Alien Invasion

David Glover’s important book asks how it was possible for a law restricting immigration to be passed in a country that had long prided itself on its open borders and its welcoming attitude to refugees. To answer it, he explores the cultural world of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England in which ‘the Jew’ came to epitomize the racially denigrated alien. Literature, the press and popular entertainments are all probed for what they reveal about changing attitudes to Jewish migrants.

The book opens with a finely-honed analysis of the complex depictions of Jews and Judaism in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and their reception by late Victorian audiences. Deronda, Glover suggests, was a key expression of liberal sentiment and the prevailing openness toward diasporic figures as well as gesturing toward a messianic vision of a Jewish homeland. It also raised questions that were to become increasingly significant about ‘national allegiance, citizenship, and birthright’ of Jews (p. 11). Daniel Deronda was published prior to shifts in the political atmosphere of the late 1870s and early 1880s that included a growth in antisemitism accompanying widespread criticism of Disraeli’s pro-Turkish policies. Furthermore, Liberal historian Goldwin Smith proclaimed that the Jews were unpatriotic and even William Gladstone at times deployed anti-Jewish discourse. Elsewhere, Australia and the United States initiated immigration-control measures that were seen in Britain as possible models to be followed. In subsequent decades, with mass immigration of Eastern European Jews, anti-Jewish and anti-immigration sentiment hardened.

The remaining chapters present readings of fictional and non-fictional works that contributed to a growing antipathy toward the Jew/Alien. The book concludes with a discussion of debates about enforcement of the 1905 Act and an analysis of novels, stories, and magazine and newspaper accounts suggesting a more decidedly antisemitic structure of feeling in the years prior to the Great War.

Glover’s compelling analysis emphasizes complexity and contradiction. This is not a story about the inevitable rise of a pro-restriction, anti-alien, antisemitic political culture but rather one about the fractures and tensions in a society that had prided itself on tolerance and had a history of granting asylum and welcoming refugees. The tale it tells is about a fractured set of emotions, a constellation of diverse and often competing strands of anti-Jewish and anti-alien sentiment – from socialist to liberal to conservative to the radical right. But it is also a story of writers and political figures who wanted to preserve Britain as a type of liberal utopia. In this sense it is, perhaps, a story about the tensions and contradictions within liberalism itself.

Early on as I read, I wondered what Glover meant by ‘liberal’. The word is famously ambiguous and, with the advent of New Liberalism in the late nineteenth century, liberalism itself was changing. ‘Liberal modernity’, Glover suggests at one point, ‘ ... assumed a form of life in which the state was constantly engaged in determining the limits and the risks that free and active subjects must face’ (p. 39). Throughout the book he implies that liberalism was closely associated with cosmopolitanism. As Uday Mehta has noted, ‘liberalism has come to represent ... political thought that was cosmopolitan in its imagination and potential reach’ – it was meant to be universal in its applicability. The universal claims of liberalism, according to Mehta, are based on what he calls an ‘anthropological minimum’ which defines what it means to be a human – that is, a being capable of acting rationally, who can be trusted with individual rights and freedoms.¹ This underlying appeal to a common-denominator humanity means that liberalism has always had problems with ‘difference’. Britain had prided itself on its ‘tolerance’ since the late seventeenth century, and now that characteristic was seen to be in peril – not only from exclusionary laws but from those who by virtue of their difference, their alien otherness, threatened that tolerance.

Glover suggests that there...