Robert S. Wistrich

Editor’s Note: This is excerpted from an interview with Professor Wistrich conducted by Manfred Gerstenfeld, published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, No. 70, July 1, 2008.

"One characteristic of English anti-Semitism has been its often understated nature, in keeping with British tradition. That makes it more effective because one does not become aware of it so easily. One example among many is the British journalist Richard Ingrams, who was editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye for twenty-three years starting in the 1960s. He once wrote in The Observer that he threw away unread all correspondence he received from people with Jewish names regarding the Middle East because, he thought, they must be biased on the subject. If someone were to tell him he is an anti-Semite he would, of course, reject that. But would he publicly write the same thing about Arab correspondents?

"Anti-Semitism in Great Britain has been around for almost a thousand years of recorded history. In the Middle Ages, England pioneered the blood libel. The Norwich case in 1144 marked the first time Jews were accused of using the blood of Christian children for their Passover matzot.

"From the Norman Conquest of 1066 onward there was a steady process--particularly during the thirteenth century--of persecution, forced conversion, extortion, and expropriation of Jews. This culminated in the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 under Edward I. It was the first ejection of a major Jewish community in Europe. It is important to bear this in mind because it is not widely known, least of all in England. I grew up there and went to grammar school and to Cambridge University and do not recall that this was ever mentioned. On the contrary, we were taught at school about the chivalry of Richard the Lionheart, not the massacres of Jews by Crusader kings.

"Britain was not only the first country in medieval Europe to expel Jews but also one of the last to take them back. It took slightly more than 350 years for this to happen. The return of the Jews to the British Isles began very quietly and informally in 1656 under Oliver Cromwell. This was the beginning--drop by drop--of the formation a new community that over time would contribute a great deal to British society.

"The long absence of Jews from the shores of the British Isles did not mean that anti-Semitism disappeared. This is an instructive early example of how society does not need the physical presence of Jews for the potency of anti-Jewish stereotypes to penetrate the culture.

"I grew up on English literature. When I was sixteen we had to prepare for the advanced-level certificate. In our syllabus were several of the classic English works. They included Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales from the late fourteenth century; Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta from the late sixteenth century; and William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice of the same period, which until today has remained one of the most popular plays of the English theater. Shylock has come to embody an image of the vengeful, tribal, and bloodthirsty Jew, who will never give up his pound of flesh. Those who talk about how humanistic, universal and empathetic his portrait is, are ignoring not only how it was perceived at the time, but its historical consequences.

"English literature and culture are drenched in anti-Jewish images. One cannot understand attitudes toward Jews in Britain today without taking into account the anti-Semitism embedded in the national culture. Many well-educated and well-meaning people fail to understand the long-term impact of such a cultural factor on their society, and are not even aware of their own latent prejudices. That was my experience during the thirty years I lived in Britain and it has got much worse because of anti-Israeli sentiment."

During the nineteenth century, matters evolved favorably for English Jews. Says Wistrich: "The British Empire reached its pinnacle of power and influence. England had become a relatively liberal society. Jews could feel proud and self-confident in proclaiming that they were British citizens. In the Middle East, Britain was even considered a protector of the Jews. It was more tolerant than most of its rivals and more open to intervening and trying to correct the disabilities of Jews in other parts of the world. So this was a kind of ‘golden age.'

"Yet here, too, the picture is more ambivalent than is often assumed. This was particularly so in the late nineteenth century with the immigration of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe into Britain. At that time there was strong xenophobia. There was a conservative anti-Semitism resistant to the Jew as an alien who could never be fully English. The Aliens Bill of 1905, directed at halting the immigration of Russian Jews, was a case in point.

"In the twentieth century, after the Russian Revolution, a linkage between Jews and communism that was intertwined with anti-Semitism became a pronounced theme in British public discourse. There was considerable publicity around the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This ended when Philip Graves, a London Times correspondent, exposed it as a forgery. Until then, one could read editorials in The Times that were based on the belief that Britain had spilled much blood in the First World War only to fall into the hands of a world Jewish conspiracy—a Pax Judaica!

"Similar accusations had been made before that, during the Boer War in South Africa. There were insinuations that a small clique of cosmopolitan Jewish financiers had dragged the British Empire into a futile, useless, expensive, and wholly destructive war for their own narrow financial interests. Such claims could also be heard from leading figures in the emerging British Labour Party and trade unions, which were promoting an anti-war sentiment resonant with anti-Semitism.

