Originally posted on 14 March 2025.

I will be delivering a paper on Sunday 30 March at the Contemporary Antisemitism: London 2025 conference. This article is a preliminary to that. It was originally posted on my Substack here.

Britain does not have a good history when it comes to antisemitism. The middle ages saw Nazi levels of prejudice and persecution. The placid provincial city of Norwich has the dubious distinction of having invented the Blood Libel. Jews were expelled entirely from England by King Edward I in 1290.

This is all history, though, isn’t it? It is often thought that Britain has been less antisemitic than other countries in the modern era. This is probably true, as far as it goes. In the twentieth century, Britain never had any mass antisemitic movements on the model of France, Germany, Austria or Russia. The gallery of antisemitic public figures comprised cranks like Belloc and Chesterton, together with losers like Mosley and Tyndall who never got near the levers of power.

But this is only half the story.

Some of my research over the last couple of years has been on mass antisemitic violence in twentieth-century Britain. One thing that comes out of the evidence is that the (relative) absence of explicit antisemitic politics did not stop anti-Jewish riots from taking place.

The British people did not, on the whole, embrace ideological antisemitism. The pubs of Exeter, Stoke and Dundee were not filled with fascists or fundamentalist Christians decrying Jews as killers of Christ or elders of Zion. Not many Brits believed in thought-through narratives of Jewish iniquity. But there was widespread casual antisemitism. Jews are different. Unscrupulous. Rich.

And that was enough.

The lesson of my research is that mere casual prejudices – unreflective, half-formed, less-than-half-baked – were enough to put the physical safety of British Jews at risk. That risk crystallised at times when social, economic and political circumstances combined to give people a pretext for violently unleashing their prejudices on their Jewish neighbours.

There have been three episodes of mass antisemitic violence in Britain since the start of the twentieth century. I go through them in turn below.

1911 – South Wales

I wrote about the 1911 South Wales pogrom last year in this article in the Welsh History Review (subscription needed). I have posted a chronology of the course of the riots here (free access).

South Wales in the early twentieth century was home to several small but established Jewish communities. These had grown up in tandem with the economic development of the region in the nineteenth century. It is often forgotten today that the Jews were as much a part of this chapter of Welsh history as the miners and metalworkers.

In August 1911, a riot broke out in the town of Tredegar. The disorder quickly spread, and several towns in the region saw rioting over the following days. The army had to be deployed, along with the police. The rioters disproportionally attacked Jewish premises, and many members of the local Jewish communities fled. Rabbi Harris Jerevitch of Cardiff met with some of the refugees:

I shall never forget the heartrending sights.

In one house… I found a mother with three young children (one an infant in arms) and a newly-married couple. Their hearts were too full to indulge in a conversation with me. But from their faces I learnt what was in their hearts. They were trembling, and looking round as if to make sure they are in a safe place. In another house… I found a family with five children actually destitute and fearing for their lives. But the most tragic scene of all I witnessed in another house… Here in a large, barely furnished room were four families with their children. I began to speak to them, but before I could say ten words one Jewish victim, well known in Tredegar, collapsed in a fit of faintness….

The riots were essentially directed against property rather than people. Unlike in the murderous Russian pogroms, no-one was killed. But for the Jews on the spot it must have seemed like the Cossacks had come to the Valleys. One journalist wrote:

Twice only have I seen an expression of real terror on a human face. Once was at the Jews’ Temporary Shelter when I went to meet some refugees from Kishineff; the second occasion was the other day in a mining village of Monmouthshire.

A few years ago, there was a historiographical controversy about how far the riots were antisemitic – as opposed to economic – in origin. In my view, attempts to pin down what the riots were ‘really’ about miss the point. They arose from a complex set of circumstances which all fitted together, including local economic discontents that were blamed indiscriminately on ‘the Jews’ and a wider background of poverty and hardship. At the time, the country was going through a period of labour strife that is known as the Great Unrest. There was little ideological antisemitism in evidence, but lots of casual antisemitism, and this formed an integral part of the web of causation from which the riots emerged.

1917 – Leeds

I haven’t published anything on the 1917 Leeds pogrom so far. If you know of a journal or outlet that might be interested in carrying something, please let me know.

There were two outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in 1917, one in Leeds in June and one in London in September. Here I focus on the Leeds episode.

During the Great War, rumours spread in Leeds (and elsewhere) that Jews were engaging in profiteering and refusing to enlist in the forces. As it happens, many Leeds Jews did enlist: according to one source, 2,500 people joined up out of a Jewish population of 21,000, which was apparently a higher ratio than for the city as a whole. As for those Jews who did not enlist, many of them were Russian immigrants who equated army service with Tsarist militarism and might be forgiven for not wanting to fight in a war in which Britain was allied with Russia.

The facts, however, were not allowed to get in the way of a good antisemitic story. The result was that Leeds Jews were regarded with some suspicion, and were pressed to demonstrate their Britishness in ways that other communities were not.

There was a particular problem with hostility between young men. Even before the War, gangs of adolescents had been in the habit of targeting the Jewish area of the city at weekends. In the lead-up to the riots, it appears that serious tensions had developed between what were called the ‘Jewish boys’ and the ‘English boys’ (interesting terms). Young men were seen roaming the streets carrying sticks.

