Why the EHRC Report into Anti‐Semitism in the Labour Party is About so much More than Anti‐Semitism in the Labour Party—A Personal View

The Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHCR) investigation into anti‐semitism in the Labour Party, the virtual disavowal of the report by Jeremy Corbyn, his subsequent suspension from and then reinstatement to the party and then his exclusion from the Parliamentary Labour Party, raise issues far wider than just the EHRC’s legalistic and limited investigation.     

Prejudice and paranoia: a comparative study of antisemitism and Sinophobia in turn-of-the-century Britain

Renshaw examines in comparative terms two of the most virulent manifestations of racial prejudice in early twentieth-century British society. The language of antisemitism and Sinophobia in the Edwardian period and the years preceding the First World War, the similarities and differences in the ways that these two forms of prejudice were articulated, and the overlap between them are analysed. Five strands of anti-Jewish and anti-Chinese sentiment and action are discussed. The first examines how international manifestations of antisemitism and Sinophobia, suspicions aimed at Jews and Chinese as transnational diasporic communities, and perceptions of these minorities, through Russian pogroms, the Boxer Rebellion in China and the post-Boer War economic situation in South Africa, were framed in narratives of victimhood and aggression. Second, the transnational and colonial circuits of racialized discourse and the relationship between periphery and metropole are considered, as are divergences in the articulation of anti-Jewish and anti-Chinese prejudice. The third strand investigates the use of the language of ‘invasion’, used by both the political right and the left in discussing Jewish and Chinese immigration and economic activity in Britain, with Chinese employment in British industries (in this period particularly as sailors on British ships) framed in the context of a demographic ‘Asiatic’ takeover of European societies. The fourth strand looks at the intersection of racial prejudice and sexual and social angst, the visceral association of immigrant groups with dirt and disease, and the sexual threat that racist and antisemitic literature attributed to Jews and Chinese. Finally, physical manifestations of antisemitism and Sinophobia in the period and the racial violence that occurred in Cardiff and Tredegar in 1911 will be described and placed in context. The article positions Edwardian antisemitism and Sinophobia as a transitory stage in the evolution of British racism: a bridge between the separate domestic and colonial forms of prejudice present in late Victorian discourse, and the new manifestations of racism located in British cities and ports, but aimed at non-white minorities, that emerged in the interwar period.     

The British Labour Party and leadership election mandate(s) of Jeremy Corbyn: patterns of opinion and opposition within the parliamentary Labour Party

This paper offers the first systematic evaluation of opinion within the 2015–2017 parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) towards the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. We do this by identifying whether individual parliamentarians remained supportive of Corbyn as their party leader or not, and then relating opinion on this to a series of variables that form the basis of a unique data set on the PLP. By constructing this data set we are able to test, via logistic regression analysis, a series of hypotheses based around (1) demographic variables – i.e. age, gender and trade union membership; (2) political variables – i.e. year of entry, constituency region, marginality, main competition and the endorsement of their constituency Labour Party (CLP) in the leadership election of 2016 and (3) ideological variables – i.e. views on continued European Union [EU] membership, immigration, intervention in Syria and the renewal of Trident.     

Labour and Antisemitism: a Crisis Misunderstood

In this article, we argue that Labour’s antisemitism crisis has been misunderstood. We suggest that a more accurate and sophisticated understanding of antisemitism offers a way forward. There are three elements to this claim. First, by drawing on existing data on attitudes towards Jews, we criticise the widespread focus on individual ‘antisemites’, rather than on the broader problem of antisemitism. In turn, we conceive of antisemitism not as a virus or poison, as in so many formulations, but rather, as a reservoir of readily available images and ideas that subsist in our political culture. Second, following on from this understanding, we offer five ways forward. Finally, we set this analysis in the context of a historical parting of the ways between anti-racism and opposition to antisemitism. An anti-racism defined solely by conceptions of whiteness and power, we argue, has proven unable to fully acknowledge and account for anti-Jewish racism.     

Corbynism: Social Democracy in a New Left Garb

This article traces some of the rhetoric flowing from Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party to the New Left, a political and intellectual movement in the UK which rose up to challenge the Stalinisation of socialism. These New Left lineages appear most clearly in the value denoted by both movements toward extra‐parliamentary politics. Indeed, the work of the New Left intellectual Ralph Miliband considers this factor to be a criterion by which we can assess the extent to which Corbyn’s party has surpassed the traditional ‘Labourist’ mould. By going beyond the movement’s early rhetoric, I show that it hasn’t. Instead, I present evidence that Corbyn’s Labour is a deeply social democratic one. The article offers an explanation for this assessment based on comparison of the contexts from which both the New Left and Corbynism emerged, and outlines an analytical path for future scholarship that emphasises continuity as well as change, and wards against ideological bias.     

