Anti-Jewish Philosemitism: British and Hebrew Affinity and Nineteenth Century British Antisemitism

In his 1989 review of three then-recent works on the history of modern AngloJewry, David Cannadine, while praising the quality of the pieces themselves, nonetheless concludes that their subject matter ultimately fails to inspire. Anglo-Jewish history, he insists, is a subject “still in search of a problem.”1 The books under review, he suggests, ultimately make evident that the history of the Jews in modern Britain has been one of broad, though certainly not uniform, success. He notes that antisemitism has undoubtedly held a firm foothold among both the “snobs and yobs” of British society, but never did it develop in either popular feeling or political organization to the degree to which it did elsewhere in Europe. The tensions which did exist manifested themselves both within the Jewish community, particularly in regards to issues of assimilation and disputes over Zionism, and between Jews and non-Jews with clear and not infrequent antisemitic outbursts. Such tensions, however, Cannadine maintains, were nevertheless tempered by steady progress. Without a dominating central problem or problems, the moderate tale of British Jewry remains, in the broad story of international Jewry, “neither very interesting nor very exciting. In the context of British History, it is just not all that important.”2 Cannadine’s brusque dismissal of a subject which many ac-