Enoch Powell’s The History of Herodotus and Three Letters from Felix Jacoby: A Rude Preface, Nazi Germany, and Antisemitism

Abstract

This paper discusses three unpublished letters from Felix Jacoby (1876–1959) to J. Enoch Powell (1912–98). They met in Germany in December 1938 and corresponded in 1939. Jacoby took offence at the way Powell treated him in his book The History of Herodotus. The conversation veered quickly from scholarship to antisemitism. In the third letter Jacoby questioned Powell on his ‘strong antisemitic bias’ and declared himself ‘no friend of the Jews on the whole’, which raises questions about his own self-identification as a non-Jewish baptised German and his nationalistic views. It also allows to reconsider the long-standing issue of his alleged support of Nazism in a lecture in spring 1933 reported by Georg Picht in a controversial article published in 1977. Finally, Jacoby’s personal tragedies and political opinions come out in his discussion of Pericles’ citizenship law in the commentary on the fragments of Philochorus published in English in 1954.