The use of antisemitism in the Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War saw an outburst of antisemitism in the Nationalist-controlled areas of the peninsula and in the Moroccan protectorate, an antisemitism influenced by the work of ultra-right-wing intellectuals associated with the Acción Española review. All the factions of the Nationalist camp interpreted the civil war as a crusade against the 'Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevist' conspiracy. In mainland Spain, where there were only a few Jewish families, antisemitism was largely confined to the written word. In this way, it was used mostly as a rhetorical tool to attack the Nationalists' real and imaginary enemies: the Republican forces, the French and the Soviets. Although there was no systemic persecution of the Jews, some aggressive acts took place in Seville and Barcelona. The situation of the larger Jewish community in Spanish Morocco was quite different. The Moroccan Jews were adversely affected by the Nationalists' efforts to enlist the support of the Muslim population against the Republicans and by the German presence in the protectorate. They were also victimized by the Falangists who confiscated their property and imposed heavy fines on them. The military authorities of Morocco tried to restrain these excesses as they realized that blatant antisemitism could hurt the rebels' image abroad. They also believed that Jewish wealth and connections could serve the Nationalist cause.     

‘The clash of races’ and ‘the Jewish intelligence’: a specifically French form of social antisemitism

The phenomenon of ‘social antisemitism’ is well known. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, an idiosyncratic variant had emerged in France. Where, elsewhere, social antisemitism tended to be ingrained and unthinking, this French variant was (typically) more theoretical, and its practitioners tended to be among the most prominent authors and thinkers. It stressed the essential cultural differences between the ‘French’ and the ‘Israelites’, and the ‘separateness’ of the Jews within France, and also developed a series of facile generalizations about the essentially inferior nature of the Jewish intellect. Griffiths examines this phenomenon, both for its characteristics and for its widespread existence in French intellectual circles, by taking a specific subject: the reception of Lacretelle’s 1922 novel Silbermann. A wide range of writers and critics—a number of whom had in other circumstances a reputation for liberal values and attitudes, and had been among those who had deplored the excesses of the antisemitic mob during the Dreyfus affair—are found to echo the views put forward by Lacretelle in that novel, and even to elaborate on them. Many of these writers were to adopt a completely different attitude towards the Jews after the Second World War; when the position of the Jews was fully realized, their earlier ‘social antisemitism’ proved less powerful than their human sympathies. But this is not to devalue the importance of the danger posed by social antisemitism, which could provide the basis for far more virulent forms of racism to flourish.     

The collective Jew: Israel and the new antisemitism

For Theodor Herzl, Zionism, in the sense of a political movement to establish a sovereign Jewish state, offered the only workable solution to the problem of antisemitism. Some commentators today speak of a 'new anti-Semitism'. They claim, first, that there is a new wave or outbreak of hostility towards Jews that began with the start of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000 and is continuing at the present time. Second, and more fundamentally, the 'new anti-Semitism' is said to involve a new form or type of hostility towards Jews: hostility towards Israel. This is the claim under discussion in Klug's paper. The claim implies an equivalence between (a) the individual Jew in the old or classical version of antisemitism and (b) the state of Israel in the new or modern variety. Klug argues that this concept is confused and that the use to which it is put gives a distorted picture of the facts. He begins by recalling classical antisemitism, the kind that led to the persecution of European Jewry to which Herzl's Zionism was a reaction. On this basis, he briefly reformulates the question of whether and when hostility towards Israel is antisemitic. He then discusses the so-called new form of antisemitism, especially the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. He concludes by revisiting Herzl's vision in light of the situation today.     

UK Labour and the EU Single Market: ‘Social Europe’ or ‘Capitalist Club’?

