The de facto ban is hypocrisy, because on some subjects Polanski will be heard. Chinatown is about child abuse, which is the very thing Polanski did: in 1977 he pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl in America and has lived as a fugitive in Europe since, dogged by accusations of predation. Chinatown was 50 this year, and there are public screenings in its honour. But An Officer and a Spy cannot be shown when it is urgently needed. This makes no sense. If you are prepared to allow Polanski’s work to exist — and filmmaking is a collaborative effort — why not show the truth of the Dreyfus case? If you are for censorship, censor all his work. Or none of it.

Its story is this: in 1894, the French army knew there was a German spy in their midst. They scapegoated Alfred Dreyfus (Louis Garrel), the only Jew on the general staff; when they realised the case was weak, they falsified evidence against him. “The idea of the Jew, took hold of them, seized them, dominated them,” wrote the historian Joseph Reinach. “My only crime,” Dreyfus said, “was being born a Jew.” He was convicted, and, at the official degradation ceremony, his sword was broken and the crowd shouted, “Death to Judas, death to the Jews!” He was imprisoned in French Guiana on Devil’s Island — how apt — and as Polanski pulls the camera back from the island to the ocean, Dreyfus’s isolation — his Jewishness — is explicit.

France was the first European country to give equal rights to Jews, and this was the revenge. It was also an epigraph to the Holocaust, in which many French people colluded. Eventually, due to the diligence of Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin), a fellow officer and repentant antisemite, and the activism of the novelist Émile Zola, Dreyfus was pardoned, then exonerated. This is an old European story, ever revived: a Christian nation divines itself through the prism of the Jew.

Polanski does not place Dreyfus at the centre of his film: he is the man things are done to, in cinema and life. But at least he does justice to the antisemitism that destroyed him. “How does he look?” Picquart is asked of Dreyfus’s degradation. “Like a Jewish tailor weeping over his lost gold.” “What was the mood like afterwards?” “As if a healthy body had been purged of something pestilential so that life could resume.”

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The Variety critic described The Dreyfus Affair as “fabled” and “legendary”. Subconsciously, at least, he could not accept that Dreyfus was real. The IndieWire critic could not bring himself to review the film: rather he reviewed Polanski and called it “a film-length tantrum” from “cinema’s most-storied rapist… as nakedly autobiographical as anything Polanski has ever made”.

Polanski demurred — to an extent: “In the story, I sometimes find moments I have experienced myself. I can see the same determination to deny the facts and condemn me for things I have not done. I must admit that I am familiar with many of the workings of the apparatus of persecution shown in the film, and that has clearly inspired me.” He was talking about the rape case. He was also talking about the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and their unborn child, who were murdered by the Manson Gang in 1969: Polanski was initially blamed, because he made Rosemary’s Baby.

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If he was also talking about Kraków, where he lived and saw his father taken in the liquidation of the ghetto when he was six, he didn’t say so, and I wonder if the spurious identification with Dreyfus obscures the deeper one. Martin Amis said Polanski’s films, “with their emphasis on terror, isolation and madness, seem no more than a demonic commentary on his life”.

But why is it Polanski’s tale of Jew hate that particularly offends, not his strange, self-hating erotica (Bitter Moon) or sketches of demons (The Ninth Gate) which are more expressive of this darkness? Why can we tolerate his fictions, but not his realities? The Pianist, Polanski’s other film about antisemitism, is still permitted. But it is a fable with cartoon Nazis. It is soothing to lay all murderous antisemitism at their feet, which is a very partial truth: witness the Poles’ long battle to be considered only rescuers, when they were nothing of the kind. France, too, was a mire of collaboration and it does it credit that it both lauded An Officer and a Spy and picketed it. Britain should do the same.

There is a tendency to tell only two pieces of Jewish history: the Crucifixion and the Holocaust. The crime and the punishment, if you will. Read the Gospel of Matthew, watch Schindler’s List and you’re done. All the average person knows of Jews is that we apparently killed Christ and were burned by Nazis. There is more. If you want to understand antisemitism, learn the history of the Jews, no matter who tells it. There is an awful lot of junk culture about this subject. This is something better, from a master filmmaker and common Jewish villain.

Since Leaving Neverland, aired earlier this month, fans of Michael Jackson have been fiercely defending their hero from the latest round of paedophilia accusations. Yet that documentary merely bolstered what everybody but the most die-hard Jackson fans had known for years. Michael Jackson’s relationship with children was stomach-turning at best, and the rumours were compelling.

