tarried always;
And yet its whole career
Is shorter than a snake’s delay,
And fleeter than a tare.
‘Tis vegetation’s juggler,
The germ of alibi;
Doth like a bubble antedate,
And like a bubble hie.
I feel as if the grass were pleased
To have it intermit
The surreptitious scion
Of summer’s circumspect.
Had nature any outcast face,
Could she a son condemn,
Had nature an Iscariot,
That mushroom,—it is him.
Emily Dickinson
In Mushroom, the eponymous fungus is painted as a forest-floor Judas, a “surreptitious” creature, an inscrutable lurker, here one minute, gone the next, a “juggler” – tricky and treacherous. These are, of course, anti-Semitic stereotypes; the traitorous Judas has long been a mere poster-boy for the image of the sly, backstabbing Jew. What is really interesting, though, is that this odd portrayal of the mushroom is not as unique as it first seems. In fact, Dickinson’s poem might be viewed as a comment on a much older tradition of fungi-based anti-Semitism that dates back to, at least, the middle ages.
The fungus Auricularia auricula (formerly Auricularia auricula-judae) was, until very recently, better known as Judas’ Ear or Jew’s Ear. In medieval times, as we know from The Vision of Piers Plowman, Judas was commonly thought to have “hanged hymselve” on an “eller” (elder tree) and the uncannily ear-like fungus, which commonly grows on elders, presumably served as a rubbery reminder of Judas’ betrayal. More shockingly, it is also said that, in the same period, all mushrooms were referred to as “Jew’s meat”.
It might seem odd that mushrooms were so entangled with the racist representation of Jews during the medieval era, but when you consider the attitude towards fungi that existed in the British Isles until only very recently, it is not difficult to see why. Mushrooms rarely graced the tables of the medieval banquet hall; only a few species were even considered edible and all others were seen as toadstools: slimy, poisonous and unpleasant. This view must have persisted well into the renaissance, judging by how well it is captured by these lines from Spenser’s The Shephearde’s Calendar:
The grisly Todestool grown there mought I see
And loathed Paddocks lording on the same
Basically, people didn’t like mushrooms. Like the Jews, they were unfamiliar, and fear of the unfamiliar breeds hatred and disgust. Just as, for example, the Jews would have turned heads by failing to conform to the church-centric weekly routine of the average peasant, the mushroom, and its tendency to pop up overnight, almost magically, would have seemed unpredictable and disturbing to a culture accustomed to the clockwork sowing and harvesting of wheat and barley. Mushrooms and Jews were both misunderstood outsiders and, as such, it is possible to see how the perceived negative characteristics of one were ascribed to the other. Soon, the slimy, waxy cap of a stereotypical toadstool had become synonymous with the sallow skin of the stereotypical ugly Jew.
So far so historically distant, but the Jew-as-toadstool did not disappear with the middle ages. In 1938 a children’s book was released in Nazi Germany which presented the image more starkly, and with more aggressive hatred than ever before. The name of the book was Der Giftpilz or, in English, The Toadstool. In one of its seventeen short stories, a mother takes her son mushroom-picking and tells him that, “there are poisonous, bad mushrooms and there are bad people. And we have to be on our guard against bad people just as we have against poisonous mushrooms.” Another story, entitled “Money is the God of the Jews”, is illustrated with a picture of a fat toadish Jew squatting on a giant bag of money. The cover of the book features several rotting green toadstools. The stem of each one bears a racist caricature of a Jewish face.