Tensions came to a head in early June 1917. On Saturday 2 June, a group of youths marched the streets shouting “Where is that [expletive] Jew?” and jostling people. On the following evening, there were further ill-tempered altercations between gangs, and it was said that a young woman or women had been assaulted. That provided enough of a pretext for the gentile youths to riot. The Leeds Mercury reported on Monday 4 June:

Gangs of youths, whose ages ranged from fourteen to seventeen, smashed almost all the windows of the Jewish traders in the vicinity, dragged out the contents of the windows, and scattered them about the streets.The residents of the neighbourhood were in a terrified condition, and up to the early hours of this morning they were huddled together in doorways afraid to go to bed.

On Tuesday 5 June, the paper had this to say about the rioters:

When asked by a Jewish family to behave decently they set to work, it was said, smashing windows. A crowd of from 1,500 to 2,000 people quickly assembled, and the police on duty in the locality were eventually reinforced.Then the youths scattered in all directions, smashing the windows of warehouses, shops, factories, or houses, wherever they found traces of Jewish occupation.

If the riots involved crowds of 1,500-2,000 people, it is reasonable to assume that they had escalated a long way beyond those gangs of ‘English boys’. Indeed, it was claimed elsewhere that the disturbances on the Monday night involved as many as 3,000 people. By Wednesday 6 June, we find reports of antisemitic pamphlets being distributed. It is not known whether these were printed at short notice in order to take advantage of the riots, or whether they had already been in existence. In any event, the kind of person who would write and publish an antisemitic tract probably belongs to a different demographic from the teenager who would throw a rock through the window of a Jewish shop.

On Tuesday 5 June, a deeply sinister event took place: about 30 men led by a discharged soldier entered a club. They told the gentiles present to leave and said that they were going to kill the men who remained. Fortunately, the police turned up and prevented any further trouble. By Wednesday 6 June, there were vicious rumours that a wounded soldier had been molested by Jews. Perhaps he had his crutches taken away. Perhaps he had even been murdered. The rumours were denied by the local hospital, but nevertheless they seem to have continued to grow. It came to be believed that ‘the Jews’ were targeting wounded soldiers, in the plural.

The Jewish community did not take all this lying down. Community leaders declared that “they cannot undertake to restrain spirited young Jews”. One young Jewish man was sentenced to 14 days for an assault, and then got into further trouble for disorderly behaviour in the courtroom. Good for him.

The full enormity of the riots is brought out when one remembers that many Leeds Jews were servicemen or the families of servicemen. In one case, a house whose windows were smashed by the mob was owned by a woman whose son had been killed two weeks previously. As a letter to the Leeds Mercury from a Jew serving with the BEF put it:

One can well imagine the feelings of a Jewish soldier, hearing that the very people he is fighting for, are breaking up his parents’ home.

The paper also contained the following damning story:

One woman… said she could not understand why she had been molested. If it was because of the desire of young Jews to avoid military service, it could not apply in her case, because she had two brothers and a husband in the Army.

1947 – Nationwide

For my chronology of the course of the 1947 riots, see here (free access).

And so to the 1947 riots, which will be the subject of my slot at the conference later this month.

I’m not going to set out the contents of my paper here, but it is worth making a few comments about this sorry episode. It is extraordinary that it has almost entirely been forgotten, both within and outside the Jewish community. Yet it took place within living memory. Other episodes of postwar ethnic violence in Britain – not to mention Northern Ireland – are still remembered today, decades after they took place. But not this one.

In brief, the riots arose out of the bitter and complex conflict that was going on in Mandatory Palestine – one of those dirty end-of-empire wars, like Malaya and Kenya, which reflect little credit on Britain. The radical Zionist group known as the Irgun had killed two British sergeants. This was part of a series of tit-for-tat killings which also involved British forces killing Jewish fighters and civilians. Most Jews in Palestine disapproved of the Irgun’s actions, as did most British Jews. But that didn’t stop thousands of gentiles in towns and cities across Britain from inflicting violence, threats and intimidation on their Jewish fellow-citizens.

The idea is laughable that the rioters were concerned about the breakdown of law and order in Palestine. Most of them probably couldn’t have found the place on a map. In Liverpool, one rioter chose to express his outrage at the Revisionist Zionists of the Irgun by shouting at diaspora Jews: “You dirty bastards, you should be in Palestine”. None of this was really to do with the politics of the southern Levant. We are dealing here with mindless, primitive hatreds and fears. In the context of postwar austerity and unemployment, the rioters wanted to smash things up, and the killing of the sergeants gave them a pretext to do that at the expense of their Jewish neighbours.

These were not ideological antisemites, any more than were the people of Leeds or South Wales. There is almost no evidence of Christian anti-Judaism among the rioters, and surprisingly limited evidence of fascist motivations. One source in the Jewish community estimated that only 5% of the rioters were Mosleyites. Contemporary court reports reveal that the offenders were largely unremarkable: in line with the stereotype of rioters, they tended to be young, working-class and male. Few of them were black of shirt and stiff of arm. They were not ideologues but casual antisemites: Jews are different; they’re not really British; they only care about their own. Yet the casualness of their antisemitism did not render it any less dangerous when it came to marking an ethnonational boundary using sticks, fists and lighted rags.

The casual antisemitism of 1947 has surely diminished in Britain over the intervening years; but it has not gone away. Nor has the temptation for thugs to threaten the safety of British Jews because they see them as a Other which can be conflated with combatants in a war in the Middle East.