The Origins of Modern Antisemitism: A Case Study of the Jews in England 1881-1920 (original) (raw)
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T here was a time at the end of the twentieth century when antisemitism was relegated to the margins of public discourse. In the general atmosphere of increasing tolerance and fight against all kinds of prejudices and increased protection of minorities, Jews lived in security and even started to take that state of affairs for granted. Following the Holocaust, no one who wanted to be taken seriously in the Western world would accept the epithet antisemite. Prejudice and hatred against Jews, based either on ancient Christian anti-Jewish teachings or nineteenth-century racist theories about the inferiority of Jewish blood, disappeared together with their most vociferous propagators in the Third Reich. Anyone still clinging to the beliefs that the Jews controlled the world via a stranglehold on the media, the financial markets, and politiciansbe it on Capitol Hill, in Whitehall, or in the Kremlin-had to either hide those beliefs or express them only behind closed doors to avoid running the risk of social ostracism. The populist lies blaming the Jews for all the ills of the world lost much of their mass appeal when Allied soldiers threw open the gates of German concentration camps and revealed the unspeakable atrocities that were the outcome of Nazi antisemitic propaganda. 1
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The question of Jewish emancipation (the 'Jewish question'), and the question of whether, how or to what extent Jewish emancipation ought to be revoked (the primary concern of antisemitism in the period following emancipation) drove European (or 'western') social and political ...
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One of the peculiar features of writing about Anglo-Jewish history and culture in Great(er) Britain is that every so often its practitioners find themselves put in a somewhat awkward apologetic mode, forced to justify the very notion that Jewish history is entitled to be seen as an autonomous field of research or that it offers any valuable insights to supplement our understanding of the societies Jews were and are part. Prof. Bryan Cheyette, a leading voice in the study of modern English literature and Judaic Studies, recalled how, during a job interview back in the 1980s, he was approached by the head of search committee who opened the Q&A session saying: 'I might well be accused of being anti-Semitic, but don't you think that writing about Jews is rather narrow?' Apparently, during the Thatcher era the fact one could find abundant references to Jews and Jewishness in canonical English literature-renowned examples would include Shakespeare's Shylock, Disraeli's Young England trilogy, novels like Ivanhoe, Daniel Derronda, Oliver Twist as well as numerous disdainful xenophobic remarks made by Chesterton, T. S. Eliot and others-could serve as no excuse for looking at the centre from the vantage point of the ever-present Other, the fringe, the minority. Historians, a no less conservative breed, had the tendency to ask similar questions. Even Max Beloff, although born into an Orthodox Jewish family, found it difficult to explain to himself or to his readers what makes 'the Jewish experience' something that deserves more than an antiquarian interest. Given the lack of territory or language unifying the Jews in their various diasporas, Beloff wrote in his memoir, the subject matter itself is so unclear that 'at times it might almost seem that the study of Jewish history depends very largely on assessment of the history of anti-Semitism.' David Cannadine, enjoying playing the role of a party pooper, raised similar concerns in a polemical 1989 London Review of Books essay. The story of Jews in England is written in the form of one of the following incompatible stories, Cannadine contended: either as a somewhat 'Whiggish' tale of successful integration of a minority, lucky enough to find itself absorbed into a wonderfully