Given the court cases and the multi-million dollar pay-offs, it was one of the most open secrets – and scandals – of modern stardom. But, along with his ability to change colour in front of the eyes of the world, the public always made allowances for a simple reason. Michael Jackson gave us “Thriller”, “Bad” and “Billie Jean”.

He’s a clear-cut beneficiary of ‘the genius exemption’. This moral ‘get out of jail free card’ has existed throughout artistic history, it is only now that it appears that the exemption – awkward and compromising as it always was – might itself have become unacceptable.

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Accusations like those made against Michael Jackson would have ended the career of anybody less talented. When similar charges were levelled at Gary Glitter, the world dropped him and his work even before the law had taken its course. It turned out to be remarkably easy to live without “Doing alright with the boys” and “I’m the leader of the gang (I am)”. Whereas it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine any radio station, wedding or birthday disco where Michael Jackson’s back-catalogue would be put onto the same ‘do not play’ list as Gary Glitter’s.

The social forces working behind the genius get-out are fascinating, not least because they are so rarely aired. There has, though, at least since the idea of ‘the artist’ came about, been some tacit recognition that artists are allowed to behave slightly differently from everybody else, and that truly great artists can be forgiven anything short of (though occasionally including) murder.

One obvious contemporary recipient of the genius exemption is Roman Polanski, who has been allowed to continue his career on the run from American justice. There is some sympathy for his past history (Holocaust survivor, murdered wife), but mainly he continues because he is reckoned in the film industry to be a director of genius. In almost no other area of life would somebody be able to survive accusations of child-rape. An accountant would not. Nor a solicitor, politician or small-business owner. But if the person is thought to have crossed a certain threshold of artistic greatness, almost anything is allowed.

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Cultural history is littered with people who have got off the most serious charges imaginable solely because of their greatness. Richard Wagner survives the anti-Semitism because it is impossible to erase him from musical history and because if you have written Tristan and The Ring people will err towards leniency. Ezra Pound wavers, his poetic reputation going down again in recent years, but if he hadn’t often had the air of genius about him, he would not have survived his own fascist political affiliations. Likewise Celine (Louis-Ferdinand, not Dion) whose fascism can be overlooked, if not forgiven, because of Journey to the end of the Night.

If there is a reason why the exemption is so little discussed, it is because it suggests that even the most non-negotiable taboos are more contingent than we would like to admit.  But the whole thing is contingent on unquantifiable factors. For example, there is ongoing indecision about what behaviour ranks where in the lists of iniquity and who exactly counts as a genius. People drift in and out of immunity based on very unclear criteria.

For decades, Woody Allen was immune to almost any and all accusations against him because of Annie Hall. He was even forgiven for every film since. But at present his own genius opt-out appears to be up for reconsideration because of fresh claims about long-ago aspects of his private life. It is a familiar problem. At various times in recent decades, Oscar Wilde’s reputation has again teetered on a ledge for similar reasons. Today, when anybody mentions the rent boys and their age, defenders of Wilde understandably stress their counter-arguments. In truth, it has simply become recognised that we cannot do without the greatest comedies in the English language. So small evasions are permitted.

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But it is a messy moral business. Until John Bridcut settled the matter a decade ago, Benjamin Britten seemed always to be at risk of a Michael Jackson-like fall. In fact, his own relationships with children turn out never to have crossed over any physical line. But there was definitely a sense of near-terror around the subject for many years. Britten could not be written out of musical history. Like Wagner, we could not do without his music. And like Wagner the accusation against him was not completely divorced from the inspiration behind some of his music, but was actually embedded within great chunks of it.

If Britten had been proved to have abused a child both The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice would have become unperformable. The innocent verdict means we do not have to live with the cognitive dissonance which would come from not doing without his work and not condoning the worst taboos.

Eric Gill turned out to be more easily disposable when his vices (paedophilia, incest, bestiality) came to light. But although his work is still in the Tate and other places, there was definitely a sense that we could ditch Gill if we had to. But these things work in mysterious ways. In popular culture, Michael Jackson inhabits the position of a great artist rather than a disposable one. And that is why the announcement by BBC Radio 2, among others, that they will no longer be playing his music is such a watershed moment.

I suspect that the ban will not last. It will stay for a time before certain early tracks creep back. When a Michael Jackson track comes on at a party, it may for a while be the subject of dark jokes and a bit of comment. But that will recede and people will go on dancing, parking the behaviour of the artist at the back of their mind.

Just one more example of the dissonance which people of talent have always provoked, and the moral exemptions we uncomfortably permit them in gratitude.