"In the literature around 1900, one often finds examples of a full-fledged left-wing conspiracy theory in which British imperialism is being manipulated and controlled by ‘Anglo-Hebraic' financiers. The entire issue was connected to the discovery of gold in South Africa. This theory was promoted by distinguished English intellectuals, enlightened journalists and writers, as well as the prominent liberal economist John Hobson. The entire episode shows striking similarities with trends in left-wing political circles in recent years. The radical Left asserts that former prime minister Tony Blair was led by the nose into a disastrous, neo-imperialist war in Iraq by a clique of rich British and American Jews.

“The theme of ‘warmongering Jews' became especially popular in the 1930s with the rise of British fascism under its aristocratic leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, who came originally from the Left. British fascism was stopped by active mobilization against it. Contrary to what would happen a few years later, the communists were among the most militant antifascists in the East End. The Jewish community, which included many working-class Jews, had a kind of unwritten alliance with the Left to stop fascism. That tradition unfortunately seems to be dead and buried today.

"In the Second World War, Britain was not willing to attempt to rescue the Jews of Europe in any meaningful way. It was not only imperial Realpolitik that made the British close the gates of Palestine. We know that officials in the Colonial and Foreign offices and people in the administration in Palestine were far from immune to anti-Semitic sentiment.

"During the war the British government was obsessed by the fear that their fight against Hitler could be construed as a war on behalf of the Jews. To avoid ‘fighting a Jewish war' became a kind of alibi for the British authorities to do almost nothing for the Jews. Britain's solemn commitment to create a Jewish National Home in Palestine was in fact betrayed in the hour of greatest need for European Jewry. This is a serious stain on the British record, which until then had many positive sides.

"After 1945—in the three years before the creation of the state of Israel--relations between Britain and the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, reached their lowest point. For example, in 1947 the commander of British Forces in Palestine, Lt. Gen. Evelyn Barker, ordered his men to avoid fraternization with Palestinian Jews and to ‘punish the Jews in the manner this race dislikes as much as any, by hitting them in the pocket, which will demonstrate our disgust for them.'

"After the Mandatory Government in Palestine executed members of the Irgun, a Jewish underground organization, the latter reacted by hanging two British sergeants. This led to anti-Jewish riots in 1947 in a number of British cities including Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and London. No lives were lost, but it was a very nasty time.

Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary in the Labour government of Clement Attlee, was convinced that a Jewish conspiracy existed, supposedly in alliance with the Soviet Union. A commonly held view, both in London and Washington at that time, was that ‘the Jews' were determined to bring down the British Empire. The empire did indeed crumble, though it was not due to any Jewish conspiracy but to more mundane economic and political factors. The war against Hitler had sapped British strength.

"Bevin made a number of anti-Semitic statements. He made remarks about Jews trying to jump to the head of the queue even after Auschwitz and the Holocaust. His attitude was also recorded by people who knew him well. The young Labour MP Richard Crossman, who was close to Bevin, emphasized that he was ‘obsessed by the Jews' and wanted to teach them a lesson they would never forget.

"Winston Churchill's record on Zionism was, of course, far more positive. But it was not as unequivocal as we often assume. There is a discrepancy between his wonderful rhetoric and what Churchill--as a lifelong Zionist--actually did for the Jews when he was in power. The gates of Palestine were kept shut under his premiership. His wartime actions regarding the Jews were no better than those of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which is to say, unimpressive. Nor, after becoming prime minister again in 1951, was Churchill's record on Israel particularly brilliant, though he had the historical vision to understand that Israel's re-creation was a major event in modern history. In expressing its meaning Churchill was at his best.

"It is important to remember that in the 1940s the ‘Zionism is Nazism' libel was rather popular among highly placed Englishmen. True, the Nazi-Zionist equation was predominantly a Soviet contribution to postwar anti-Semitism. But it did not originate there. Indeed, a number of Britishers can claim first-class honors in this field. An example is Sir John Glubb Pasha, who was commander of the Arab Jordanian Legion fighting against Israel in 1948. He was an upper-class conservative Englishman and a lifelong Arabophile, with a special love for desert Arabs.

"Glubb was obsessed with the idea that Jews had anticipated Hitler's master race theory. Nazism, in his view, was a pale copy of the Hebrew original as revealed in Old Testament sources. In memos he sent to London he branded Jews as Nazis who combined their East European fanaticism with a narrow Hebraic cast of mind, based on biblical vengeance and hatred. Glubb was not alone. One can find in British documents similar statements from high-ranking officials in the Palestine administration.

