Indeed, the allegory may be more specific than this.
I find it incomprehensible that no one, for instance, among the biographers of Wagner I have read (and they approach a dozen) has even asked the question, if only to answer it yes or no, if any of the mine owners in the Dresden area were Jewish; or, indeed, if there were any mines owned specifically by a pair of Jewish brothers.
However unpalatable a confirmation might be, to me the four operas clamor, one way or another, for an answer.
When Wagner had completed Parsifal, he was set on having the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi conduct its premiere at Bayreuth. Levi was understandably dubious; Wagner’s anti-Semitism was, by this time, blatant and notorious. Wagner invited Levi to Wahnfried, Wagner’s home at Bayreuth, and prepared a banquet for him at which Jewish wines were served and traditional Jewish foods were prepared. Wagner’s argument was great-hearted — and, ultimately, convinced the not-insensitive Levi. Given the fact that Levi was, in Wagner’s estimation, the finest conductor in Europe, it was particularly important, Wagner argued, for Parsifal, the work of a famous and committed atheist, but nevertheless based on a Christian myth, to have a Jewish conductor. This would be a way of stressing that it was the mythic and universal significance of the story that Wagner intended to signify — and not any narrow, sectarian interpretation. It would be a gesture, declared Wagner, toward brotherhood among all peoples.
Nietzsche had already broken with Wagner. At least part of the reason was that he felt the great atheist artist, by choosing a Christian religious story, was pandering to the bourgeoisie, which Nietzsche — and, until then, Wagner — claimed to hold in contempt. Another reason for the break was that Wagner had taken an untoward — and unwanted — interest in the younger man’s masturbation and campaigned to have it ended medically! Which was paramount, however, at this date it is hard to say.
Levi consented to Wagner’s request. He conducted Wagner’s last opera; on Wagner’s death, he was one of Wagner’s pallbearers — and, till his own death, one of Wagner’s staunchest defenders.
Levi’s defense of Wagner is precisely what one would expect of a nineteenth-century intellectual at home with the philosophy and cultural presuppositions of his time: Wagner’s anti-Semitism does not represent the authentic Wagner. Anti-Semitism was not central to Wagner’s being. Rather, for Levi, Wagner was still the great republican revolutionary who wished to promote universal brotherhood. Like the young Hegel, like the young Nietzsche, Levi wished to cut off all that was idiosyncratic, anomalous, and marginal about Wagner, as he saw it — unaware that such margins and such centers are wholly a product of personal perspective — which is the same as personal blindness. Indeed, it is not till Theodor Adorno’s 1964 (!) study, The Jargon of Authenticity, that we commence a critique firmly identifying the problem to be the concept of the authentic/inauthentic as valid for the subject in the first place. It is the notion that such personal centers (one) exist and (two) are constitutive of the subject that creates the problem. This and similar critiques are what have slowly opened us up to the postmodern notion that the subject is constituted across a split (rather than around a center), a notion that begins, of course, with Freud’s idea of the conscious/unconscious dichotomy in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), but which has been further radicalized by thinkers such as Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida in the 1950s and ’60s.
My own feeling is that Wagner’s treatment of Levi does not mitigate Wagner’s anti-Semitism — from Cosima’s diaries and Wagner’s own late articles in his own paper, the Bayreuther Blätter, we know that by his last years, even after Parsifal, such feelings in him grew obsessive. But one could, indeed, cite Wagner’s similarly warm and respectful treatment of any number of his other Jewish friends. A particular case in point is Heinrich Porges, whom Wagner asked to the rehearsals of the Ring at the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876 to take down those incredibly revealing notes on the production that have facilitated performances ever since.
Anyone interested in almost any aspect of mid-nineteenth century romantic art should read the “Introduction” by this earliest, erudite, and most intimate Jewish commentator on Wagner. (Wagner Rehearsing the Ring: An Eye-Witness Account of the Stage Rehearsals of the First Bayreuth Festival [Die Bühnenproben zu den Bayreuther Festspielen des Jahres 1876] began to appear in sections in the Bayreuther Blätter in 1881.) It is a wonderful compendium of nineteenth-century critical tropes, some already sedimented for a century or more and some radically new and vibrant with mid-romantic fervor, all of them welded into a brief, impassioned defense of the Wagnerian enterprise. Indeed, Porges’s whole study is equally illuminating. And though the Nazis later suppressed this “Jewish commentary” on the Master, there is no mention in it of anything overtly anti-Semitic.
What this and the case of Levi point up more than anything else is, first, how insistently modern the form of Wagner’s anti-Semitism was: rationalized, depersonalized, intellectualized, with intermittent moments of liberalism, and constantly excused by what has now become a hopeless cliché: “But some of my best friends…!” Second, it shows ultimately how little threatened Jews such as Levi and Porges felt in the face of such ideas in those pre-Dreyfus days. We must remember, as Hannah Arendt points out in her study The Origins of Totalitarianism, anti-Semitism as a virulent political plank in various hard-edged political platforms did not begin till 1886—that, indeed, anti-Semitism was so violently to change its practical implementation and material extent, if not its rhetoric, in these later years of the nineteenth century that Arendt can assign its very “invention” (along with that of South African and Rhodesian racism) to that year, at the end of an explosion of printing and political pamphleteering unheard-of before in history. Presumably after that date, Porges and Levi might have felt somewhat differently.