On English anti-Semitism

The tone for the inter-war period had been set by the 1905 Aliens Order, the very first restrictionist legislation enacted in Britain, and specifically intended to prevent a repetition of the large influx of Eastern European Jews who arrived as refugees from the Russian Empire in the late 19C. This was followed and expanded upon by the 1920 Aliens Order.

According to Lappin:

They stand aloof- not always without a touch of oriental arrogance- from their fellow citizens. They look upon us with suspicion and a certain contempt. Mixed marriages between orthodox Jews and Gentiles are forbidden. These people remain an alien element in our land.

The feeling on the left was not much different even when the scale of the Nazi persecution became apparent in the mid 1930s.

… Moreover, significant sections of the Labour movement, particularly the TUC, and the left supported the exclusion of Jewish immigrants and participated in the agitation against them that provided public support for anti-alien legislation… Throughout the pre-war period Britain maintained its system of rigorous controls on immigration, treating Jewish refugees as aliens subject to the existing restrictions. The labour movement, as represented by the TUC, supported the government’s policy of drastically limiting the flow of Jewish refugees.

The undesirabililty of admitting large numbers of Jews was also reflected in official policy:

… The Home Secretary Samuel Hoare expressed this attitude in his comments to an Anglo-Jewish delegation on April 1, 1938.

Todd Endelman devotes almost a whole chapter to anti-Semitism in Britain in the inter-war years and through 1945 “The Great War to the Holocaust”. It may be instructive to consider an extended extract.

“… As Jews moved into the middle class, abandoning the districts and trades of their parents or their own youth, they encountered new levels of ill-will and unpleasantness. …[It] took place at a time when news-making events abroad - the Bolshevik revolution, riots and armed revolt in Palestine, the rise of the Nazis - heightened the “Jew consciousness” of ordinary Britons. But it was not just a matter of bad timing. Residential and economic mobility brought Jews into contact with Gentiles more frequently than before. Earlier in the century social relations between immigrants and English men and women were limited, since the former tended to work and socialize among themselves. Now, for the first time, large numbers of Iews were moving into middle-class social space (clubs, schools, shops, restaurants, resorts, cinemas, theaters), disturbing their once homogeneous ethnic character. Jewish women shopping in Golders Green struck gentile observers as exotics, “decked as for some barbaric royal levee,” courting attention “with their bold, brilliant eyes”: “Bracelets swing from their wrists, chains of big, coloured beads loop their necks, earrings dangle from their ears, diamonds glitter on their pink-enamelled fingers.” The reaction to this “invasion” was similar to that which occurred in the United States in the interwar period: occupational and social discrimination, defamation, whispering and sniggering.

…

Masonic lodges and golf, tennis, and motor clubs introduced membership bans. Restaurants and hotels advertised that they did not cater to Jews. Garages refused to rent cars to them because insurance companies would not issue short-terms policies to Jews and other “high-risk” groups. Admission to public schools and the most desirable colleges became more difficult. St. Paul’s, for example, which had welcomed Jewish boys in the late-Victorian and Edwardian years, imposed an undeclared quota, as did University College, London. … Newspaper advertisements for secretaries, clerks, and shop assistants specified that Jews would not be hired. …The atmosphere at the London Hospital, in the heart of the Jewish East End, was markedly hostile to Jewish medical students. One instructor went so far as to allot the back seats in his lecture room to Jews.

Two other resurgent forms of antisemitism heightened the impact of these discriminatory practices. One was the denigration of Jews in low and high culture; the other was ideological, right-wing antisemitism, the variety associated with fantasies and fears about Jewish plots to dominate the world. In the 1920s and 1930s both popular and serious writters - T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Wyndham Lewis, H. G. Wells, John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Dornford Yates - populated their work with mythic, offensive Jews. … Journalists, travel writers, and social commentators as well represented Jews in unflattering terms, describing them as clannish, oversexed, materialistic, averse to physical labor, alien, and corrupt. One account of East London, in describing the spread of Jews into streets beyond those in which they had been concentrated earlier, spoke of “their predatory noses and features which the word ‘alien’ describes with such peculiar felicity.” Echoing a common anti-immigrant trope from the prewar years, it remarked: “One seems to be in a hostile tribal encampment, and it makes one afraid, not of them personally, but of the obvious tenacity, the leech-like grip, of a people who, one feels in one’s English bones, flourish best on the decay of their hosts, like malignant bacilli in the blood.” A card game of the 1930S, “Sexton Blake,” based on a popular radio program of the same name, included cards picturing “Solly Silver, fence” and “Jake Smith, fence’s agent,” both drawn as swarthy, hook-nosed Jews.”

The common thread running through these ways of thinking about Jews was the notion of Jewish “difference.” … Young, English-educated Jewish men and women who came of age and entered the workplace from the 1920s to the 1940s. These upwardly mobile second-generation Jews were un-able to escape gentile constructions of “the Jew” - and the more eager they were to succeed outside Jewish circles, the more baleful the impact of these ideas was on their own sense of self-worth and their attitudes to their Jewishness, Living and working outside immigrant neighborhoods, they repeatedly encountered corrosive reminders of gentile constructions of their difference.”

Endelman goes to recount the rise and fall of the BUF, and the persistence of anti-Semitism throughout the war. Other commentators, such as Philip Ziegler and Angus Calder, maintain that anti-Semitism actually reached a peak during the war itself, citing many of the same public perceptions as Endelman.

“… The anti-refugee hysteria that led to internment in the first place was linked to the continued vitality of domestic antisemitism during the war years. While the banning of the BUF and the detainment of its leaders in May and June 1940 curtailed its public activities, other forms of antisemitism did not diminish. The hardships of the war years - especially the rationing, the blitz, and the absence of loved ones - created a climate that worked against the moderation of old fears and hatreds. Ugly rumors and charges surfaced in the press, survey research, and government reports: East End Jews were panicking in the air raid shelters; Jewish traders were making fortunes on the black market; Jewish homemakers were evading rationing; Jewish evacuees were corrupting the countryside; Jewish men were shirking national service; Jewish women were awash in chocolates, hot-house flowers, silk stockings, diamonds, and fur coats.”

These anti-Semitic attitudes persisted throughout the war years and only subsided when the scale of Nazi atrocities became apparent, only to quickly arise again with the public reaction to Jewish terrorist attacks against British forces in Palestine.