Sam Johnson

‘A veritable Janus at the gates of Jewry’: British Jews and Mr Arnold White

ABSTRACT Historians of British antisemitism consider Arnold White (publicist, author, journalist, campaigner) a key exponent of racially orientated anti-Jewish sentiment in the United Kingdom in the period before the First World War. These attitudes were repeatedly demonstrated by his vehement opposition to East European Jewish immigration and underscored by a large literary output on the topic. In the late 1880s, White frequently clashed with leading Anglo-Jewish figures on immigration yet, in general terms, there was often difficulty in assigning him definitively to the antisemitic camp. This was the result of his work for Baron Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Colonization Association, which led to a more flattering interpretation of Whites contribution to solving the so-called ‘Jewish question’. Indeed, at times, he was actually regarded as a ‘friend of the Jews’. Johnsons study examines the problems Anglo-Jewish society had in analysing and negotiating the White world-view. For instance, an appreciation in the Jewish Chronicle described him as a ‘veritable Janus at the gates of Jewry’, essentially a two-faced troublemaker whose true attitude was not easy to determine. For almost three decades, the question of whether White was friend or foe was asked by various individuals and publications. Ultimately, Johnson considers what White and his Anglo-Jewish encounters reveal about the nature of the Jewish-Gentile relationship and how antisemitic ideology was confronted in Britain in the period before the outbreak of the First World War.

Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture since the 1880s

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Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–1948

general audience interested in a brief overview of a lost East European synagogue. The editors have included a summary in German to reach out to a wider popular readership, as well as an appendix containing a concise archeological survey of the building. The book’s strength lies in drawing attention to the Turei Zahav structure as an example of East European synagogue architecture and to the attempt to conserve the building’s ruins and memory.

Russia and the Origins of Twentieth-century Antisemitism

In seeking explanations for the origins of modern antisemitism, historians have often dwelt extensively on the developments in anti-Jewish discourse in nineteenth-century Imperial Germany and the Hapsburg Empire. The role played by the Tsarist Empire – darkest, backward Russia – has frequently been overlooked or underplayed. Until the past decade or so, antisemitism in the dying days of Tsarism was often characterised as little different from its medieval predecessor. Recent interpretations have shed new light on changes in antisemitism in Russia in the late nineteenth century. Much like the apparently unchangeable Tsarist state, a multitude of internal and external influences gradually altered the nature of Russian antisemitic discourse, which – in the years after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution – would have profound consequences for the rest of Europe.