This article looks at the UK Labour Party’s view of the EU single market over the last four decades, focussing on three case study periods when this issue was particularly salient: first, the time of the single market’s introduction under Neil Kinnock’s leadership; second, the A8 accession with Tony Blair as Labour Prime Minister; and third, between the 2016 European referendum and 2019 general election during Jeremy Corbyn’s time as party leader. This historical narrative uses the theoretical approach of Harvard economist Dani Rodrik—of a ‘trilemma’ faced by national policy makers in response to globalisation—as a lens to describe a clear arc in Labour’s policy towards the single market across the three case studies. A position of initial scepticism moved to support under Kinnock’s leadership, and then active encouragement under Blair, before coming back again under Corbyn to uncomfortable non-commitment. This arc directly correlates with the ebb and flow of the party’s overall economic approach—first the Keynesian, national Alternative Economic Strategy at the time of the party’s 1983 general election defeat; then, the deviation under Blair to a policy that actively encouraged cross-border market liberalisation; and finally the return to an Alternative Economic Strategy-style approach under Corbyn.     

A Reply to ‘Labour and Antisemitism: A Crisis Misunderstood’

In their 2020 Political Quarterly article ‘Labour and antisemitism: a crisis misunderstood’, Gidley, McGeever and Feldman argue that the Labour Party’s responses to its antisemitism crisis have been misguided because its understanding of antisemitism is wrong. We must look less at cases of individual antisemites and more at the ‘reservoir of stereotypes and narratives’, in which the long (but unacknowledged) history of left antisemitism has deposited its ideas—and from which they can be easily retrieved. This response challenges the reservoir concept as ahistorical, and culturally adrift, lacking the components necessary for cultural understanding—of being rooted, contextualised, complex and contradictory, evolving and regressing, but always home to inconsistent, yet coexisting, ideas and prejudices. The authors simply ignore the political dynamics of this crisis which have allowed antisemitism to be weaponised and made it all but impossible to have a calm, serious, rigorous reflection and public debate about antisemitism, and about Israel/Palestine. Such a debate is long overdue.     

Public Opinion and the Depth of Labour's Crisis

Labour's current problems are the culmination of long‐term trends flowing from the rising cost of tax‐funded services and welfare and voters’ mounting resistance to higher taxes to pay for them. As a result of this, there is now a big gulf between the attitudes of Labour party members, and in particular the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, and Labour voters—and an even wider gulf with the extra voters Labour needs to win a future election. This gulf is also wide in relation to a range of other issues, including immigration, education and economic ideology. For Labour to return to government, it needs not just to narrow the gulf in policy, but to persuade voters of its ‘valence’ virtues of trust and competence—qualities in relation to which Labour currently lags the Conservatives by large margins.     

Nixon and the Jews

ABSTRACT

In public the 37th President of the United States did not express hostility or disparagement, or show any signs of religious prejudice towards Jews. But inside the White House, Richard M. Nixon's remarks were often scurrilous. His antisemitism was not casual; it was close to compulsive. And it could be coupled with other seething grievances, for example, towards liberals, radicals, the media, Blacks and Italian-Americans. Yet Nixon controlled his antisemitism. It had no adverse effect on Jewish life, either at home or abroad. The malice that he nurtured remained unmobilized. Apart from a few limited personnel instances (mostly but not completely ignored by Nixon's underlings), it is impossible to connect private resentment to public policy, probably because the barriers to the expression of antisemitism in the United States have been so high. The ugliness of his utterances in the Oval Office revealed his character, but did not extend outward to shape the processes of governance. A disconnect can therefore be discerned between what he felt and how he acted. Most American Jews voted for Nixon's Democratic opponents in 1968 and 1972. But even Jews who voted against him, even those who loathed him, have often acknowledged that Nixon's policies fortified the security of Israel; and he was proud of his support for the Jewish state during the Yom Kippur War. What betrayed Nixon, and what forced him to resign the presidency, was his decision to instal a secret taping system in the Oval Office. When the tapes were played in 1974, he showed himself to be conspiring to obstruct justice. In subsequent years, further exposure of the tapes revealed the extent and intensity of Nixon's antipathy to Jews. The expletives that had to be deleted did much to besmirch the dignity of the office. But such was the stigma the political culture attached to antisemitism that, had his bigotry become public before 1968, Nixon's career would have been over.     

Catholic teaching for Jewish pupils

A spate of letters to the press in Britain, purporting to come from Jews, aims to encourage antisemitism by vindicating Nazi policies or lending colour to anti‐Jewish libels.     

