There’s a story going around now that Winston Churchill wrote an article in which he laid the blame for anti-Semitism on Jews’ refusal to assimilate. The best account I’ve found is in the IHT:
“It would be easy to ascribe it to the wickedness of the persecutors, but that does not fit all the facts,” the article said. “It exists even in lands, like Great Britain and the United States, where Jew and Gentile are equal in the eyes of the law, and where large numbers of Jews have found not only asylum, but opportunity. These facts must be faced in any analysis of anti-Semitism. They should be pondered especially by the Jews themselves.
“For it may be that, unwittingly, they are inviting persecution — that they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer.”
The article continued: “The central fact which dominates the relations of Jew and non-Jew is that the Jew is ‘different.’ He looks different. He thinks differently. He has a different tradition and background. He refuses to be absorbed.”
But it also urged support for Jews “suffering from persecutions as cruel, as relentless and as vindictive as any in their long history.”
The Guardian says the document was written by a ghost-writer who was an anti-Semite, and that the document was known about for decades.
But when The Observer contacted Sir Martin Gilbert, the eminent historian and Churchill biographer, the implication of anti-Semitism began to unravel. Gilbert, who also has a book out this summer, said the article was not written by Churchill at all, but rather his ghost writer, Adam Marshall Diston. He added that Churchill’s instructions for the article were different in both tone and content from what Diston eventually wrote, and pointed out that Diston was a supporter of Oswald Mosley, the notorious fascist and anti-Semite. Churchill had stopped its publication in a newspaper.
I’m of two minds over this. If it was written by an anti-Semitic ghostwriter, then it’s a worthless document that could frankly be thrown away and save future historians the problem of rediscovering it. If it was written by Churchill, well, what’s the point? That he felt the same way most people felt about Jews in the 1930s? That he was more progressive than some because he didn’t try to persecute or exterminate us?
It’s a lose-lose proposition. In an article called “Concerning the Jews,” Mark Twain, who was not an anti-Semite, repeated the canard that Jews don’t serve in the military in proportion to their numbers in the host country, among other things that seem, frankly, as anti-Semitic as the paper purportedly written by Churchill. That Twain (who happens to be my favorite author and literary idol) was wrong is not the point. The point is, if Churchill wrote the paper, his views are no different than Twain’s from forty years earlier. And I’m not surprised. Those views are extant today. It’s just not as PC to put them into writing.
Unless, that is, you substitute “Israel” and “Israel Lobby” for Jews, and then you’ve got the same thing all over again, written by two men named Walt and Mearsheimer.
That essay on anti-Semitism I’ve been promising for years is about ready to write, I think.
A disproportionate number of Jews were a part of the French Resistance during WWII… probably because those left “in the wild” knew that their French “neighbors” would turn them in if they tried to stick their head in the sand and stiff-arm salute the Germans like the Vichy did.
The sons and daughters of collaborators with evil, slowly being colonized by the followers of evil.
Sharon was right. French Jews need to get out. Now.
Actually, Mark Twain ultimately discovered and corrected his error about Jews and the military. He noted that according to the War Department, Jews had provided officers and soldiers in the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Spanish War. In addition, in the Civil War, Jews and Christians volunteered in equal percentages – which “means that the Jew’s patriotism was not merely level with the Christian’s, but overpassed it…His company was not desired, and he was made to feel it. That he nevertheless conquered his wounded pride and sacrificed both that and his blood for his flag…” etc.
I love Mark Twain!
Churchill was philosemitic and pro-Zionist. At any rate he was pro-Zionist up to the point when the idiots of the Stern Group assassinated his friend Lord Moyne in Cairo in 1944. That kind of quelled his ardor, and you can hardly blame him for that.
Incidentally, practically the entire Yishuv helped the British track down and arrest the remaining members of the Stern Group after that. The overwhelming majority of Jews in Palestine opposed terrorism and helped suppress the Jewish terrorists.
Laura SF,
What’s the source for your Twain quote? Thanks, Larry
I found it in The Complete Essays of Mark Twain. It’s a postcript to the Harper’s article, which was printed in a collection of his works. Thanks, Laura.
I’m pretty sure I own that book if you want me to dig it up.
Thanks Meryl, I am interested in reading it. No rush though. Perhaps after we return the other book we have borrowed from you.
Churchill was never truly philosemitic or pro-Zionist except as it suited political expediency. Moreover, he was never a good national leader except during WW2. In the 1920’s, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill tanked the British economy (and helped cause the Great Depression) by doubling the official exchange rates. As Home Secretary, he called out the army to attack a women’s protest against high bread prices. Later, Churchill also presented the 1922 White Paper which restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine, restrictions that applied even if Jews were British citizens. During WW2, it was Roosevelt, not Churchill, that raised the subjects of accepting Jewish immigrants and of bombing concentration camps. Churchill was against these. In fact, most of the time, Churchill was pretty much a manic depressive alcoholic whose behavior worried Roosevelt, Hopkins (mutual friend and US Ambassador to GB) and Marshall.
Also, Lorie, the Stern Gang was pretty much over by 1942, when Avraham Stern has hanged by the British.
chsw
Avraham Stern was shot in Tel Aviv, not hanged.
An interesting sidelight is that the Jews served in the German Army in WWI in disproportianate numbers. The German general staff did a study as a result of similar rumors but suppressed the results.
The German government continued sending the pensions to Jews in the US until they declared war in WW II. Rav Breuer was one of the people receiving such a pension. Rabbi Wein points out the irony that they sent the pensions because they could not get their hands on Jews to murder them.
Interesting information!
I apologize, Rahel. You are correct. Stern was shot.
Sabba Hillel is also correct. My granduncle who emigrated to Britain during the 1920’s also received a German war pension until 1939. However, the British threw all German immigrants – who were primarily Jewish by 1939 – into prison camps for the first several months of WW2. The Brits tracked who received these pensions and used receipt of these pensions to justify imprisonment of “enemy aliens.”
chsw
If Martin Gilbert says it was a ghost writer, you can pretty much take that to the bank. There just isn’t anyone on the planet who knows more about the details of Churchill’s life.
chsw – I don’t think Sir Martin would agree with your assessment. The subtitle of his newest book, “Churchill and the Jews,” is “A Lifelong Friendship.”
Lynn, I know that Churchill had Jewish personal friends, perhaps more than did Roosevelt. However, I also know that my facts about Churchill’s actions are correct.
chsw
More on this over at Powerline
The Stern Group made a comeback, “bigger and better” than ever after WWII and “helped” Israel’s diplomatic position in 1948-9 by assassinating Count Folke Bernadotte. They specialized in own goals.
And I think that if you consult Gilbert’s work on Churchill you will find that he was not a manic depressive alcoholic. He could be depressed, what he called “the black dog”, but it was hardly clinical depression let alone bipolar disorder. He could hold his liquor too. Plenty of his bon mots come from times when he was drunk.
There was much opposition to bombing concentration camps among airmen for the simple reason that it was not a productive use of the air forces. Flying to Poland from Britain was a very long flight, far beyond the range of fighters. Thus the bombers could not be escorted and would be vulnerable to enemy fighters and have to carry minimal bomb loads. At night the bombers could not hit small targets like camps, by day they would be cut to ribbons by German fighters. Any damage they could do such as bombing rail lines would be repaired quickly by the Germans. There was no point in getting many men killed to do insignificant damage in this case.