Initially he was of course banned, then welcomed by anti-Stalinist Nikita Khrushchev, but in the anti-Khrushchev reaction he was suppressed.

His books about the Russian prison camps, the gulags, were required reading for anyone who claimed to be interested either in culture or politics.

He also blamed the Jews for everything that went wrong in Russia before, during, and after communism. It was no accident that he became a passionate member of the Russian Orthodox Church.

His distaste for Jews illustrated once again, as if we needed reminding, that often great art goes hand in hand with great hatreds.

We so desperately want our "personalities" to be good human beings that we delude ourselves into denying how nasty they often are.

Roald Dahl is an example and Jose Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner, famous writers but seriously flawed human beings.

And, of course, the archetypal Richard Wagner whose disgraceful book Jews in Music, describing Jews as infecting and degrading pure culture, seems to have been the inspiration of Hitler and Solzhenitsyn's two-part book about Russia and its Jews, Two Hundred Years Together, published in 2001 and 2002.

Solzhenitsyn blames the Jews almost exclusively for the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. True, he does not use the terminology of a "Jewish conspiracy" but he accuses the Jews of wartime cowardice and evasion of active duty.

Incidentally, my grandfather served for many years in the Russian army and ended up fighting the Japanese in 1904.

Jews were heavily represented in the anti-Czarist movements. Marx was a nominal, if negative, Jew and lots of Jews joined the Communist party and rose up its ranks. Trotsky is the obvious example.

There were many Jews among the Nihilists. The Russian intelligentsia in general was heavily invested in all these revolutionary movements.

Of course, the really evil men were Lenin and Stalin, and even Solzhenitsyn did not try to pretend they were Jewish.

Besides which, Solzhenitsyn says nothing about the horrific conditions and constant oppression heaped upon the Jews for hundreds of years by the Czars and the Church, which were good enough reasons for so many Jews to want to see a change.

His antisemitism is reiterated in interviews and articles after his return to Russia, where he notably failed to support modern dissidents and democrats. His primitive desire was to see Russia return to a mythical earlier purer state of Christian orthodoxy and devoid of malign Jewish influence. Coming at a time of increasing antisemitism in Russia and the rise of Russian neo-Nazis and extreme nationalists, this was grist to their mill.

It helped revive all those ancient antagonisms, the medieval libels of Jews poisoning wells, killing little children and drinking their blood, fifth columnists, in league with the devil, and all the other rubbish that distilled itself into that notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Incidentally, it is a best seller today in most Muslim countries. Yes, indeed, Solzhenitsyn was revealing his - and the Russian - sickness for all to see. He looked and tried to present himself as a prophetic figure but he was a false one.

As always, he has his defenders. So too do TS Eliot and Ezra Pound. Both have written enough revolting lines insulting to Jews to warrant the label antisemite.

Life has been better for us Jews in the West in general (rather than just for a few favoured ones) these past 50 years than at any time since our exile began, with perhaps the exception of the Golden Age of Spain.

But one just has to look at the amount of pernicious sites on the Internet to realise that antisemitism is as virulent a disease as ever and lurking beneath the surface, even in the USA, whose liberal laws on free speech allow almost anything.

I suppose you know, for example, that Judaism encourages the rape of children under the age of five. (And I'm not going to give you the URL to check it out because the more who do the higher it goes up the Google rating!).

We have focused recently perhaps too much on Muslim antisemitism and have underplayed a lot of other hatred.

And sadly almost all fundamentalist religions, be they Muslim or Orthodox Christian, still think in medieval terms.

Their gospels still encourage the view of Jews as the anti-Christ and the enemy, something continually promulgated among the millions of their poorly educated faithful.

Their Pope John has not yet arrived. The exceptions prove the rule. Even those who profess to love us usually have an agenda which involves either our conversion or destruction. Take your pick.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, as we know. We need to remember, too, that even great artists can be grubby, nasty little men.

By the way you can catch up on all my past articles on my blog www.jeremyrosen.com/blog

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