Conservative Party Attitudes to Jews, 1900-1950 (review)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 224–226 HARRY DEFRIES. Conservative Party Attitudes to Jews, 1900–1950. London and Portland, Oreg.: Frank Cass, 2001. Pp. x Ⳮ 268. The British Conservative party (or the Tories, their interchangeable name) was arguably the most successful political party in the Western world in the twentieth century, holding power on its own or in coalition for sixty-eight years out of one hundred. Although it was renowned for its pragmatism, moderation, lack of full-blown ideology, and ability to adjust to new situations, it was always recognizably a right-of-center party that believed in British patriotism, age-old British institutions such as the monarchy, traditional values, and the maintenance of the Empire until that became impossible. Sociologically, the Conservative party was originally dominated by landowners but became, by the 1880s, the party of the British ‘‘Establishment’’ and the upper middle classes, especially those educated at Oxbridge (Oxford or Cambridge Universities) and British public (i.e., expensive private) schools. It was, and is, always stronger in England, especially in the wealthy areas of suburban London, than in Scotland, Wales, and southern Ireland (which was a part of the United Kingdom until 1922). Finding a foreign analogue to Britain’s Conservative party is not easy: it obviously had, and has, affinities with the Republican party in the United States, although the Tories never made the mistake of rejecting the welfare state and never suffered the electoral collapse the G.O.P. experienced for nearly fifty years after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. While a book about the British Conservative party and the Jews might seem as far-fetched as ‘‘The Elephant Question and the Jews,’’ it is anything but, and a searching and detailed examination of this subject could shed a great deal of light on British society, the place of the Jews in modern England, and the dimensions of British anti-Semitism. As Britain ’s right-wing political party, did the Tories share the growing antiSemitism that marked much right-of-center ideology and, perhaps, ‘‘establishment ’’ institutions between about 1880 and 1945? Or was Britain a demonstrable exception to these patterns, especially to the madness that overtook the European continent? While a number of other scholars, such as Geoffrey Alderman and myself, have also examined this question, Harry Defries is the first to analyze this subject in detail, and his is thus an important book. Tragically Dr. Defries (whose doctoral thesis at London University forms the basis of this work) died in 2000 at the age of DEFRIES, ATTITUDES TO JEWS—RUBINSTEIN 225 forty-nine, and the work was completed and seen through the press by his widow, Penny Gostyn. Defries’s aim in this book is to examine the attitude of the Conservative party to Jewish questions and issues between 1900 and 1950. These include the debate over ‘alien’ immigration leading to the Aliens Act of 1905, four chapters on Zionism and the Palestine Mandate, alleged Jewish involvement in the Russian Revolution, and Tory attitudes to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. These are all bellwether issues for testing the extent of prejudice against Jewish causes within the Conservative party and were, indeed, the only Jewish issues in British politics in this period. Defries does not, except tangentially, examine such questions as the treatment of Jews within the Conservative party (although he does briefly discuss nearly all Tory Members of Parliament who were Jewish) nor any wider question of right-wing anti-Semitism in Britain. During the past thirty years or so, a considerable debate has arisen among scholars about the extent of British anti-Semitism to which, it should be noted, I have been a contributor. I have established a well-known position, which in broad terms is that levels of anti-Semitism in Britain were remarkably low by any comparative standard and that when there were upsurges in levels of British anti-Semitism (as there unquestionably was between 1917 and about 1922), these quickly receded and never became a permanent feature of the British right. In contrast, a number of...