Socialist antisemitism and its discontents in England, 1884–98

Satnam Virdee

doi:10.1080/0031322x.2017.1335029

Abstract

ABSTRACTVirdee's essay explores the relationship between English socialists and migrant Jews amid the new unionism of the late nineteenth century: a cycle of protest characterized by sustained collective action by the unskilled and labouring poor demanding economic and social justice. Reading this labour history against the grain, with a greater attentiveness to questions of race and class, helps to make more transparent both the prevalence and structuring force of socialist antisemitism, as well as English and Jewish socialist opposition to it. In particular, the essay suggests that the dominant socialist discourse was intimately bound up with questions of national belonging and this directly contributed to a racialized politics of class that could not imagine migrant Jews as an integral component of the working class. At the same time, such socialist antisemitism was also challenged by a minority current of English Marxists whose conceptions of socialism refused to be limited by the narrow boundaries of the racialized nation-state. And they were joined in this collective action by autonomous Jewish socialist organizations who understood that the liberation of the Jewish worker was indivisible from that of the emancipation of the working class in general. With the help of Eleanor Marx and others, these latter strands entangled socialist politics with questions of combatting antisemitism, and thereby stretched existing conceptions of class to encompass the Jewish worker.

Highlights

This essay explores the relationship between English socialists and Jews amid the new unionism of the late nineteenth century: a cycle of protest characterized by sustained collective action by the unskilled and labouring poor demanding economic and social justice
For example, mentions in passing how London’s East End saw ‘deposit after deposit of refugees and immigrant workers’,2 while Eric Hobsbawm makes reference to ‘some localised anti-Jewish feeling’ around 1900 but fails significantly to identify any conflict amid the new unionism.[3]. What emerges from this and a much broader layer of ‘race-blind’ socialist-inflected labour historiography is a near unanimity that the working class was re-made in this period.[4]. Such an impression was already emergent in the actual moment of the new unionism when no less a person than Friedrich Engels could speak in glowing terms about how the working class had woken from its forty-year slumber: ‘The grandchildren of the Chartists stepping into the line of battle.’[5]. More than seventy years later, a latter-day Marxist like Eric Hobsbawm could still confidently characterize this period as one marked by a ‘recrudescence of a revolutionary utopianism’
While there is undoubtedly much of value in this labour history, the emphasis laid on working-class agency, one is struck at the same time by the failure of such historians to acknowledge the ethnic diversity within the working class in England, and to consider the structuring force of antisemitism, and how such antisemitism was understood and combatted by Jewish socialists as well as by other parts of the English socialist movement

Summary

Introduction

This essay explores the relationship between English socialists and Jews amid the new unionism of the late nineteenth century: a cycle of protest characterized by sustained collective action by the unskilled and labouring poor demanding economic and social justice.

Results

Conclusion