The publicity hook for Traitors and Spies is a conspiracy theory that supposes a cell of Melbourne Jewish businessmen allegedly led by HM. Notwithstanding that the book details the remarkable career of David John Morris, an Australian army officer and non-Jewish member of the supposed cell, and his subsequent life in Moscow, it is the Jewish character of the cell that has featured in media publicity. From these events, a few lessons might be gleaned about the pitfalls of careless historical scholarship compounded by media spin.

When he arrived in Melbourne in 1927, HM was a scholarly young man who had been educated in a Jewish high school in the recently reconstituted Poland. He was a product of the Yiddish language cultural movement and Labour Zionism, and his interests were literary and scientific. He rapidly gained Australian university qualifications and tutoring appointments, along with wool-classing studies and employment in research with CSIRO. From the 1930s to the 1960s, he was involved in both English and Yiddish literary projects, including little magazines (notably Meanjin and Manuscripts). He reviewed in newspapers including the Bulletin, The Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald, as well as co-founding the Australian Jewish Historical Society and publishing original research, with his CSIRO colleagues, on wool.

Hirsh Munz, courtesy of Martin Munz

HM’s knowledge of other European languages informed his literary work. He was a significant contributor to the Australian expression of the two major cultural movements in twentieth-century Jewish life. One was the modern Yiddish language movement, the other the developing modern secular Hebrew language that was bound into Zionism. Zionism, notwithstanding its many socialist factions, rejected the universalist theory and practice of communism. Instead it prioritised a political theory and practice of Jewish emancipation. HM’s intellectual and cultural formation precluded him from communism. The thought of him being an illegal deep-cover GRU (Soviet military) operative is illogical. Unfortunately, these distinctions about Jewish people were lost on the Australian security organisations of the early and mid-twentieth century, reflecting the anti-Semitic prejudices and stereotyping commonly held at that time. For them Jew=Zionism=Communism.

John Fahey – misreading and mis-citing the documentary record of Australian security organisations in the National Archives of Australia, yet taking them at face value and seemingly not noticing pervasive anti-Semitic stereotyping – comes to the speculative conclusion that what Melbourne needed was a second spy ring made up of mainly Jewish businessmen, and that HM was the man who had led it. Of the many facts contradicting this conspiracy theory, a definitive one is that HM was not resident in Melbourne for the key period that this scenario requires. He and his Melbourne ring could not have been the source of the Ultra (highly sensitive intelligence derived from breaking high-level German codes generated by Enigma machines) decrypts leaking to the Soviets. By the author’s own account, the Melbourne ring only used human couriers (indicative of HM’s superior ‘tradecraft’). But human couriers could not have moved the intelligence that HM (living and working in Brisbane) was supposedly stealing from his top-secret naval intelligence unit in Brisbane out of Melbourne in a timely fashion for the Soviets to leak it to the Japanese.

Historians who have reviewed Fahey’s book have expressed reservations about the precipitate historical imagination that leads to conclusions that can’t be substantiated. The use of terms like ‘intelligence perspective’ and ‘credible raw intelligence’ serves to justify improbable assertions in which the absence of information is supposedly evidence of an offence – in this case tantamount to treason, a capital offence at the time. Records from a notably flawed, byzantine arrangement of security organisations often engaged in internecine bureaucratic warfare, which the author has criticised freely in two recent books, are taken as prima-facie evidence of the facts – this in the face of the well-accepted practice in the historical profession that records, and the information therein, require contextualisation and nuanced treatment.

One can only do so much when faced with a historical misrepresentation of a loved and respected parent, colleague, or friend that bears little resemblance to the character and conduct of that person. Defamation only protects the reputations of the living. There is no legal recourse for the heirs or estate of the deceased to protect his or her reputation, name, or image from defamation or unlicensed commercial exploitation. Australian law should recognise such a right. Until that time, historians and their publishers need to meet a higher standard than was demonstrated in Traitors and Spies.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.