Anthony Julius, the distinguished solicitor and literary critic, has produced in his new book Trials of the Diaspora a definitive account of the story of anti-Semitism in England. Five years in the making, the author not only methodically charts its history, but calibrates and psychoanalyses this most enduring of evils. He investigates, too, and where it masquerades in a supposedly innocuous form he exposes and then eviscerates it.
But the real merit in this study is not simply that it provides an exhaustive compendium of defamations made against the Jews in England over the years, often designed to justify their persecution. When woven together, as they are here, one is astounded at the sheer resilience of anti-Semitic themes and their ability to mutate with such deadly consequences over the course of centuries.
The starting point is that the Jew is the aggressor. Whether in the guise of a banker, a newspaper proprietor, a revolutionary or a Zionist, his objective is to manipulate national economies, control the press, promote religious conflict and subjugate his fellow non-Jew.
Julius observes that England was the last country in Western Europe to admit Jews. It was also the first to expel them.
They arrived in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. The intensity of the persecution that Jews suffered in Medieval England will, I think, surprise the reader. Allegations of clipping metal from the sovereign’s coins led to the execution of hundreds of Jews. In the 12th and 13th centuries, Jews in Norwich, Gloucester, Bristol, Winchester and Bedford were accused of kidnapping, torturing, circumcising and crucifying Christian children for the imagined purpose of using their blood for religious rituals. Half of the adult male Jewish population are said to have been executed as a consequence.
Jews were subjected to impossible financial levies with those unable to pay facing a daily tooth extraction until they did. The motivating force behind this oppression was, of course, religious intolerance and Julius notes that the Jews in Dunstable escaped a massacre only after submitting to baptism.
In 1290, the entire community, numbering some 2,000, were expelled and were only readmitted by Oliver Cromwell during the Commonwealth 400 years later. Despite the fact that Jews had become just a memory, “legend laden anti-Semitism took material form in literature”.
The author’s examination of anti-Semitic themes from Geoffrey Chaucer to present-day literature is intriguing. The Prioress’ Tale was one of the first to develop the theme of a Jewish propensity to murder. It contrasts the innocence of a Christian child singing a hymn in honour of the Virgin Mary with the wickedness of the agents of Satan, the “cursed folk of Herod” who capture, torture and kill the child.
The second canonical work of literary anti-Semitism is, of course, The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare. Antonio’s submission to the knife-wielding Jew’s malevolent intent is symbolic of Christian resignation. Shylock, Julius writes, is a legalist in his indifference to equity, charity and conscience. The offer of monetary recompense is declined. Even though he thrives on Christian money, his craving for Christian blood is irrepressible. The defeat of the Jew is symbolised in his final departure from the stage and his submission to Christianity.
Fagin, in Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, is a slayer of children, the destroyer of fresh life and thwarter of its promise. Christopher Marlowe, with The Jew of Malta, Lord Alfred Douglas (“the leprous spawn of scattered Israel”), Anthony Trollope (“can a Jew be a gentleman?”) William Makepeace Thackeray and Graham Greene are all similarly exposed for their caricature of Jewish malevolence and aggression. In Greene’s Brighton Rock an actual racecourse razor attack on a Jewish book keeper is corrupted into a razor attack by a Jewish gang on Pinkie, a Roman Catholic.
The Rabbi’s Speech (1868) by Sir John Retcliffe complements the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Here the leaders of Jewry meet with the Devil in a cemetery in Prague and review their progress toward world domination. Their inexhaustible financial resources have enabled them to control national governments and the press and they demoralise the gentiles by undermining the church and army. Julius finds a parallel in a recent bestseller, The Israel Lobby, by two American academics who maintain that a malign and powerful entity has been manipulating US foreign policy in the
post-war period in the interests of Israel.
Jews did not, of course, experience state-sponsored persecution since readmission. Julius correctly observes that threats from Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and their modern day successors, although invoking fear, never posed an existential or material threat to the well being of Anglo-Jewry.
The final – and the most controversial – part of this work concerns the emergence of what he calls neo-anti-Semitism. The focus has now shifted away from attacks on individual Jews and Judaism towards Jewish nationalism, as embodied in Zionism, which is targeted as uniquely pernicious.
Julius contends that this phenomenon now constitutes the greatest threat to Anglo-Jewish security and morale. It denies to Jews the principle of national self-determination that it upholds to all others. It is outraged, Julius writes, by the Jewish nature of Israel, but is untroubled by the Islamic nature of Saudi Arabia and Iran. It brands social inequalities between Jews and Arabs in Israel as racist, but is indifferent to legal inequalities between Muslims and non-Muslims in Arab states. It writes out of history the massacre of Jews at Hebron in 1929 and at Jerusalem in 1948 but treats the massacre of Arabs at Dir Yassin in 1948 as uniquely malevolent. It ignores the Arab rejection of the 1948 UN partition plan for Palestine and the repeated attempts by the Arab world to destroy Israel.
It is the readiness of the anti-Zionist left to find common cause with traditional anti-Semitism that particularly dismays the author. The defeat of Oona King in the 2005 general election following the prominence given to her Jewish origin by anti-Zionists was, he says, a case in point. But this was not an isolated incident. Anti-Zionism engages the same delusional themes of Jewish power and influence but camouflages its language. George Galloway marked his victory over Oona King by claiming to Al-Jazeera that it was a triumph over the Labour government and the Zionist movement “and the newspapers and news media which are controlled by Zionism.”
Similarly, the Liberal Democrat Baroness Jenny Tonge told her party conference: “the pro-Israel lobby has got its grips on the Western world, its financial grips. I think they have probably got a certain grip on our party.” And her colleague Chris Davies MEP told a constituent: “I shall denounce the influence of the Jewish lobby that seems to have far too great a say over the political decision-making process in many countries.” Although neither actually went so far as to advocate a Nuremberg Law to curtail this insidious – and imagined – Jewish activity, it is of note that successive Liberal Democrat leaders have pointedly refused to expel the pair.
Julius writes that “Israelis are the only citizens of a state whose indiscriminate murder is widely considered justifiable”. Although bodies such as Respect and the Socialist Workers Party claim to harbour no ill will toward Jews, they justify targeted Hamas suicide bombings against Jewish civilians in Israel by proclaiming sympathy for the suicide bombers. Tonge even went so far as to state that “civilian targets are chosen because there is simply no way of getting at military targets”.
The reality is that modern day allegations of an all-powerful, corrupting and murderous Zionist conspiracy are simply a variation of the same centuries-old anti-Semitic theme of an “anti-Christian conspiracy”, a “Jewish-Masonic conspiracy” and the one most favoured by the Nazis, a “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy”.
Anthony Julius’ erudite and scholarly work will prove indispensable in the struggle against this form of racial prejudice.
