Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876-1939

Colin Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317384434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the first detailed study of anti-semitism, as an ideology, among the British. First published in 1979, it concentrates on the crucial period between 1876 and 1939 when, against a background of Jewish immigration, war or the threat of war, and social and economic unrest, hostility towards the Jewish community reached its peak. Colin Holmes identifies the main strands of anti-semitic thought and their expression, starting with the Eastern Crisis of 1876 which sparked off the first serious manifestation of anti-semitism. He shows how, before 1914, opposition towards Jews rested on religious and other perceived cultural distinctions. It was only after the First World War that a sinister and significant change of emphasis occurred: racism now became the dominant feature of anti-semitism and was reinforced by theories of conspiracy, the most notorious being The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Anti-semitism has no uniform cause or characteristic and a single explanation cannot suffice. This book elucidates the complex range of factors involved, using both historical and sociological methods and drawing on extensive (and sometimes controversial) research.

Part I

1 Background

There are historical themes and subjects which often inspire fierce and widely differing views and anti-semitism is one of them. ‘If you want to keep out of trouble’, it has been written, ‘there are about five subjects you should never mention in a speech or in print. Either in praise or dispraise or even natural curiosity. One of them is anything to do with Jewish culture or Jewish people.’¹ An exaggeration, without doubt, and one which might be countered by quoting a Jewish source that we could do with more studies of anti-semitism and, in particular, accounts written by Gentiles.²

Of course, difficulties and sensitivities concerning particular topics are relative. It is much easier to write of certain themes in some societies than others and it is also the case that difficulties can be greater in some epochs than others. Anyone who writes now on anti-semitism can hardly be unaware that he is working in an age which has witnessed an orgy of persecution and death, and, more generally, in a climate which has encountered the emergence of guilt feelings in certain sections of Western society concerning the treatment of other races. Such developments have undoubtedly affected attitudes and opinions and, in some respects, inhibited analytical progress. Indeed, a review of Robert Skidelsky’s long awaited biography of Oswald Mosley, after noting that the author had referred to Mosley’s anti-semitism as ‘the greatest blemish on his whole career’, went on to comment: ‘That ought to satisfy the critics but I fear it will not, for Mr Skidelsky [attempts] to explain it, and there are quarters which will not forgive even an explanation of a phenomenon they rightly detest.’³ Tensions can clearly begin to mount once description gives way to analysis.⁴

My theme in the following pages is anti-semitism in Britain between 1876 and 1939 and, before moving any further, we ought to engage in some definitions, bearing in mind that anti-semitism is notoriously difficult to define. The term is not employed here to mean an opposition towards all semitic peoples but is used in its more conventionally accepted sense of a hostility towards Jews. It can happen that Jews become caught up in conflict situations in which the fact that they are Jews is not an issue. But these are not our concern, since anti-semitism is defined broadly as a hostility towards Jews as such. In its most extreme expression between 1876 and 1939 it assumed the form of an ideological racist anti-semitism, when a genetic based hostility was manifested towards all Jews, who were regarded as a totally unassimilable element in society and as exercising a dangerous influence on their non-Jewish environment. In addition one can detect another strand of opposition in the tendency to refer to Jews in categorical rather than ad hoc terms, in other words to lump them together and to ascribe qualities to them but to do so without the injection of genetic elements. Finally, it is possible to find a more restricted opposition, towards individual Jews and groups of Jews – poor immigrants, rich financiers, international Jews, revolutionary Jews, for example – when the Jewish origins of such individuals or groups were emphasized as affecting the nature of the conflict which had developed between them and the Gentile world. Hence, because they were Jews, immigrants could pose special problems to British society. Hence, within a general opposition to finance capital, there could be specific hostility to Jewish finance. Such responses implied a wider antipathy and, as will become apparent, boundaries between sections of Jews could not always be neatly drawn and maintained. Although all the forms of anti-semitism referred to here found expression in the form of social discrimination against Jews as Jews, my emphasis in the following pages is mainly upon anti-semitic attitudes and my intention is to illustrate, analyse and categorize the essential qualities of such thought and the patterns of emphasis and expression it assumed.⁵

