The idea that Sullivan was Jewish was fairly common during his lifetime but is based on no evidence other than his appearance &, through examples such as Mendelssohn & Offenbach, the association of the idea of the romantic, commercially successful composer with Jewishness, as well as far-fetched claims about the origin of his name. These assertions, from the unfriendly & from sources such as the C19th Jewish Yearbook and those who, in the words of a poem written by one Reverend AA Green cannot resist ‘writing to the papers that the great men, all, are Jews’.
Such obsessions with assigning origins always reflect the preoccupations & anxieties, fears & enmities of the age. In mid-November 1919, just months after the Treaty of Versailles, at the conclusion of an article about the theory of relativity which he wrote exclusively for The Times, Albert Einstein took the paper gently to task for describing him as a ‘Swiss Jew.’
“By an application of the theory of relativity to the taste of readers, today in Germany I am called a German man of science, & in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be regarded as a bête noire, the descriptions will be reversed, & I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans & a German man of science for the English”Arthur Jacobs simply dismisses, parenthetically & with an exclamation mark,Francillon's claim , which was repeated in a 1971 biography written by Percy M Young, that Sir Arthur Sullivan’s swarthiness was explained by his being partly negro.
In this context it intrigues me that the face of the Olympics, national treasure, nation’s darling & now gold medal winner Jessica Ennis is never described by the media as black, in the way that, for example, is Lewis Hamilton & many others of mixed race parentage. I like to think that this is a hopeful sign, though of course since there is nothing at all novel in her status – Ennis is a long way from being the first black Olympic champion - the omission may simply reflect the fact that, for a journalist, it is simply not a story.
Seb Coe described her as a Sheffield girl, a member of the same athletic club which he joined as a youngster.
Simon Barnes called her ‘Britain’s magnificent Mona Lisa’ in The Times. From my own point of view that inscrutability, combined with a slight hawkish cast to her profile, provokes the fancy that, with a father who comes from the melting pot of Jamaica, she probably has some Lebanese or Syrian blood in her!
The irony & confusion in all this is made even more delicious by the observation by Ashling O’Connor, writing also in The Times, that Somalian-born but British hope Mo Farah might 'break a 28-year African monopoly in the 10,000 metres'.
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