Remembered today as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Jabberwocky, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a/k/a Lewis Carroll) also produced important books and essays on mathematics and formal logic. Adam Roberts, as an admirer of the former works, decided to read the 1897 Symbolic Logic, Part I—and came across the following example of deduction:
No Jews are honest;
Some Gentiles are rich.
Some rich people are dishonest.
Adams responds:
No Jews are . . . hang on a minute. What?
But, look: one particular instance of anti-Semitic generalization surely doesn’t mean that Carroll himself hated Jews. Surely this is just one example of the ways that the background radiation of 19th-century British anti-Semitism fed through into particular texts. It’s not as if Carroll goes on and on about Jews in his dry little book about inductive logic. Is it?
To Roberts’s dismay, the Jews continue to return in such sample statements as “No Gentiles say ‘shpoonj,’” “No Jew is ignorant of Hebrew,” and “Some Jews are rich,” although he reports nothing else as nakedly bigoted as “no Jews are honest.”
Read more on Adam’s Notebook: https://medium.com/adams-notebook/carrolls-symbolic-logic-1896-b-jews-9f1224047e4f