It is possible for anti-semitic ideas to exist among individuals and in societies where Jews are not present.⁶ But all sections of the British Isles have witnessed some Jewish settlement. A custodian of Irish Jews was appointed in the thirteenth century and authentic references to Jews in Ireland appeared two centuries earlier. In Scotland settlement occurred much later than this. There were applications for trade and residence in Edinburgh in 1691 but the first community, also in Edinburgh, was not established until 1816. In Wales too, no organized existence was recorded in the middle ages although individual Jews certainly lived there. It was not until 1768, in fact, that the first community was settled in Swansea.⁷

In England, by contrast, an organized Jewish life existed in medieval times. It is possible that the occasional immigrant entered the country before the Norman Conquest but it is generally accepted that ‘the first Jews of medieval England were Norman imports’: members of the Rouen community came in the wake of the Conqueror and settled in London, which is the only place in England where Jews are definitely known to have established themselves before the middle of the twelfth century.⁸ This medieval Jewish community maintained an existence until Edward I’s expulsion order of 1290. This does not mean that there were no Jews in England from the late thirteenth century until the official acceptance of their readmission in 1664. It has been emphasized that ‘the exclusion of the Jews from any land, however rigidly it may be prescribed by law, is unlikely to be absolute’ and this was certainly the case in England.⁹ Indeed, from medieval times onwards individual Jews were called in to help in some special capacity, often in their role as medical men or financiers, and a scattering of nominally converted Jews, the Marrano community, maintained an existence in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Furthermore, there was official connivance at the settlement of Jews in the Cromwellian years. But it was not until 1664 that the residence of the Jews in England was legally authorized for the first time since the great expulsion.

From around this time – the religious status of Jews was not legally secured until 1673 – it is possible to write about a continuous Jewish community in England, contributing to and sharing in social activity while maintaining its own forms of social organization. And, as we have just noticed, communities were formed later in other areas of Britain. The majority of the community during the early years of the resettlement were Sephardi Jews, those of Spanish, Levantine, Mediterranean descent, although there were Ashkenazi Jews, of Franco, German, Polish background, some of whom entered England after the 1648 and 1651 attacks upon Jewry in Poland by Bogdan Chmielnitzki, the Polish king of the Cossacks.¹⁰ In the course of the eighteenth century the number of Ashkenazi Jews increased still further until by the middle of the century there were two distinct groups of Jews in Britain. These were so different in terms of status, condition and appearance that by the end of the century a German traveller could comment: ‘Dress, language, manners, cleanliness, politeness, everything distinguishes them [the Ashkenazim] much to the advantage of the former [the Sephardim] who have little to distinguish them from Christians.’¹¹

Over the course of the next century as a result of migration, a component inseparable from Jewish history, the number of Ashkenazi Jews was to increase even more. Some came from central Europe but, from the middle 1860s and certainly from 1870, the outstanding factor in the history of the Jewish community in Britain was the influx of Ashkenazi Jews from Russian Poland.¹² This was part of a general westward migration from Russia, Austria-Hungary and Romania which went mainly towards America, ‘the goldene medina’, and to a lesser extent to western Europe and South Africa. It gathered momentum in 1881–2 during the pogroms which followed the assassination of Alexander II, reached a new high point in 1891–2 when administrative measures by the Tsarist autocracy resulted in the uprooting of large numbers of Russian Jews, and attained an unequalled peak in 1903–4, in the wake of the pogroms instigated by the Russian authorities. There was in fact an upward curve of movement by Jews out of the Russian Empire and it has been estimated, although figures cannot be entirely accurate, that one million Jews left eastern Europe for the west between 1881 and 1905. The majority of these – almost three quarters, in fact, – came from Russia itself and over 80 per cent of them went to America, with an imprecise number, although probably more than 100,000, coming to Britain.¹³

But immigration from eastern Europe was not the only numerical accretion to Anglo-Jewry in the late nineteenth century. There was also a settlement of some German Jews, a number of whom like Ernest Cassel, Felix Semon and Edgar Speyer were later to play an important role in British society, particularly during the reign of Edward VII. The consequence of all these developments was that an Ashkenazi stamp was firmly imprinted upon Anglo-Jewry, which reached the apex of its power within ‘the Cousinhood’.¹⁴