Gender and cultural citizenship among non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union in Israel

About 330,000 of partial Jews and gentiles have moved to Israel after 1990 under the Law of Return. The article is based on interviews with middle-aged gentile spouses of Jewish immigrants, aiming to capture their perspective on integration and citizenship in the new homeland where they are ethnic minority. Slavic wives of Jewish men manifested greater malleability and adopted new lifestyles more readily than did Slavic husbands of Jewish women, particularly in relation to Israeli holidays and domestic customs. Most women considered formal conversion as a way to symbolically join the Jewish people, while no men pondered over this path to full Israeli citizenship. Women's perceptions of the IDF and military service of their children were idealistic and patriotic, while men's perceptions were more critical and pragmatic. We conclude that women have a higher stake at joining the mainstream due to their family commitments and matrilineal transmission of Jewishness to children. Men's hegemony in the family and in the social hierarchy of citizenship attenuates their drive for cultural adaptation and enables rather critical stance toward Israeli society. Cultural politics of belonging, therefore, reflect the gendered norms of inclusion in the nation-state.     

‘The most ardent pro-Israel party’: pro-Israel attitudes and anti-antisemitism among populist radical-right parties in Europe

Since the turn of the millennium a growing number of European populist radical-right parties have taken to criticizing antisemitism and embracing Israel's cause in its conflict with the Palestinians. This development raises the question of whether, for the first time in European history, we are confronting radical-right politics that is not antisemitic. Kahmann’s article approaches this recent development on the extreme right-wing spectrum of European parties from an empirical perspective: he analyses the manner in which leading representatives of the Belgian Vlaams Belang (VB), the Sweden Democrats (SD) and the (now-defunct) German party Die Freiheit have articulated their anti-antisemitism and their solidarity with Israel, and the conclusions that are thereby suggested with regard to the underlying image of Jews and Israel. Kahmann's analysis shows that the pro-Israel and anti-antisemitic turn serves primarily as a pretext for fending off Muslim immigrants, which is claimed as a contribution to the security of the Jewish population. Furthermore, it shows that the right-wing ideal of an ethnically homogeneous nation results in the perception of Jews as members of a foreign nation and in the cultivation of stereotyped images of Jews. For these parties, the status of the Jewish population in the respective European states remains therefore precarious: Jews are merely granted the status of a tolerated minority as long as they are not considered to pose any threat to the ‘native’ culture. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians serves in this context as a convenient screen on which to project the popular right-wing narrative of a battle between the Judaeo-Christian Occident and the Muslim world.     

Jews in the Christian Gaze: Munich's Churches before and after Hitler

Abstract

Kauders sets out to examine three interrelated topics: the nature of antisemitism after the Second World War; the continuity in thinking about the Jews in the twentieth century; and the problem of responsibility inherent in any analysis of the events surrounding the Holocaust. In what follows, emphasis is placed on the Catholic and Protestant churches in the Bavarian capital of Munich, whose reactions to Jew-hatred before 1933 and after 1945 are studied in some detail. Several conclusions emerge from this investigation. Both churches embraced völkisch thinking before 1933, without approving of violent manifestations of racialist thought. Both Catholics and Protestants, whenever they defended the Jews before the rise of Hitler, did so in order to safeguard Christian dogma, and in particular the value of the Old Testament as well as the Jewish origins of Jesus and Paul. After 1945 clerics employed language that ignored events between 1933 and 1945, describing the ‘Jewish question’ as if the issue was still embedded in Weimar politics; they did so because they assumed that a majority of Germans had been innocent of any wrongdoing, so that a pre-1933 image of ‘the Jew’ (which did not allow for extremism and violence) could be re-adopted with impunity after 1945. Christian views began to change in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Jews were increasingly seen as Others who were to be respected as such. Although German-Jewish irreconcilability was thereby cemented, this shift also entailed an acceptance as opposed to a denial of the Jew as different from Christians and ‘Germans’.     

