Acting like an Alien: ‘Civil’ Antisemitism, the Rhetoricized Jew, and Early Twentieth-Century British Immigration Law

Abstract

It has been more than 20 years since the historian Colin Holmes, in his influential work on twentieth-century British antisemitism, stated that ‘at no point between 1876 and 1914 did any [governing party in Britain] introduce discriminatory legislation specifically against Jews’.¹ His claim has since become a truism of contemporary scholarship on Anglo-Jewish relations. This essay reconsiders Holmes’s assertion in light of what I call ‘civil antisemitism’, a highly nuanced form of anti-Jewish rhetoric operating within the British Parliament during the first part of the twentieth century. Civil antisemitism, like the fanatical anti-Jewish ideologies espoused by radical right-wing groups such as the Britons, draws a clear demarcation between Jews and non-Jews, decries Jews’ degenerative properties, and promotes a belief in the threat of Jewish influence; it relies, however, on more rhetorically complex techniques to convey its attitudes and theories. It has received limited critical attention from scholars of British antisemitism, precisely because it rarely appears to be as militant, or as dangerous, as the hate mongering we associate with demagogues like Arnold White and Oswald Mosley.² Indeed, because civil antisemitism distills fanatical antisemitic rhetoric into an ’acceptable’ medium for differentiating Jews both from British citizens and from other immigrants, it has frequently been mistaken for philosemitism, not only by politicians and journalists of the period, but also by contemporary literary scholars and historians.