*
The publication went on to examine this inversion in some depth, analysing incidence, causes and morality, before considering Pastoral Guidance. This again divided the topic between adolescence and adulthood, and between the ‘apparent’ and ‘real’ homosexual. ‘The priest must re-educate the homosexual youth on the nature of love,’ it advised. ‘All true love is a going-out of oneself, a self-giving; but, all unconsciously, homosexual love is bent back upon the self in a closed circle, a sterile love of self, disguised in apparent love for another.’ With regard to adults,
It should be stressed that a homosexual is just as pleasing to God as a heterosexual, as long as he makes a sincere effort to control his deviate bent with the help of grace … God must become the driving motive in the life of the homosexual who, otherwise, will grow lonely for the kind of fellowship found in homosexual haunts – in which he had been formerly enslaved, to which he is still attracted, and in place of which a stronger love must be found.
The sixteen-volume Encyclopaedia Judaica, published in Jerusalem in 1972, pursues a similar line. According to the Torah, homosexuality is a ‘sexual perversion’ punishable by capital punishment; Talmudic law commutes the punishment to flagellation, and extends it to lesbianism. Historically these ‘abhorrent practices’ are linked to the Egyptians and Canaanites. The prohibition of homosexuality is omitted from Joseph Caro’s Shulhan Arukh (the sixteenth-century code of Jewish law); the Encyclopaedia Judaica explains that ‘This omission reflects the virtual absence of homosexuality among Jews rather than any difference of views on the criminality of these acts,’ while noting that Rabbi Caro felt obliged to add, ‘Nevertheless, in our times, when lewdness is rampant, one should abstain from being alone with another male.’*
Homosexuality was judged illegal for three reasons. It might lead to the male abandoning his wife; it might debase the dignity of man; it will almost certainly lead to ‘spilling the seed in vain’. The practice should be confined to ‘the abominations of the sinful city of Sodom’. The Judaica concludes, ‘Whereas the more liberal attitude found in some Christian circles is possibly due to the exaggerated importance Christians have traditionally accorded to the term “love”, Jewish law holds that no hedonistic ethic, even if called “love”, can justify the morality of homosexuality any more than it can legitimise adultery, incest or polygamy, however genuinely such acts may be performed out of love and by mutual consent.’
Why are these entries worthy of our consideration today? Why should they not be dismissed as the predictable reactionary objections of organised groups threatened by the subject in hand? Because they question the very concept of the encyclopaedia. These multi-volume publications are necessarily conceived as a physical compression of definitive knowledge. Far from the historical equivalent of the rant on social media, they are instead the tablets from the mountain. The influence they impart is immense, and these particular entries (which I have predominantly culled from the open shelves of the London Library) have the power to transform lives. As the New Catholic Encyclopedia makes clear, ‘it is not unknown for adolescents who were told that they were homosexual to commit suicide.’ (The original publication date of 1967 is no sad apologia; when the set was updated for the fourth time in 1996, the text remained untouched.)
Such entries should serve as a check on the contents of all encyclopaedias, an invitation to question authorship and intentions. The notion of opinion masquerading as fact is something we’ve become increasingly aware of in the digital age, not least with the emergence of open editorial access. But it is something we should question with regard to even the most revered print editions, and something we may wonder about historically. Encyclopaedias are a mirror of contemporary knowledge, a spotlight on current learning, and we may legitimately question what sort of opinions we have formed from our consultations with apparently irrefutable text at an impressionable age. How has the monolithic reference slab – be it in our homes or in the school or local library – shaped us as individuals? Marginally, I would argue, but not entirely academically.
With regard to Britannica, the early omissions and persistent damnation were consistent with the encyclopaedia’s prudishness regarding all matters deemed potentially upsetting to adults (and necessarily intriguing to children). Biographies of the famous obscured any incidence of sexual matters that differed from either morally good or ‘normal’ behaviour. Oscar Wilde, for example, was imprisoned in Reading Gaol for offences ‘under the Criminal Law Amendment Act’, a statute most widely known for protecting underage girls. In earlier years at Oxford, Wilde ‘adopted what to undergraduates appeared the effeminate pose of casting scorn on manly sports, wearing his hair long, decorating his room with peacock’s feathers, lilies, sunflowers’.
In addition to his survey of factual errors, Harvey Einbinder uncovered numerous incidences of clumsy euphemism. Paul Verlaine’s personal life was disturbed when ‘the strange young poet Jean Arthur Rimbaud came somewhat troublingly into his life’; a later reference described their relationship as ‘extravagant’. Of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt we learn how, ‘in his later years the sway of an old and faithful servant held him in more than matrimonial bondage’. And Tchaikovsky’s marriage to Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova was described as ‘an impossible one through no fault of hers but simply through his own abnormality of temperament’.
‘The Victorian desire to make artists and poets respectable members of society is sometimes carried to amusing extremes,’ Einbinder writes, quoting the entry on Robert Browning: ‘He frequented literary and artistic circles, and was passionately fond of the theatre; but he was entirely free of a coarse Bohemianism, and never went to bed, we are told, without kissing his mother.’ The entry on Dickens from the 1930s is similarly shy of a full biography when it came to the turbulent details of his relationship with Ellen Ternan. ‘The little that needs saying has already been said,’ wrote G.K. Chesterton, an oddly terse comment in an otherwise comprehensive account (and more to the point, it hasn’t been said in this great encyclopaedia of record). Einbinder concludes that ‘Chesterton grew up under the influence of Victorian ideals which demanded moral perfection from its heroes,’ an influence that also shielded the personal life of William Thackeray.
Britannica’s influence was far greater than a regular biography, and its impact reverberated globally for decades. ‘Prudery is like a rare disease that strikes infrequently but leaves serious consequences in its wake,’ Einbinder concludes. Effectively, the encyclopaedia’s frailty when confronted with a true life lived, ‘seals off important areas of human experience from mature examination and perpetuates taboos which are no longer accepted by educated readers.’
In 1974, the fifteenth edition did modify these matters. Tchaikovsky is now definitely homosexual, as is his younger brother Modest. His marriage was hastily conceived to conceal this, and a letter to his other brother Anatoly from 1878 is quoted: ‘Only now … have I finally begun to understand that there is nothing more fruitless than not wanting to be that which I am by nature.’
The trials of Oscar Wilde and his imprisonment are also now explained, although there is still a disapproving reference to his ‘reckless pursuit of pleasure’. Elsewhere, a certain studied suggestiveness presides. Alexander von Humboldt is a ‘gregarious’ figure appearing ‘regularly in the salons of Parisian society’. He was ‘always willing and anxious to assist young scientists at the beginning of their careers’.