Although this end-of-century migration has captured much attention, Jewish immigration into Britain did not end in 1914. The events of the Russian Revolution encouraged a further refugee immigration between 1917 and 1920 and this was supplemented shortly afterwards by the influx of Jews fleeing from the tightening screw of Hitlerite persecution after 1933. This most recent immigration was on a smaller scale and concentrated into a much shorter time span than that of the late nineteenth century and whereas the earlier movement from the Russian Empire had been composed largely of working-class Jews or those who had few visible means of support on arrival, the influx of the 1930s into this ‘strange country’ was mainly middle class and professional in character.¹⁵

The community which developed from the Restoration resettlement succeeded over the course of time in establishing an effective institutional life to preserve and defend its interests. By the end of the seventeenth century both the Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews were organized to look after their own and in the years which followed significant additions were made to the community’s institutions. The Board of Deputies, the legal representative of the Jewish community, was established in 1760; the Jews’ Free School was officially founded in 1817; the Jewish Chronicle, the voice of the older Jewish families, appeared in 1841; and the Jewish Board of Guardians was established in 1859 to relieve the poverty and improve the condition of the Jewish poor. In all this, as well as in the early establishment of synagogues for both Sephardi and Ashkenazi groups, we can discern an intention to protect Jewish interests and guarantee a future existence for the community.

In tentative fashion we can also plot the growth in numbers of the community, although there can be no doubt that any attempt to make an assessment of the size of the Jewish population built up over the years is fraught with difficulty. Until capitalism found it useful and necessary to engage in the measurement of resources in the nineteenth century no accurate figures were available and even after official surveys had been introduced it still remained difficult to assess the size of the Anglo-Jewish community. ‘Comprehensive detailed surveys of Anglo-Jewry have been rare’, one commentator has remarked, ‘and there is no absolutely authoritative statistical evidence, because the census does not classify the inhabitants by religion.’¹⁶ From what does exist it would seem that the medieval community in England was the least important numerically – as well as culturally – in Europe, that soon after the resettlement it numbered 3,000–4,000 and that by the 1753 Jew Bill its size had grown to 8,000.¹⁷ By 1850 we are dealing with a community in Great Britain of approximately 35,000 and between 1850 and 1939 this grew tenfold.¹⁸ It is apparent from this that the years which are of prime concern to us here were remarkable for a significant population jump, albeit from a very small base. At no time, however, did Jews constitute a large percentage of the total population. They were 0·1 per cent of the population of Britain in 1850 and in 1880, 1900, 1910 and 1939 they constituted only 0·17 per cent, 0·38 per cent, 0·53 per cent and 0·8 per cent, respectively.¹⁹

Although this point is worth making, it does not have a significance regarding anti-semitism which some might try to suggest. The size of the Jewish community is not necessarily a crucial variable in creating antisemitism. In England at the time of the 1753 Jew Bill, Jews were only one tenth of 1 per cent of the total population, yet this did not prevent the emergence in certain quarters of fears about Jewish power.²⁰ In Germany Jews formed only 1·25 per cent of the population of the German Empire in 1870 and this figure diminished as time went on, yet antisemitism existed there and increased as the relative size of the Jewish population declined.²¹ Jews were often perceived as a linked international minority; consequently it could be believed that national details did not tell the whole story.

Although the Jewish community was never large in absolute or relative terms it was spatially concentrated. From its beginnings at the time of the Conquest throughout medieval times the Jewish settlement remained basically urban and lived close to the sources of much of the host community’s wealth. There was no strict ghetto but Jews tended to live close to a market and, where possible, a royal castle.²² From its beginnings, therefore, the Jewish community possessed an urban character, it was very strongly represented in London and, even within urban centres, was inclined to congregate in certain areas. These characteristics were to remain important features of Jewish life. Indeed, this concentration was such that by the middle of the eighteenth century, when proposals to naturalize Jews were being discussed, ‘outside the metropolis practically nothing was known of Jews: many eighteenth-century Englishmen had never seen one’ and some of those who had were probably acquainted only with the poor Ashkenazi hawker who peddled his wares from time to time in their district.²³ This concentration in London continued into the following century: it has been estimated that in 1850, when Anglo-Jewry numbered about 35,000, approximately 18,000–20,000 Jews lived in the capital. It is true that some degree of geographical dispersion had taken place by this date as the wealthier members of the community had drawn themselves apart in terms of residence and as provincial communities had been founded with the active support of leaders of the London community.²⁴ Nevertheless, the figures for the number of Jews living in London in 1850 show its continuing attraction in a period ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index of Persons
• Index of Persons
• Index of Persons