‘A veritable Janus at the gates of Jewry’: British Jews and Mr Arnold White

Abstract

ABSTRACT Historians of British antisemitism consider Arnold White (publicist, author, journalist, campaigner) a key exponent of racially orientated anti-Jewish sentiment in the United Kingdom in the period before the First World War. These attitudes were repeatedly demonstrated by his vehement opposition to East European Jewish immigration and underscored by a large literary output on the topic. In the late 1880s, White frequently clashed with leading Anglo-Jewish figures on immigration yet, in general terms, there was often difficulty in assigning him definitively to the antisemitic camp. This was the result of his work for Baron Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Colonization Association, which led to a more flattering interpretation of White's contribution to solving the so-called ‘Jewish question’. Indeed, at times, he was actually regarded as a ‘friend of the Jews’. Johnson's study examines the problems Anglo-Jewish society had in analysing and negotiating the White world-view. For instance, an appreciation in the Jewish Chronicle described him as a ‘veritable Janus at the gates of Jewry’, essentially a two-faced troublemaker whose true attitude was not easy to determine. For almost three decades, the question of whether White was friend or foe was asked by various individuals and publications. Ultimately, Johnson considers what White and his Anglo-Jewish encounters reveal about the nature of the Jewish-Gentile relationship and how antisemitic ideology was confronted in Britain in the period before the outbreak of the First World War.