David Hamilton: All Comments

The real difficulty in watching the film version of An Education is working out why the film makers added so much anti-Semitism to the original memoir which is available in now in a book of that name. It has no anti-Semitism.
The talk with the headmistress re-affirms David's nature. “Jews killed our Lord” and are therefore evil. The audience waits for this “truth” to be undercut but it is affirmed at the climax. David is from those who killed our Lord—the symbol of goodness who came to save us. He is the betrayer, the Judas.

We don't know if any of the other characters are Methodist, Anglican, Protestant, atheist, etc. and wouldn't know unless that was chosen to be highlighted. His use of "shwartzeh" for black, rather than just saying "blacks" or "negroes" (considering the time), seems as if they are making it more of a slur.

His Jewishness was emphasised throughout the entire film—from his comment at the beginning and then many more times throughout in case one kept missing it. Jenny is redeemed at the end by going to Oxford and, of course, the headmistress is then shown to be right.

Jews are, as a voting bloc, ultra-liberal and sympathize with socialism. They are intelligent and successful but are they, as a group, dishonest and corrupting? This film gives that impression.

David is the only Jewish character in the film and it is part of his self-image. There are no external signs of Jewishness-- no kippah, no ethnic look or clothing so, if one didn't know—if he or someone else in the film wasn't continually pointing it out, he would be a character like the others rather than the embodiment of an ethnicity. He is a corrupter of innocence; a fraud, a thief, a liar, a scammer. He is a child abandoner. He has done this before, according to the abandoned wife with child beside her, who is now jaded. He has impregnated other innocent British girls. He lowers property values and ruins society. He steals from innocent vulnerable people and takes the treasures of the culture for himself like the stereotypical money-grubbing Jew.

There is a purposeful link made between the Jew and evil and corruption. It is purposeful because they produced it that way. It is not fair to say, well, the fellow in re