Having spent some time in recent years dipping into the considerable literature on Richard Wagner as composer, thinker and anti-Semite, I was not eager to read ?Wagner and the Jews,? a long essay by the composer and writer Nathan Shields in the online magazine Mosaic. What could he possibly add to the familiar positions, to the brief for the prosecution or the apologetics of the Wagnerians? Quite a lot, it turns out.

Shields brings rare critical discrimination to the question of how much Wagner?s art can be separated from his poisonous views about Jews and Judaism. His starting point is Wagner himself, who plainly believed that the redemptive power of his own ?music dramas? was a response, at least in part, to the social and spiritual corruption brought about by the Jews as a people and by Judaism as a set of ideas. To those who insist on the possibility of experiencing Wagner in strictly musical terms, Shields writes, ?The artwork, in Wagner?s vision, is neither an entertainment nor an object of aesthetic contemplation. It is a drama of collective salvation. As such, it is inescapably political, and political questions can and must be asked of it.?

In what sense, then, can the music itself be understood to embody anti-Semitism or (more precisely) anti-Judaism? Here, too, Shields is insightful. If Wagner sought to articulate our ?sense of homelessness? in the world and our ?longing to transcend it,? the Jews, to his mind, stood in the way, both historically and theologically. ?Faced with this world of suffering and banishment,? their crime was that ?they dared to affirm it, to greet its imperfections not with pity or horror but with joy.? They were barred from Wagner?s self-styled musical ?paradise.?