Normalization of antisemitism, 1880–1900: the case of a Jesuit community in Rome

The significance of the political antisemitism of the 1880s and 1890s for developments in the twentieth century remains controversial. Researchers have been divided as to whether the antisemitism of the nineteenth century, or even earlier, was one of the factors that made the Holocaust possible, or whether it was a phenomenon with little or no relevance for subsequent events. The decline of most antisemitic political parties at the beginning of the twentieth century appears to support the latter point of view. Yet some commentators, such as Shulamit Volkov and Peter Pulzer, have convincingly suggested that the importance of nineteenth-century antisemitism lies less in the political fortunes of antisemitic parties than in the way antisemitism came to penetrate civil society. Thus, they have argued, antisemitism came to form a component of a widespread conservative and anti-liberal world-view. Following Pulzer and Volkov, it might be desirable to investigate the processes by which antisemitism could have been transformed from an extremist political position into a common element in the outlook of broad portions of European society: mechanisms that have remained largely unexplored. Dahl's article studies the normalization of antisemitism in the two last decades of the nineteenth century through a scrutiny of shifts in the attitudes to Jews of a restricted group of Italian Jesuits. The analysis is based on a detailed study of La Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit community in Rome that published a journal of the same name. Since its foundation in 1850 this institution has been an authoritative exponent of Catholic policy and is generally perceived as having been a protagonist in the formulation of a Catholic stance towards the ‘Jewish question’ in the later nineteenth century. Dahl shows that, while in the early 1880s, most members resisted or opposed the use of antisemitic propaganda, through the following two decades the attitudes of virtually all of them became tinged with antisemitism, supporting the hypothesis that antisemitism became part of a widespread ‘culture’. In his analysis, Dahl does not focus on the wider circulation of ideas that influenced the Roman Jesuits, but on the dynamics within the institution that made possible the gradual acceptance of antisemitism, arguing that a debate over antisemitism among the Jesuits in the early 1880s was a crucial moment in this development. As they failed at this early stage to formulate an anti-antisemitic response, they allowed antisemitism to become part of the culture of their institution, and rendered its later rejection practically impossible.     

Endogenous economic voting: evidence from the 1997 British election

Using panel surveys conducted in Great Britain before and after the 1997 general election, we examine the relationship between voting behavior and post-election economic perceptions. Drawing on psychological theories of attitude formation, we argue that those who voted for Labour and the Liberal Democrats perceived the past state of the British economy under the Tory government more negatively than they had prior to casting their ballot in the 1997 election. Similarly, we posit that Labour supporters would view the future state of the national economy under Labour more positively than they had before the election. This indicates that, contrary to many assumptions in the economic voting literature, voting behavior influences evaluations of the economy as voters seek to reduce inconsistencies between their vote choice and evaluations of the economy by bringing their attitudes in line with the vote they cast in the election. It also means that voters’ post-election economic perceptions are, at least in part, influenced by and thus endogenous to their vote choice. This finding has two major implications: first, cross-sectional models of economic voting are likely to overestimate the effect of economic perceptions on the vote. Second, the endogeneity of economic perceptions may compromise the quality of economic voting as a mechanism for democratic accountability.     

Continuity and change in anti-Jewish prejudice: the transmission of the anti-talmudic texts of Sixtus of Siena

ABSTRACT

One of the main elements common to both the mediaeval anti-Jewish tradition and modern antisemitism is the use of Jewish religious texts—particularly the Talmud—in order to ‘prove’ that Jews pose a threat to non-Jews. Bravo López considers how a series of anti-talmudic texts written by Sixtus of Siena in the sixteenth century were disseminated and used, up to the beginning of the twentieth century, to legitimize a threatening image of Judaism and Jews. Despite the changing historical context, that image remained virtually intact throughout the centuries, allowing these same texts to be used time and time again to ‘prove’ that it was a faithful reflection of reality. Although historical changes can account for differences in the specific motives that drove each author to use the texts of Sixtus of Siena, those authors all shared the same image of Judaism and the Jews, and they considered these texts—cited as an authoritative source, legitimizing their point of view—to be effective in support of their cause.     

When the Elders of Zion relocated to Eurabia: conspiratorial racialization in antisemitism and Islamophobia

Zia-Ebrahimi’s objective in this article is two-fold. First, to argue that antisemitism and Islamophobia display similar dynamics in representing their target population as a separate and antagonistic race (a process referred to as ‘racialization’). Second, to suggest that conspiracy theories of the ‘world Jewish domination’ type or their Islamophobic equivalent ‘Islamization of Europe’ type are powerful enablers of racialization, something that the race literature has so far neglected. In pursuing these two interrelated objectives, he offers a textual comparison of two conspiracy theories featuring Jews and Muslims. The first is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), the notorious forgery claiming to be the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders planning to take over Europe and the world. This text is largely considered to be at the very heart of modern-day antisemitism and an essential ingredient of the ideational context of the Holocaust. The second is Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (2005), a pamphlet by polemicist Bat Ye’or claiming to have uncovered another ominous conspiracy, that of Muslims plotting to turn Europe into Eurabia, a dystopic land in which jihad and sharia rule, and non-Muslims live in a state of subjection. Zia-Ebrahimi argues that, despite some differences in format, the two texts display strikingly similar discursive dynamics in their attempt to racialize Jews and Muslims as the ultimate Other determined to destroy Us. This process is referred to as ‘conspiratorial racialization’.