After this, and after the holocaust, one might assume that comparing Jews to mushrooms, no matter how sympathetically, might have been abandoned. However, in 1975, Derek Mahon published A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, a poem in which mushrooms growing in a recently-unearthed shed become, among other things, symbols for the survivors of concentration camps. Indicative, perhaps, of a change in attitude towards both Jews and fungi, these mushrooms are not the hook-nosed toadstools of old. The slimy poisoners have become dry innocents, “powdery prisoners of the old regime”. Instead of using toadstools as propaganda to stimulate anti-Semitic disgust, Mahon uses mushrooms to depict human suffering and create empathy. The poem reclaims the image of the mushroom for the Jews as a symbol and reminder of their oppression. This is admirable in intention but something still leaves me feeling uneasy. The Jews have not been freed from the fungal metaphor; they are still mushrooms, but mushrooms of a different type. These new mushrooms, too, are responsible for creating a stereotyped vision of the Jews. Observe the images conjured by the closing stretch of A Disused Shed…
Magi, moonmen, Powdery prisoners of the old regime, Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream At the flashbulb firing squad we wake them with Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms. Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms, They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
‘Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain…
I may be straying into controversial waters now, but it seems to me that the whitened bodies of those near-starved concentration camp inmates who, days from death, were rescued and photographed at the end of the war, are in danger of becoming a new Jewish stereotype. In a world where the usurious hand-rubbing Shylock of traditional anti-Semitism has become unacceptable, the Jews have been re-branded, Christianised perhaps, as the ultimate sufferers. They have “come so far in darkness” and are a “wordless” mass, withered, pale and weak with suffering, trudging listlessly from Egypt to Auschwitz. The mushrooms in this poem take the elongated skeletons of the death-camp snapshots and distend them into grotesque shapes that, in their own way, are as revolting and unreal as any slimy Jewish toadstool.
Of course, Mahon’s ghostly caricatures aim to defend rather than vilify, and, for this reason, they are infinitely preferable to the propaganda of Der Giftpilz. Still, they are far from ideal. Yes, the Jews were horribly, unforgivably, persecuted. Yes, pictures of their suffering need to be seen and not forgotten, but heavy-handed emotionally manipulative metaphors are not a healthy way to discuss the holocaust. Mahon’s poem clings too stubbornly to its symbols. There is something frustratingly reductive about the way it overworks its concept, explicitly naming Treblinka, jabbing at you with the algebraic insistence that Jew = mushroom.
This is why I love Dickinson’s foray into the world of Jewish fungus. In her poem, no characteristic can be assigned to the mushroom without it being instantly undermined by contradiction or inversion. The tone is set with the self-deleting metaphor of the first two lines:
The mushroom is the elf of plants,
At evening it is not;
I’ve never been able to decide whether the second line is meant to negate only the elf-ness of the mushroom (“it is not”) or its very existence (“it is not”). Perhaps both. In any case, the effect is that the image of the elfin mushroom flickers only for a moment before being blown out by contradiction. This paradoxical bivalence characterises several of the poem’s descriptions. The mushroom becomes a kind of logic-defying Schrödinger’s fungus, simultaneously existing and not existing. It is and is not the elf of plants. It is a “bubble”, both waiting and hastening at the same time.
All this leads us to an increased awareness of the conditionality of the poem’s final statement. We realise that, since nature does not have an Iscariot, or the ability to condemn a son, any trace of Judas that we find in the mushroom must find its origins in the eye of the beholder. We, as modern readers, need only consider the holocaust for proof of this. Nature may well be “red in tooth and claw”, but the production-line murders of Nazi Germany stand as a uniquely human achievement. To project our guilt onto a scapegoated toadstool, to search for justification or explanation or redemption in the depths of the forest is, I think, dangerous and, the amateur mycologist in me is screaming, a waste of good mushrooms.
A final note: If you’d like to read a poem that does not treat fungi as disposable symbols to be tossed aside like wrapping paper, try Margaret Atwood’s Mushrooms. Freed of their burdens of metaphor and signification by a barrage of exhilarating, quick-fire imagery, Atwood’s mushrooms become, in equal measure, beautifully and terrifyingly alien.
Richard Osmond
Richard Osmond is 20 years old and studies English at Cambridge University. He was a winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award in 2005, and since then he has been invited to perform his poetry at the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden, London, most notably at events New Blood and Broadcast. He has also been published in online ‘zine Don’t Panic, and read as part of a showcase at the “Our Words” literature event in London in 2006.