Corbyn had an opportunity to prove that he cared about anti-semitism. He refused to take it. | thearticle

Just when it seemed the Hobson/Corbyn controversy was quietening down, it’s taken an unexpected twist. In a letter to the Guardian about Corbyn’s 2011 foreword to Hobson’s 1902 book

Imperialism (2nd May), Professor Donald Sassoon wrote, “The campaign about anti-Semitism in Corbyn’s Labour party is getting absurd. … No one has ever felt the need to highlight the 10 lines

or so, in a book of 400 pages, which are anti-Semitic, but Corbyn was expected to do so.” Geoffrey Alderman wrote something similar in a blog for The Spectator (8th May), “In a text running

to almost 400 pages there are merely a dozen or so lines which we would call anti-Semitic. There was absolutely no need for Corbyn to have drawn attention to them in his foreward [sic].”

Sassoon and Alderman are not entirely accurate about the passages in Hobson’s Imperialism. We are talking about a couple of pages rather than a few lines. But what matters is Hobson’s

language in these pages. It is _virulently_ anti-Semitic. The anti-Semitism leaps off the page: _“United by the strongest bonds of organisation, always in closest and quickest touch with one

another, situated in the very heart pf the business capital of any State, controlled, so far as Europe is concerned, by men of a single and peculiar race [my emphasis], who have behind them

many centuries of financial experience. They are in a unique position to control the policy of nations.”_ (p64) Later there is a slanderous reference to “the house of Rothschild”, and on

the next page we read: _“There is not a war, a revolution, an anarchist assassination, or any other public shock, which is not gainful to these men; they are harpies who suck their gains [my

emphasis] from every new forced expenditure…”_ (p65) But there are two other points which need making. First, Hobson had previous form. For over a decade he had attacked Jews. He attacked

Jewish immigrants for “underselling the labour of the urban poor”. In Problems of Poverty (1891), written over a decade before Imperialism, he writes, “Admirable in domestic morality, and an

orderly citizen, he [the Jew] is almost devoid of social morality.” “The foreign Jew,” Hobson wrote, “is such a terrible competitor [by which he means such a formidable competitor].” “The

insistence of the poorer working-classes … [has] slowly and gradually won… some small advance in material comfort… Turn a few shiploads of Polish Jews upon any of these districts, and they

will and must in the struggle for life destroy the whole of this.” The Boer War changed Hobson’s views significantly. He now started to attack rich Jews, “a small group of international

financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race…” Why were we fighting in South Africa? “We are fighting in order to place a small international oligarchy of mineowners and

speculators in power in Pretoria.” In his book, The War in South Africa (1900), Hobson wrote of the Jews leaving their “economic fangs in the carcase [sic] of their prey” and of British

foreign policy dancing to their “diabolical tune”. These financiers used their wealth to buy newspapers and influence opinion. For Hobson, Jews were the personification of laissez-faire

capitalism in what EJ Hobsbawm called “The Age of Empire”. None of this is new, of course. Historians have been writing about Hobson’s anti-Semitism since the 1970s and ‘80s. See, for

example, Colin Holmes’s essay, “J.A. Hobson and the Jews” in Immigrants and Minorities in British Society (1978) and his book, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876-1939 (1979) or John

Allett’s essay, “New Liberalism, Old Prejudices: J.A. Hobson and the ‘Jewish Question’” in Jewish Social Studies, 1987. Sassoon and Alderman mention none of this. Neither Hobson’s virulent

anti-Semitism over more than a decade, including a few nasty passages in Imperialism itself, nor the significant historical debate about it which has gone on for more than forty years. If

you were asked to write a Foreword to Hobson’s Imperialism, would this not be relevant? Would you not acknowledge this history, even if just in passing? Would you not make the slightest

attempt to put Hobson and his best-known work in some kind of historical context, during the high point of modern British anti-Semitism? Would you not prick up your ears at all at this talk

of “men of a single and peculiar race” and connect it to years of writing about “harpies” and “economic fangs”? Not, of course, if you were Jeremy Corbyn, who never seems to see

anti-Semitism even when it is staring him in the face. When the Jewish Board of Deputies expressed concern about Corbyn’s Foreword to the 2011 edition of Imperialism, he was less than

conciliatory. Instead of trying to build bridges, he claimed that any accusation that he endorsed the content of an anti-Semitic book was “false” and politically motivated, just “the latest

in a series of equally ill-founded accusations of anti-Jewish racism that Labours political opponents have made against me.” He deplored the “mischievous representation of my foreword”. In

her response to Corbyn, the Board President wrote, “your lengthy and detailed foreword of over 3500 words, variously describes Hobson’s work as ‘great’, ‘remarkable’, ‘interesting’,

‘brilliant’, ‘painstaking’, ‘very powerful’, ‘attractive’, ‘valid’, ‘correct’, ‘prescient’ and ‘very prescient’, without any qualification referring to the anti-Semitism within it.” Corbyn

could have defused the whole issue but chose not to.