"In the 1950s and 1960s Arnold Toynbee, the renowned British philosopher of history, was immensely popular. He came to shockingly anti-Zionist conclusions presented in the grand style of historical generalization. As an Englishman he felt superior to the German Gentile barbarians who had infamously inflicted the Holocaust on the Jews. But he also claimed that the Jews were worse than the Nazis because they had knowingly imitated their evil deeds and become ruthless persecutors. Today, a disturbingly large number of English people--misguided, intoxicated, and half-brainwashed by parts of the media--would probably agree with Toynbee.

"Toynbee ranted on about the ‘expulsion' of the Palestinians, which he considered a crime of a greater order than that committed by the German Nazis! Israeli ambassador Yaacov Herzog demolished his arguments in a debate in the early 1960s in Montreal. But the mud stuck. After all Toynbee was an elite figure of the British establishment.

"In the 1970s, I was actively involved in such debates when I wrote my doctorate at University College, London. The campus war had heated up and was at full blast in 1975 after the UN ‘Zionism is racism' resolution. There were efforts to ban all Jewish societies on British campuses. This was stopped by a militant and determined campaign. The time was not yet ripe for the brazen anti-Semitism of the kind we find today in Britain and much of Europe, but it was certainly there beneath the surface.

"In the 1970s, the anti-Zionists in Britain--some of them Jews and expatriate Israelis—were already vilifying Israel as an ‘ethnic cleansing' and ‘racist' state. Even then there were claims that Zionism equals apartheid. Among the most extreme demagogues were Jewish Trotskyites, who were the most vitriolic in their loathing for Zionism.

"It is a curious fact that Trotskyites have been influential in left-wing circles in the UK--at least in comparison to other European countries. Only in France does one find anything equivalent. In their concept of the world, Zionism has for decades been inextricably linked with global capitalism and American imperialism. These were also the hackneyed phrases of Soviet propaganda. The communist empire has collapsed, of course, but the Trotskyites are still running with the ball. Their numbers are small but they have tenacity, ideological discipline, and use clever tactics of infiltration. Trotskyites infiltrated the Labour Party and the trade unions in the pre-Blair era. We see the bitter fruits in boycott actions today against Israel, sparked by people who went through this anti-Zionist indoctrination and have passed it on.

"Trotskyites are organized in the Socialist Workers Party, which was very active in the 1970s. It has become a larger political factor in recent decades. I watched the huge antiwar demonstration in London in February 2003. The two main organizers were the Muslim Association of Britain--close to the Muslim Brotherhood--and the Socialist Workers Party. They formed a Marxist-Islamist alliance against the war in Iraq and on the issue of Palestine, which was a major unifying factor.

“The protest came at a time when the ‘cabal' theory that the Jews had seized control of American and British foreign policy was being widely advanced. It was crudely asserted in Britain, Europe, the Middle East--and to a lesser degree in the United States--that Bush's war in Iraq was being fought on Israel's behalf. This echoes the anti-Semitic notions of the late 1930s about ‘warmongering Jews' pushing the West into an unnecessary conflict with Nazism."

"There is also a relatively new party called Respect led by MP George Galloway from Scotland. He was on the left of the Labour Party before he went independent. Galloway at one time received generous assistance from Saddam Hussein and defended him regularly on British television. Galloway is an intellectual lightweight and rabble-rouser. He sees a revolutionary potential in the Muslim immigrants in Britain, a kind of ‘substitute proletariat' that could help revive the lost dreams of international socialism.

“Then there is the more general Muslim contribution to anti-Semitism in Britain, which has become a significant factor. There is no other Western society where jihadi radicalism has proved as violent and dangerous as in the UK. Although anti-Semitism is not the determining factor in this extremism, it plays a role. The exploration of Muslim attitudes in the UK is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, it appears that close to half of British Muslims believe in a Jewish conspiracy that dominates UK media and politics. The percentage of Muslim perpetrators of violent anti-Semitic acts is nearly ten times greater than the Muslim percentage of the general population. Muslims from Britain have been involved in a series of high-profile cases. One leading terrorist was Omar Sheikh, an Anglo-Pakistani born and bred in Britain and educated at the London School of Economics and the alleged mastermind of the beheading of the American Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi. The horrific video emphasized Pearl's Jewish origins.

"At the other extreme, the far-Right British National Party sees a climate emerging where it might do better than in the past. The fascists would frankly like to see a Britain without Muslims. On the other hand, they also see eye to eye with many Muslim extremists on issues concerning Israel and the Jews. These British fascists admire Osama bin Laden.

“Another pioneering role of the UK, especially in the area of anti-Israelism, is the longstanding bias in BBC reporting and commentary about the Jewish world and Israel in particular. The BBC plays a special role owing to its long-established prestige as a news source widely considered to be objective.

"Within the distorted BBC system, the reporting of Israeli civilian fatalities and Palestinian suicide attacks made them seem no more than minor pinpricks compared to the retaliations by Israel, the definitive ‘rogue state.' The BBC invariably disconnects jihadi terrorism from any notion that it is part of a hate culture and the result of ideological indoctrination. The explanation is that these murderous deeds are driven by the relentless, ‘racist actions' of the Israeli government. Terrorism is mentioned without connection to an ideology and the issue of anti-Semitism in the Arab or Islamic world is virtually nonexistent.

“Another favorite topic of the British media is the power of the Jewish lobby. One well-publicized example occurred when the veteran Labour MP Tom Dalyell said in a 2003 interview in Vanity Fair that Tony Blair was surrounded by a ‘cabal' of Jewish advisers. Of the three people he mentioned, only one was Jewish, Lord Levy. A second exemplar, Peter Mandelson, did have a Jewish ancestor but never claimed to be a Jew; while the third was Foreign Minister Jack Straw, whom many Jews consider anti-Israel. Straw, it turned out, did have a Jewish grandfather but had never advertised the fact. Dalyell claimed these people were linked up with the neocons in Washington in a pro-Israeli Jewish world conspiracy. Many others on the British Left have held virulently anti-Israeli views, including former minister Claire Short who, at one point, blamed the Jewish state for global warming!

"There are exceptions to the anti-Israeli attitude. The most important was former prime minister Tony Blair, who was as sympathetic to Israel as one can reasonably be under the circumstances. The paradox is that, while Blair and his successor Gordon Brown have been pro-Israeli and pro-Jewish, Britain is still one of the leaders of current European anti-Semitism. Blair and Brown fit into a line of statesmen who came out of the British Christian tradition, which has a historic affinity with Zionism. These leaders include Arthur Balfour, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Harold Wilson, and Margaret Thatcher--individuals of vision and great political talent.

“Britain can also pride itself on the publication of the Report of the All-Party Inquiry into Anti-Semitism, which did a fair and thorough--though not perfect--job of investigating the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment in the UK.

"Among those who have contributed to the current hostile mood is Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London until May 2008. In the 1970s, he knocked on my door to ask for my vote in a local North London election. It turned out he was a passionate admirer of Leon Trotsky and was enthused to learn that I had just written a book on the Bolshevik leader--the kind of Jew he could empathize with--a radical leftist, an international socialist, and an ‘anti-Zionist.'
"A few years later he became a co-editor of the Labour Herald, the Labour Party's paper in London. In 1982, during the First Lebanon War it published on its front page a caricature of then-Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin in full SS uniform with the skull-and-bones insignia on his head. He was standing atop a mountain of skulls. The caption was in big, black Gothic script: ‘The Final Solution.' This cartoon could have come straight out of Pravda.

"On two occasions Livingstone gave red-carpet treatment to Sheikh Youssef Qaradawi whom he invited to London. This Egyptian sheikh lives in Qatar and has supported suicide bombings as being consistent with Islam. He was presented by Livingstone as a ‘progressive' and the kind of moderate who could positively influence British Muslims.

“What is interesting is that in Britain, as in much of Europe, the proclaimed antiracism of the left-wing variety often feeds the new anti-Semitism—which is primarily directed against Israel. Of course, if one suggests that such leftists are anti-Semites in disguise, they are likely to become enraged and retort that one is ‘playing the anti-Semitic card.' This has become a codeword for saying, as it were, ‘You are a dishonest, deceitful, manipulative Jew' or a ‘lover of Jews.' Zionists supposedly use the ‘accusation of anti-Semitism' to distort and silence the fully justified criticism of Israel and its human rights abuses. The word ‘criticism' in this context is misplaced. It is a euphemism or license for the demonization of Israel. And that in turn is a major form of anti-Semitism in our time."

Robert Wistrich holds the Neuberger Chair for Modern European and Jewish History at Hebrew University.